New Ethereum ASIC could shake up the market if bold claims prove true

Chen Min, who led chip design at Canaan Creative, has a project in the works that could shake up the already volatile Ethereum world. Her new venture Linzhi plans to release ASIC-based Ethereum miners next year with some eye-popping specs.

Ethereum was designed to prevent the race to develop better and better application-specific chips for mining it, but that hasn't stopped Bitmain from building its AntMiner to run 190 hashes per second. Still, that's nothing compared to what Chen has planned for Project Lavasnow, which she says will deliver 1,400 hashes per second. That's a more than sevenfold increase in performance and the economic implications for Ethereum are staggering. The Bitmain miner produces about $3 worth of return per day in Ethereum, Linzhi's would do $20. 

Chen says the payback period would be around four months, though pricing and precise availability timing wasn't announced during her presentation at the Ethereum Classic Summit. (Source: CoinDesk)