Zetagig, a U.S. upstart fabless chip designer backed by co-founders of Genesis Digital Assets (GDA), has revealed its Z1 bitcoin ASIC chip as the latest entrant to the bitcoin mining hardware market.
The startup said in an announcement on Thursday that the Z1 chip has been tested with a computing power of 175-300 GH/s at an efficiency of 21.8-26.5 J/TH.
Zetagig is the latest bitcoin chip designer entering the hardware market with financial backing from major mining companies, following recent moves made by Bitdeer and Marathon-invested Auradine.
While an efficiency of 21.8 J/TH does not appear to be competitive enough to rival industry incumbents, Zetagig said the test was carried out on a much older generation of processing nodes.
Zetagig claims that the chip’s efficiency can be improved to 11 J/TH after implementing the design on 3-nanometer nodes, which is currently the most advanced process.
If true, that could rival Bitmain’s latest launch of the Antminer S21 Pro in Oman on Friday which boasts an efficiency of 15 J/TH. However, according to Zetagig’s roadmap, it plans to roll out a full miner system in Q2, 2025.
Zetagig was founded by Sandeep Gupta, who is said to have over 25 years of experience in chip design with work in semiconductor companies like Intel, Broadcom, and Texas Instrument. Zetagig’s team is about 20 people with backgrounds in hardware engineering. It is invested by Marco Streng and Marco Krohn, two co-founders of GDA.
GDA is a privately owned proprietary mining firm that operates over 180,000 miners across multiple sites in the U.S., according to its website. Before founding GDA, Streng and Krohn also ran Genesis Mining, one of the earliest bitcoin cloud mining service providers.
The previous title of the story described Zetagig as “GDA-backed”. It was edited to clarify that Zetagig is backed instead co-founders of GDA.