A Multi-Million Dollar Bet Ethereum's Proof-of-Stake Isn't Coming Soon

One such investor is Chen Min, CEO and founder of Linzhi, a Shenzhen-based, startup that has spent $4 million in pursuit of designing the fastest specialized mining chip, or ASIC, for ethereum.

Still, the mining chip will only function on ethereum if the blockchain keeps its current code-base.

As detailed in CoinDesk, mining giant Bitmain released its ethereum miner, the Antminer E3, back in March, while Innosocilion announced three ethereum miners in July.

Though still in the proposal stage, if executed, ProgPoW would effectively disable ASICs from mining on ethereum - and momentum is building toward the implementation.

According to Chen, much of the conversation about removing ASICs from ethereum lacks an awareness of the kind of advantages specialized hardware can bring to a cryptocurrency project.

Pointing to scaling challenges faced by ethereum, Chen theorized that advancements in mining hardware could even help ethereum overcome its current concerns about scaling to more people and more transactions.

In her mind, because ASICs will be able to mine ethereum faster and more efficiently, they will be able to process more transactions at a faster pace.

Pointing to a recent proposal by ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin that offers a scaling method based on hardware running zk-snarks, Chen said that Linzhi would be capable of producing such hardware in the future, although it's not on their roadmap.

Speaking to CoinDesk, Hudson Jameson, a communications officers for the Ethereum Foundation, said he was unaware of any ASIC advocates in the ethereum developer community who might protest the plan to switch to proof-of-stake.

Irrespective, Chen urged that in the event of ProgPoW or proof-of-stake, Linzhi will switch to mining ethereum classic, a rival ethereum platform that split away from the blockchain in 2016, and that traditionally been more friendly to ASIC hardware.