Internal e-mails reveal that Genesis Mining and Giga-Watt are planing to add Siacoin mining contracts

Earlier this year, Nebulous, the company behind Siacoin, announced that they are in the process of designing ASIC-miners for Siacoin. Up until now, mining was only possible with GPUs. They did not announce any specific specs of the final machine, just that it will have more than 100GH/s and will be shipped by June 2018. There wasn't even a picture.

They immediately started a presale, selling 4000 units for $2499 each. They did not disclose which company was designing and building the machines.

Leaks

A confidential source has leaked me a series of e-mails between Zach Herbert (VP of Operations, Sia) and a non-named mining company. In these e-mails, a lot of information was given which was denied to the public.

Excerpts from the e-mails:

We have Custom Silicon Solutions working on our chip. They have been building ASICs for 20 years, and have experience building working 28nm Bitcoin mining chips from a couple years ago. This is super important, since most ASIC designers cannot handle the demands of crypto mining. The chips will move from design to production in a couple months, and should be in production by end of this year if things stay on schedule. We are aiming for early 2018 shipping, but the official ship date is June 2018 - we built in a lot of time for things to go wrong.

I looked at the homepage of "Custom Silicon Solutions" and it looks like a really competent company. The e-mail also reveals, that they are aiming for a much earlier shipping date than specified on their website. Really good news!

Right now we are in talks with Giga Watt and Genesis Mining with regard to large purchases

So Giga Watt and Genesis Mining, two well known companies in the cloud-mining-business are planning to offer Siacoin mining contracts using Obelisk-ASICs. Genesis will probably offer hashrate based contracts, like they always did. Giga Watt will let you buy a machine and they will run it for you with cheap electricity.

Here are a BTC, LTC and ETH contracts they offer right now:

Mining with your own Obelisk would be really profitable (ROI in about 2 months). The profitability of the contracts can not be assessed yet, as these two companies will have a strong monopoly position.

What do you think about Sia moving to ASICs and cloud-mining contracts? Feel free to comment.

I will keep my confidential source warm and publish any further information here on Steem. Follow me if you are interested!