Mine Kaspa while you can! ASICs are coming for it! Superscalar K10 & Osprey E300
Kaspa was then the coin of the moment among graphics card miners: it was approaching the top 200 on CoinMarketCap, with high trading volume, and its price had risen sharply over the previous weeks. In this video (in French), we explain why you should make the most of it quickly: specialised machines, first FPGAs and then ASICs, are coming to Kaspa, led by the Osprey E300 and the Superscalar K10.
Video from 2023: the figures below date from that time. See "What about today?" at the end of the article.
GPU vs FPGA: a question of efficiency
On Kaspa, even the best graphics cards, the well-known RTX 3070 Ti Laptop, RTX 3060 Laptop and the brand-new RTX 4070 Ti, top out at an efficiency of about 10 MH/s per watt.
With FPGAs, you get to around 20, or even 40 MH/s per watt. For example, the Xilinx Varium C1100 delivers 4,200 MH/s for just 100 W, an efficiency almost 4 times higher than a GPU's.
Difficulty and network hashrate rising fast
- Mining difficulty was just under 100 K at the end of the previous year; at the time of the video it stood between 200 and 235 K. It had therefore doubled.
- The network hashrate had just reached 1 PH/s, compared with less than 0.2 PH/s the year before. And in our view, this was only the beginning.
Osprey E300: FPGAs inside a machine
The Osprey E300 is rated at 14 GH/s for 500 W of power in this mode, i.e. just under 30 MH/s per watt. Inside, the hashboards are actually FPGAs: the machine contains three of them. Osprey says it could potentially support other algorithms. Ergo surprises us, as we do not think that project will let ASICs run on its network; Radiant, on the other hand, seems possible to us.
Superscalar K10: raw power
The Superscalar K10 is rated at 30 GH/s for 1,700 W. Its efficiency is "only" about 17 MH/s per watt, a little less than double that of a graphics card, but it offers real raw power. It was announced as available during May.
Our advice: make the most of it while you can
Kaspa's developers have no plans to change their algorithm to keep these machines out. So if you mine with graphics cards, now is the time to mine Kaspa. After that, to keep mining this coin, you will probably need to turn to FPGAs such as Xilinx cards, or go straight to ASICs.
What about today?
The prediction came true: Kaspa ASICs, from IceRiver and then Bitmain's KS series, arrived in 2023 and made Kaspa mining with graphics cards marginal. Today Kaspa is mined with dedicated ASICs, and the figures in this video are out of date.
For comparison, read our article on the most efficient GPU of the moment and our IceRiver KS0 review, one of the first Kaspa ASICs. Then browse our Kaspa miners and estimate their earnings with our Kaspa profitability calculator.