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Is Monero ASIC resistant? If not, are there already people out there running on ASICs?

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Cryptonight (the PoW hash used by Monero and most Cryptonote coins) does not lend itself well to ASIC development, for the following reasons:

  • Cryptonight requires 2 MB of fast memory to work. This means that parallelizing hashes is limited by how much memory can be crammed in a chip while keeping cheap enough to be worth it. 2 MB of memory takes a lot more silicon than the SHA256 circuitry, for instance.

  • Cryptonight was designed to take advantage of the AES-NI instruction set, which uses existing hardware circuitry on modern x86_64 CPUs to speed up AES operations (Cryptonight is based on AES, a modern symmetric cipher). This means that at least some of the work done by Cryptonight is already being done in hardware when run on modern consumer machines.

  • There has been some talk of replacing the PoW algorithm with Cuckoo Cycle (an alternative PoW hash designed to be ASIC resistant too, see details about it at https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo). If such a switch happened, the R&D cost of developing a Cryptonight ASIC would be lost in large part, since they could not be used for Monero anymore.

So, no, there are no ASICs for mining Monero as of now, and probably will not in the near future either.

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Monero is not immune to ASICs in the future, but the costs of manufacturing ASICs is offset by the block rewards such that it would not be profitable. ASIC manufacturing would need to get cheaper, or the value of XMR would need to skyrocket for people to even consider ASIC mining. As I understand it, Monero's POW requires 2mb to perform hashing, and ASIC manufacture with high memory requirements can get very expensive, very fast. This means that off the shelf hardware like GPUs and CPUs still carry an advantage and probably will do for years to come.

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    That doesn't seem ASIC resistant. ASIC resistance would be designing such that everyday computers are the optimal design for the algorithm - thereby being the ASIC.
    – damiendonnelly
    Mar 18, 2017 at 22:12
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No such thing as ASIC resistant, CryptoNight (the POW algorithm) requires 2 Mb per instance, this makes ASIC manufacturing expensive and thus discouraged for the time being ($2 USD per XMR)

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    but $2 is about the market value of XMR now, so in the furture..?
    – user15
    Jul 19, 2016 at 21:50
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    In the future I'm sure we'll see XMR asics if the price continues to rise. By the time tail emission kicks in I expect the network to be a lot more safe with asics around.
    – user20
    Jul 20, 2016 at 2:15
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    Just pointing out a year later it's $50.
    – Nate Gardner
    Jun 17, 2017 at 18:11
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    It touched $150, still waiting :)
    – kim0
    Sep 7, 2017 at 12:47
  • we all know how this went now :P
    – bitlamas
    Apr 19, 2018 at 12:36
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Baikal has delivered an ASIC miner which is for sale on their web site here: http://www.baikalminer.com/product12.php

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Bitmain Introduce Cryptonight ASIC

https://shop.bitmain.com/productDetail.htm?pid=000201803132107063379CD35Gxy064F

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  • Isn't this for Bitcoins?
    – kenorb
    Mar 15, 2018 at 23:16
  • @kenorb no its not its for cryptonight
    – onefox
    Mar 16, 2018 at 14:18
  • This link no longer points to a product.
    – Highly Irregular
    Aug 11, 2018 at 9:14
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Monero's ideology is ASIC-resistance. This was previously done by adapting Cryptonight with each release making ASICs harder and harder - but Monero has now switched to pseudorandom program execution for hashing called RandomX.

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