Litecoin Hashrate Hits All-Time High As Rumors of New L5 ASIC Miners Do the rounds.
The past few months have been incredibly optimistic for Litecoin and the cryptocurrency ecosystem. As a result, not only did prices rise, but network security in the form of hashrate also emerged.
Perhaps more impressively, despite the rise, only Litecoin appears to be hitting new hash rates. Bitcoin is still trying to rally higher, but despite a close run, a recent price retracement has sent it back down. On the other hand, Ethererum, Monero, BCH and most large digital assets are not even close, indicating that long-term market confidence may suffer.
It appears that these crashes may be caused by the rumored new L5 Bitmain ASIC Scrypt miner that has been hinted at online. The LitecoinTalk forum recently hosted a thread by ‘nehgekim’ who mentioned that Bitmain and Ant-miner’s cloud mining partner Bitdeer had listed L5 for lease. There has been no other mention of L5 online, but I have heard from other sources that L5 does exist and is currently being distributed by Bitmain and mining farms, including Bitdeer.
The option to rent L5 has since been removed, but while L5 was operational, ‘nehgekim’ was able to capture some interesting first insights and leaks.
“It looks like Bitdeer has removed the little info icon that explains the L5 specs. I’m sure some search engines will provide them, so the L5 specs in the image above are: 1473 MH/s 1425 W 0.97 J/MH” “Mining Contract I bought one from Bitdeer that uses L5 and has performed better than I expected due to the rising LTC price. I can use Sub 5c electricity, but the LTC price will have to fully rise for this to all continue to be valuable.”
Our source also offered some insight based on what they heard.
“I think L5 is around 1.2GH @ 1–1.2 kw.” “For a 7–10nm chip, that’s about 1w/mh.”
The provided statistics show a significant improvement in hashrate output compared to the previous generation L3++, more than doubling it at 580 MH/s. Perhaps this is why the L4 name is skipped entirely. It’s certainly not as powerful as Innosilicon’s A6+, but it appears to be more efficient to put in a good position when it finally goes on sale to the public.
The upcoming halving will see mining rewards halved from £25 to £12.5 for the second time in Litecoin history, which will have a major impact on the mining space. Logically, the hashrate would also need to be halved, but once L5 is released, the network could recover faster due to increased efficiency and reduced overhead, assuming market prices don’t fall sharply during this period.
