Xilinx Enters Crypto Mining Market, A Threat To Smaller Altcoins?

Xilinx is a semiconductor company that specializes in FPGAs that just entered the crypto mining market and some are wondering whether it poses a threat to the smaller market cap altcoins with ‘’vulnerable’’ mining algorithms so let’s find out more in the coming altcoin news below.

Xilinx has a market capitalization of over $24 billion and recently it leaked communications within the firm that show how they are making moves into the crypto mining with FPGAs or field-programmable gate arrays. This sector was mostly dominated by Nvidia and AMD GPUs. The company served other hardware designers on the market such as the SQRL which specializes in FPGAs for crypto mining. The FPGA is a type of chip that allows the miners to figure out an effective way to mine different algorithms and create different coins. The capability can even allow the FPGAs to withstand algorithm hardforks that are meant to prevent specialized hardware similar to the one Monero has to offer.

The SQRL CEO David Stanfill talked about FPGAs and noted:

 “In the hardware world outside of crypto mining ASICs, the growing event for the last year and a half has been the gradual replacement of GPU farms with new high-end FPGA based accelerators. Nothing like the small FPGAs that briefly existed in early Bitcoin days.”

Nowadays, the sources say that Xilinx is trying to build its own FPGAs geared for the larger-scale mining farms and Stanfill claims that Xilinx copied these designs from SQRL:

 “I believe our chips have been gaining in popularity in the crypto community. I don’t believe the U50 is targeted specifically at this market. Their new boards are capable of mining every coin and chain, almost always more power efficiently than GPUs.’’

The FPGAs are now a threat to smaller altcoins and the less commonly used mining algorithms and the coins such as Monero and Beam and Ravencoin are still dominated by GPUs according to Kristy-Leigh Minehan who is the former CTO of Core Scientific. She added:

 “FPGAs right now are mostly concentrated on low liquidity coins with vulnerable or weak algorithms ⁠— Keccak variants, such as 0x, RVN (using x16r), CKB (which uses Eaglesong) and other coins. Hardware distribution is still mostly locked into China with companies such as HashAltcoin (Blackminer) and their F1 product..’’