Introducing the GRN1 - A Cuckatoo31 ASIC from Obelisk

Obelisk is excited to announce the GRN1, a cuckatoo31 miner. We are looking forward to work with the community and targeting it’s ASIC friendly family of algorithms.

Full details can be found at our blog post, I’ll be around for Q&A: https://medium.com/obelisk-blog/the-obelisk-grn1-an-asic-for-grin-1d1ff580a19d

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Are you allowing vouchers from previous orders made on your website, to be used for buy into this new venture ?

Have you been able to process the compensation payments you promised for previous orders that were shipped too late ? If not, will you consider allowing the pre-order “vouchers” to be bought beyond february 1st - for previous customers at least ?

Are those chips at 7nm process and where will they be manufactured ?

Customers can use their existing coupons to participate in the sale, and can also use any Obelisk credits that they have. Most manufacturing details will be kept confidential until after tape-out for competitive reasons, however we are using advanced processes.

Will the unit be compatible with further version of Cuckatoo ?

Will the units be shipped at coupon or retail value ? Asking for customs.

wondering if it will be compatible with c29 also, or only c30 (and undertsandably not c31+)

We are tentatively planning to target only Cuckatoo31. Voucher holders will be shipped units at voucher price.

what is the estimate on how long the grin1 asic will be viable for? october until april? so if they arrive first thing in october they will be competitive for 6 months?

Anyone considering this is cautioned to look at Obelisk’s history of shipping ASICs way late and way below spec.

I don’t understand how they’re still in business… oh right it’s because they take your money first, deliver crap later, and leave normal people to suffer the consequences of having useless mining hardware. I never even plugged in my Decred miner. It lost money on electricity before it even shipped (many months late and way below promised specs)

How’s the lawsuit from SIA and Decred miner customers going? Did you spend all your customers’ money on lawyers?

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That’s about what we expect. Beyond April the weight of CC31 becomes low enough that CC32 miners will likely out compete them. If no CC32 ASICs appear, the miners will be viable for a few months longer than April.

There are some key differences things that we have for the GRN1 sale that we did not have for the SC1 sale:

  • A completed frontend design for a chip
  • Trusted and proven relationships with a full suite of suppliers (PSU, Fans, Bare boards, Contract Manufacturing, and all other sourcing)
  • A direct relationship with our Foundry
  • A working previous-generation hashing board as well as the team that made it
  • A working previous-generation control board as well as a complete set of firmware to go with the control board
  • An executive team that has shipped hardware before
  • An executive team that has shipped mining hardware before

We have much better control over the manufacturing process this time around. We’re a much more experienced company and we’re working with teams and suppliers that have proven themselves to be reliable previously. Many of the issues for the SC1 came from working with unreliable / incompetent contractors, and these have been replaced and re-tested accordingly.

Most of the lawsuits have either been resolved or dismissed from court. Obelisk has gone above and beyond to handle its missed shipping dates, including providing full compensation for all customers who missed out on block rewards from not having units shipped to them by the due date. We compensated the cash value equivalent for all tokens that would have been mined by the machine, assuming that the customer had free access to electricity.

We take care of our customers.

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Words, words, words

- Hamlet

Show us even a decent miner, not a PoS, before you ask people to pre-fund your R&D. If you’re so successful, you can foot the bill for tapeout and only ask for people’s money after you have a working product ready to ship with proven stats.

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This is exciting, A new coin and an ASIC to mine it! As a miner of SIA and prior to the fork I am seeing all the careful design and product polishing that is going into all the current and future products. ROI has been met and net profits for those early customers and miners on the SC1 has been a pleasure to deal with. So much so that no wonder why the resell market and aftermarket is so small - miners are quiet and making net profits, both mining and reselling gear.

