Aion Conducting Open-Source Research on Equihash on an FGPA

How do you make cryptocurrency mining profitable again? For the average home-based cryptocurrency miner, this is a statement that they are constantly keeping top of mind when investing in traditional ASIC mining hardware. The (semi) mass adoption of Bitcoin has led to an enormous degree of difficulty associated with the mining of ASIC coins and has turned off the hobby miner, paving the way for well funded mining conglomerates to capture majority of ASIC mining market-share. The energy and resources required to fund a small-time (home-based) mining operation have dissuaded people from mining Bitcoin and have led to an increased popularity in ASIC-resistant coin mining. Cryptocurrency miners who focus on ASIC-resistant coins use various GPU’s (Graphics Processing Units) to solve complex algorithms, validate and secure networks and aid in the facilitation of transactions. Although GPUs were traditionally designed for gaming, they have been repurposed to mine cryptocurrencies. The AION mainnet coin is an ASIC-resistant coin which is mineable with GPU’s which have acted as the benchmark in terms of mining hardware. Many miners who are currently supporting AION’s network use GPU’s to mine AION as it is currently one of the most profitable coins to mine. “Miners are a critical part of any blockchain infrastructure and the development of open source FPGA will enable miners to have the best available systems to compete in an open environment.” — Matt Spoke of Aion The AION mining community, has been an irreplaceable asset to the AION project. AION understands that without this ever-growing community, AION would not be able to continue its efforts towards becoming the next standardized blockchain platform, focused on truly fixing what’s broken and bringing real, connected solutions to better the way the world does business. AION will continue to support it’s mining community through the continued research and development into tools which make the process more user friendly, profitable and accessible. We’re extremely excited to announce a new research initiative focused on improving mining efficiency of ASIC-resistant algorithms. Positioning themselves as an industry leader, AION (leveraging the expertise of ePIC Blockchain Technologies) will conduct research to further increase the effectiveness and efficiency of mining ASIC-resistant coins through the creation of new, open source mining technology. First announced in May 2018 at AIONEX, this partnership will create the first-ever implementation of Equihash on an FPGA (Field-programmable gate array). ASIC’s are specialized hardware manufactured to do one thing, and do it better than GPUs (from Nvidia or AMD). It is fairly well understood that when a blockchain network becomes large enough, the incentive to build ASIC hardware increases, and conventionally this development has been done in secret, giving the organization who develops ASIC a strong incentive as their efficiency (ability to mine and earn rewards) increases exponentially against GPU miners (used by their community members). Because this is done in secret the market has not fully corrected for the availability of ASICs. AION will be building this advanced efficiency hardware alongside the community as an open source project — ensuring full transparency, all while building hardware that can be used to better mining efficiency, industry-wide. This planned implementation will set a new precedent in blockchain development as both a hardware and protocol provider will collaborate on an open source project which will benefit the entire blockchain community. With an effort to maintain complete transparency, this project is still in it’s ideation stage. The project will encompass a significant amount of research on behalf of both AION and ePIC Blockchain teams. As this will be a community focused, and driven project, we invite the AION community to not only contribute, but maintain a critical eye, overseeing the continued development of this project.