Bitmain Launches New Zcash Miner Touting 3 Times More Hashing Power

Cryptocurrency mining giant Bitmain has launched a new miner for the privacy-oriented cryptocurrency zcash, which it claims, has three times more hashing power than its predecessor.

Announcing the news on Tuesday, Bitmain says the new ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) miner, called the Antminer Z11, is designed to mine cryptocurrencies that are based on the Equihash algorithm, such as zcash.

The company adds the new product offers a hashing power of 135K sol/s (solutions per second), which is “three times more powerful” than its previous Equihash miner, the Antminer Z9, which was released in last May. Sol/s is generally equivalent to h/s (hashes per second), which is the number of hash computations created per second in cryptocurrency mining.

Bitmain further claims that the Antminer Z11, adopting a 12-nanometer chip, is more energy-efficient due to the new internal circuit structure, which can save 60 percent of electricity cost compared to that of Z9.

Bitmain first launched Antminer Z9 at a time when the zcash community was having an ongoing debate on whether the network should be altered to become ASIC-resistant, meaning the network would prevent the participation of miners using ASICs, which are in general more powerful than ordinary Graphic Processing Units.

However, in June last year,  members of the zcash community at the Zcon0 conference voted not to prioritize research efforts on changing the zcash network’s rules in order to make it ASIC-resistant.

“To preserve the Zcash community’s values around security, reliability and accessibility,” Bitmain said, it will “continue to provide shipping updates of the first batch of the Antminer Z11.”

Just last month, Bitmain also launched a new 7-nanometer mining processor, called the BM1397, which is designed for proof-of-work cryptocurrencies based on the SHA256 algorithm, such as bitcoin and bitcoin cash.

Zcash image via Shutterstock; Antminer Z11 image courtesy of Bitmain