1. Why this comparison matters
A new chain's biggest day-one risk is concentration. If most of the initial hashpower can be supplied by a small number of large mining operators, the cost-of-attack is whatever they charge to rent it. Bitcoin's SHA-256 has 15+ years of specialised hardware development; BLAKE3 has effectively none. That asymmetry is the single biggest reason B3Chain is launching on a different PoW.
2. SHA-256 ASIC market (mid-2026)
| Manufacturer | Flagship | Hash rate | J/TH |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bitmain | Antminer S21 XP Hyd | ~473 TH/s | ~13.5 |
| MicroBT | WhatsMiner M66S | ~298 TH/s | ~18.5 |
| Canaan | Avalon A14 Pro | ~250 TH/s | ~22.5 |
| Bitdeer Tech | SealMiner A2 | ~226 TH/s | ~16.0 |
| Auradine | AT2880 (water) | ~600 TH/s | ~14.5 |
Total Bitcoin network: ~700+ EH/s as of writing. Top 5 pools control over 75% of hashpower. Public miners alone hold ~30% of the network in capital terms.
3. BLAKE3 ASIC market
There is no public BLAKE3 ASIC product as of writing. The reasons:
- BLAKE3 was published Jan 2020. The first PoW chain to adopt it (Alephium) launched late 2021. The economic incentive to design a BLAKE3 ASIC has existed for <5 years vs ~16 for SHA-256.
- BLAKE3 already exposes much of its parallelism through SIMD, which top-end consumer GPUs and CPUs already exploit. The ASIC speed-up over commodity hardware is therefore smaller in absolute terms than SHA-256's ASIC-vs-CPU gap.
- A handful of GPU miners (Bzminer, GMiner, lolMiner) support BLAKE3-family algorithms. Estimated capex to reach 100 GH/s on commodity GPUs is roughly $100K.
4. What this means for B3Chain
- Year one: cost-of-attack is bounded by the CPU/GPU rental market (EC2, Vast.ai, Akash). This is much more diffuse than the SHA-256 ASIC market and harder to corner.
- Eventually: as B3Chain accumulates economic value, BLAKE3 ASICs will follow. We make no claim that BLAKE3 is permanently ASIC-resistant; no algorithm is.
- Counterweight: SHA-256's enormous ASIC market is also why Bitcoin's PoW is so secure today. BLAKE3 trades immediate ASIC scale for initial decentralisation. These are different security properties at different time horizons.
5. What this comparison is NOT
- Not a claim that BLAKE3 is ASIC-resistant. It is not, in any meaningful long-term sense.
- Not a claim that BLAKE3 PoW is more secure than SHA-256 PoW. SHA- 256 PoW is enormously secure precisely because of the mature market.
- Not a claim that B3Chain is "more decentralised forever". The decentralisation advantage is initial-conditions; it erodes as the market matures.
6. Update protocol
The full text in
compare-asic-landscape.md
lists the trigger events that cause us to re-evaluate this analysis:
- A public BLAKE3 ASIC product announcement.
- Any single miner's BLAKE3 hashrate exceeding 1 PH/s.
- The first BLAKE3 mining pool controlling >25% of any major BLAKE3 chain.
Any of these triggers a reassessment of B3Chain's launch-time security margin and may motivate the checkpoint ceremony described in the roadmap.
7. Sources
See the full Markdown document for citations: Bitmain, MicroBT, Canaan, Bitdeer, and Auradine product pages; blockchain.info hashrate chart; Alephium official documentation; the BLAKE3 paper.