Support for the Anti-ASIC Algorithm on Ethereum Blockchain Gathers Steam

01. Oct 2018 Posted by Akolkar B on News

As Ethereum’s Constantinople hard-fork near, Ethereum developers get a crucial support to oust ASIC miners from gaining dominance over the ETH cryptocurrency. In a meeting last Friday, Martin Holst Swende, security lead at the Ethereum Foundation, said that he is favour of removing the ASIC miner hardware front eh Ethereum platform.

The issue about the ASIC mining chips started this year in April when crypto mining giant Bitmain released a powerful hardware to mine the ETH tokens. During that time several developers raised their voice arguing that ASIC chips reduce the participation of miners to profitably mine and maintain the network’s ledger.

Swende is currently working in coordination with other core developers of the Ethereum platform who support the stopping ASIC miners from gaining the platform dominance. In the latest meeting, Swende proposed a software change dubbed ProgPoW and further asked it to be implemented “in parallel” with the upcoming update i.e. the Constantinople hard fork.

Martin Swende voice his opinion of a Reddit thread discussing the ProgPOW implementation. He wrote: “I really think this change could be implemented in parallel with Constantinople [... If] people who are in the know deem this to be ASIC resistant then … I’m for including it as soon as possible.”

Swende joined the non-profit Ethereum Foundation back in 2016 and since then he has been working with persistent efforts to make sure that new code changes don’t disturb the existing operations of the Ethereum blockchain network.

As a result, Swende has assured that the latest proposal of ProgPOW won't affect deployment of smart contracts on the platform. ProgPow would "not touch the EVM or state transition at all,” he told in an email to CoinDesk.

Swende also said that the latest proposal could be implemented on "a totally separate testbed" in parallel to the normal testing process. However, while speaking on a forum previously, Swende has proposed to implement the ProgPOW in a "separate hard fork which is decoupled from Constantinople.”

"If we eventually decide to set both [upgrades] to the same [block] number, then fine, but that's not a necessity," Swende wrote.

Ethereum developers have been working for over the last few months to bring important and necessary changes to the network through Constantinople hard fork. The hard fork is expected to be activated at 4.2 million block on the ethereum testnet Ropsten on October 9.