Proto Rig and Proto Fleet: A paradigm shift in bitcoin mining

With modular hardware and software that simplifies, Proto shares a fresh, new take on what mining can be.

Today, we’re proud to reveal Proto Rig, a first-of-its kind modular mining system, and Proto Fleet, powerful open-source fleet management software.

Not long ago, we shared what was little more than an idea:

Block was thinking about getting into mining hardware.

Because mining had become an area of increasing centralization—concentrated, largely, in the hands of a small number of companies, all operating from a single country. And for bitcoin to work, it needs to be decentralized.

If mining hardware were to continue along that trajectory, we have a pretty good sense of the outcome: more centralization. More single-use machines that break and break often, are hard to repair, expensive and time-consuming to upgrade, and don’t make the best use of power or space. Mining would remain inefficient, in almost every sense of the word.

On the software side was a different version of inefficiency: a tangle of inelegant solutions, forcing operators to manage multiple systems and spin up their own, home-grown tools to fill in the gaps.

With Proto Rig and Proto Fleet, we set out to solve for each of these pain points, giving mining operators the power to move beyond the status quo in both hardware and software.

Mining hardware isn’t optimized as infrastructure.

During our initial explorations, we heard from mining operators that legacy hardware is not optimized for a lot of existing infrastructure. Shoebox machines often leave power unused at the wall, hashrate is limited by the amount of space a machine takes up on a rack, and upgrading from one generation to the next means essentially starting over with entirely new machines.

Proto Rig is designed to solve for rackspace density, get the most out of existing electrical infrastructure, and make upgrades extremely easy and efficient.

Proto Rig fits three miners worth of boards in the space of two legacy miners, delivering more than 1.5x the power per foot of rack space compared to the most efficient shoebox machines on the market. Designed to run on both modern and legacy power infrastructure, it’s the best use of power, too.

When it comes time to upgrade, you don’t need to rip and replace your entire fleet. You can just swap out hashboards, at about the same level of difficulty as loading a dishwasher. And while you pop in new, more powerful hashboards, you can just keep mining. Your infrastructure (because it really is infrastructure now) can stay in place, without the need to power down large portions of your fleet at once.

What was a 3- to 5-year asset becomes closer to a 10-year asset, and one that becomes increasingly powerful and cost-effective over time. Operators realize savings across shipping and installation, costs come down by as much as 20% each upgrade cycle, and a longer useful life as infrastructure is better in terms of working capital, asset depreciation schedule, and time to profitability.

Mining hardware breaks. A lot. And it’s a pain to repair.

We also heard that machines break and break often. And when they do, repair is a pain.

Replacement parts can be scarce, requiring a sometimes extensive boneyard of cannibalized machines just to get the right part. The repair process itself often requires moving heavy machines and removing many screws just to get started—all of which can take minutes or hours or days. This all means downtime, which means lost revenue.

We all know that the best repair is no repair at all. The team behind Proto has shipped millions of devices built to take a beating in bars and coffee shops and pockets the world over. And we’ve built every Proto Rig to the same high bar of durability and reliability (even though they’ll probably just sit in one spot on a rack).

If something—say, a fan—does break, there’s no need to take the whole machine off the rack and drive it to a repair room or ship it off to a warehouse. You can just pop the fan off and put a new one in place right there on the rack, no tools required.

If a hashboard goes down? The whole machine doesn’t just stop running. The rest of it keeps hashing, and you can quickly swap out a faulty board with a new one. Repair time takes literally seconds, and repair-related downtime all but vanishes.

Mining software leaves a lot to be desired.

On the software front, mining just hasn’t kept up. There’s too much software, it’s too complicated, and it just doesn’t do enough. And the software that does exist doesn’t improve operations or efficiency, at least not to the extent that it really should.

Proto Fleet aims to change all of that, bringing together everything a mining operator needs: from power scaling, to individual miner diagnostics, to maintenance, to overall fleet performance, all in one place.

With Proto Fleet, software starts to become a meaningful tool for streamlining operations, maximizing miner uptime, and minimizing time spent troubleshooting. It's open source, hosted on-prem, in cloud, or hybrid, easy to set up and use.

And it's free.

Moving beyond the status quo in mining hardware.

As part of Block, the team behind Proto has helped shape products for Square and Cash App—brands celebrated for their world-class design and seamless customer experience. We’ve made our name on our ability to simplify complex systems, to build best-in-class hardware and software products at scale, and to do it all in the open, based on input from the people who know their industries best. Today, Proto Rig and Proto Fleet join a long and growing legacy of transformational products.

Proto Rig really is an entirely new mining system—not just a new machine or new chips, but a whole new take on industrial mining, from form factor, to footprint, to repairs and upgrades. Everything about this system has been thoughtfully reimagined, based on the real world needs of today’s working miners—on what mining can be, not what it has been. The result is a system designed to last, be easy to fix when something breaks, get the most out of mining facilities, and upgrade in place. Together with Proto Fleet, it’s a true paradigm shift in bitcoin mining—a shift away from a disposable, single-use, largely inefficient status quo, toward reliable, repairable, upgradable infrastructure and software that makes it all easier.

To learn more, visit proto.xyz. Want to get your hands on Proto Rig? Contact our sales team. To get access to Proto Fleet, join the closed beta.