Fact is if the other larger manufacturers took their time to really look after the needs of miners they would have done a much better job at modulating the hardware design. For example I was an early adopter of DCR mining via first batch D9’s and they were not cheap! At $6k each I spent a small fortune ordering my rack full. Sure I was netting $200 per day but that was short lived. What was happening behind the scene was that there was a massive hoard of these being used to mine the DCR network dry at such a high rate that the roi via mining DCR was impossible to reach. Luckily I was able to flip my gear - the second, third and fourth batch owners were kind of screwed… This is what lead me to really consider the exclusivity roadmap where Sia + Obelisk meant they would ensure a much more stable roi opportunity for early miners whom got in. Fast forward to now, SC1 remains on the top of the ASIC profitability charts - 4 months post fork! Take a look: https://apanel.com check it out full screen on your cpu browser so you can see the full data set - on mobile it is condensed.

Now Intro GRIN Coin and the newly announced GRN1 ASIC. This is super exciting as a miner because the coin is so fresh off the lab and so Obelisk is leading the charge to serve that coin and allow us miners to join the mining opportunity - outside of the GPU realm. I am not a gpu miner so I can’t wait for this one!

Instead of insulting and complaining lets validate some of the real facts and milestones Obelisk has achieved for its customers and miners. For a US based company I sure am proud of how far they have come in such a short time. At the end of the day if you don’t jump in early as in securing your GRN1 via the vouchers which is a significant discount initially at just $100 per then once things start looking great on GRIN value and realize you want to get into the cool club it will most likely cost you double as one can clearly see what happens once demand outpaces availability.

Keep up the great work!

As a miner I manage a large group on telegram called Blockchain Association of Miners and we welcome all miners to join the discussion and connect with fellow miners all over the world.

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Their sia asic is profitable because they forked the sia coin along to accomodate it. Profits for miners doesn’t mean security of a blockchain. There are some points to be made about the low quality of their asics and how they handled the issues along the way to building them (mostly thinking about communication problem).

Yet they gave coupons and credits to early buyers and in retrospect the initial buying price at today’s btc value is fair. We need more players in the field so I hope they succeed, that being said I expect them to learn from their mistakes and do better this time around.

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Very true - I don’s see any others offering compensation policy or buy backs. These may not be perfect remedies but they seem like steps towards addressing customer concerns. Cheers, and to profitable mining in 2019 for all of us miners!

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Obelisk doesn’t design ASIC’s, and they don’t build them. They are a front company, a general contractor, who takes your money and hands it out to subcontractors in China who do the work for them. It’s not even US-based like they lead you to believe. When has subcontracting ever produced a quality product, in any industry, ever?

From the peanut gallery, this looks exciting for our community and I certainly hope to see others at least as open as Obelisk to enter the Grin ASIC race. Way to go fellas!

Good the asic races are starting early.

@mining software poeple, what would be a rough estimate before the racing is functionally done, which I roughly mean a piece of hardware is profitable to run for a year?

I think Bitmain or someone else wil start sale the miner for Grin significantly earlier…

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After mining in secret as long as they can get away with it…

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Obelisk full time employees were directly involved with the design and architecture of the GRN1 chip and memory architecture, including being responsible for several innovations and solutions that pushed performance and efficiency beyond where they would have been without Obelisk involvement. Obelisk full time employees were also directly responsible for several choices related to chip comms that contributed to the overall market viability of our machine.

Obelisk full time employees were also directly involved in the PCB design, both hashing board and control board, of the SC1 slim and will be directly involved in the design and architecture of the PCBs for the GRN1.

Obeliks full time employees were also directly involved with the design and architecture of the mechanical enclosures.

Huh? None of the core IP was developed in China. The chip design, PCB design, and mechanical design was all done in North America for the SC1 and SC1 slim, and will also all be done in North America for the GRN1. I’m not sure that it’s a big deal either way, but your statement is just factually incorrect.

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Sorry, that was an ad hominem attack. Maybe the people responsible for your past projects are gone or replaced. Maybe you have a stellar team now inside Obelisk. It’s possible. But show us a working product before asking for money.

If you ask ordinary users for presales to fund your R&D, then I will shout “scam” all day long.

If Obelisk can make a better product than Bitmain, Innosilicon, Whatsminer, and the others, awesome. Do it. Show us. But don’t ask for us to pay for it before you make it.