Ehsminer, a Paris-based company specializing in IT security and worldwide promotion and adoption of cryptocurrencies, is not new to the mining industry. Haikel Ben Hmida, the company CEO, has been into mining since 2011. After ordering Bitcoin miners from Butterfly Labs he decided to launch his own mining product. The choice fell on Litecoin since that area was still uncharted with no competitors present.

A company spokesperson told Cointelegraph:

“Since the launch of Litecoin, mining is still profitable. It is Bitcoin mining which is considered difficult because of the mass of big players being in place. We are thinking to realize other miners specialized in X11 and even in private algorithms. We have gained experience during the last three years of experimentation. Bitcoin uses SHA256 as the only hashing function, and if it is broken, all the network will be compromised. X11 uses a sequence of eleven scientific hashing algorithms for the proof of work, if ten of them are broken, the whole network remains working. Bitcoin cannot monopolize the cryptocurrency space.”

Competing with China

The company has grown and is now set to shake off Chinese manufacturers of mining equipment from the podium. It is already a great challenge to produce high-quality equipment and ensure profitability over a long period.

Competition with China is quite fierce since everyone has to be aligned to market price and keep in parallel scalable and energy-friendly products. Besides, the memory cost and its power consumption is another pressing challenge for the industry.

A Ehsminer spokesperson said:

“Litecoin, Dashcoin, Zcash and others cryptocurrencies are ASIC-resistant. It means that there will be no significant speedup by implementing the algorithm in an ASIC, as compared to a CPU/GPU-based implementation. This is usually achieved by requiring a lot of memory, which when implementing this on an ASIC, translates to needing lots of physical area on the chip. Also, this means that the ASIC will be so expensive that mining cannot be profitable.”

Ehsminer develops its own mining architecture

Ehsminer is taking the lead to resolve this problem by developing a low-cost, optimized and dedicated memory IP for the cryptocurrency industry. It has developed ACSMA, a Litecoin mining architecture, where every single asset is in continuous operation, and every step of the scrypt algorithm is mapped to an optimized unit.

Looking at the architectural side of the multiple mining cores solutions, the Ehsminer team found that in all cores and at a particular time, only a small fraction of the electronics is used.

Therefore, the company has come up with a new approach to connect unit cores and optimize the operation of transistors. According to the Ehsminer team:

“The great barrier to carrying crypto algorithms to ASICS is memory and power consumption. For example, Zcash uses Equihash as a memory-oriented proof-of-work. This algorithm needs memory to function making the use of ASIC unprofitable given the cost of developing and producing the ASIC. Our approach is to develop our own memory dedicated to these algorithms which will enable us to produce ASICS at low cost. This IP memory is under development in collaboration with one of our partners.”

ACSMA has been designed to increase the hash rate by using an architecture organization. A company spokesperson told Cointelegraph:

“We believe that at this point in time, this memory, which is considered as the denser part of a Litecoin miner, will be optimized in ways never seen before. We hope this will be enough to catch up with the current offerings. In our view, a 2Gh miner with new components will be possible at prices equivalent to those of the current Chinese offerings.”

Another product currently being developed and tested by Ehsminer is a more classical Litecoin architecture similar to those already present on the market. The company is planning to produce this solution in 14nm following the demand.

For more information please visit www.ehsminer.com.