Sazmining Offers Proto Immersion Hashboards to Buyers

The entry threshold for bitcoin mining has dropped.

On Thursday, Sazmining said it has started offering Proto's immersion hashboards to both retail and institutional clients via its mining-as-a-service offering. Prior to this, the hardware was largely available only to large mining operations.

Each hashboard provides about 200 TH at roughly 15 J/TH. Buyers fully own the hardware while Sazmining takes care of setup, tracking and upkeep at a US-based site. Mining proceeds are sent directly to each owner's wallet.

This step comes after a multi-megawatt supply agreement between Sazmining and Proto, the bitcoin mining unit of Jack Dorsey's Block (NYSE: XYZ). Both firms anticipate scaling up the arrangement as demand increases.

“Because of our aligned-incentive model, Sazmining only earns when we produce bitcoin for our clients,” said Kent Halliburton, CEO and co-founder of Sazmining.

Halliburton also promoted mining as a way to diversify bitcoin accumulation: instead of buying at the spot price on a given day, a miner's expenses are distributed over the machine's operational lifespan.

Sazmining, headquartered in Wyoming and established in 2018, runs facilities powered by renewable energy in the US, Paraguay and Norway. The firm claims its operations exceed the Bitcoin network's carbon-free portion by over 20 percentage points.

Proto represents Block's bitcoin mining initiative. The Twitter co-founder has long contended that bitcoin underpins "a more open financial system," backing projects from Cash App's purchase and transfer features to the Bitkey self-custody wallet. In 2021, he described mining as the clear missing element: “Bitcoin mining should be as easy as plugging a rig into a power source.”

In January 2022, Block officially revealed it was developing an open bitcoin mining system, with the goal of making mining "more distributed and efficient."