It seems that the ProgPow team has admitted that they are working with both Nvidia and AMD. This comes after some controversies regarding favouritism related to the proposed Ethereum proof of Work (PoW) change. The information was released in a blog post by IfDefElse and reported by Trust Nodes.
ProgPow Developers Work with AMD and Nvidia
According to the team behind this project, they were lucky enough to have an email review that included engineers from different foundations and companies. Among these firms were Nvidia and AMD. It seems that these two GPU producers provided positive feedback about ProgPow.
IfDefElse commented on this issue:
“We were lucky enough to have an email review that included engineers from the Ethereum Foundation, Ethereum Core Devs, Nvidia and AMD. The Nvidia and AMD engineers gave the algorithm a generally positive review.”
ProgPow has been developed since 2018 and it seems that both Nvidia and AMD have been working on it as well. And as soon as Ethereum developers said that that it could be a good idea to go ahead with the ProgPow, Minehan’s employer Core Scientific informed that they’ve joined the Nvidia Inception program.
At the moment, the mining hardware producer is working on a new ASIC. However, they are focused on Ethereum’s current PoW algorithm. The intention is to provide a small efficiency gain of around 2 times. However, if the algorithm is now changed, the main question that analysts make is whether there will be a new ProgPoW ASIC.
Ethereum’s developers wanted to create mining activities that were ASIC resistant. Until now, developers couldn’t find a solution to have a final solution for an anti-ASIC algorithm. Some other projects just mix different algorithms, which is sometimes not easy to do.
Now, the community is trying to understand who is going to be producing this new hardware. The possibilities are AMD and Nvidia, startups such as Linzhi or giants such as Bitmain or Innosilicon.
Ethereum wants to switch to a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm. But it will not be so easy as it seems. Indeed, there are many different issues that must be faced before. Miners might do everything as possible to delay the upgrade.
Developers and the ETH community must consider the complexities that an algorithm change might bring to the network. Is this the best decision they can take?
