Crypto miner Hive Digital CEO sees AI working in unison with blockchain

by Jeremy

Crypto mining agency Hive Blockchain despatched a sign to the tech trade when it dropped “blockchain” from its namesake in July, opting to name itself Hive Digital Applied sciences and mirror its synthetic intelligence foray.

The choice is a part of a wider motion from crypto miners to pivot outdoors of digital forex mining, amid depressed crypto costs. January noticed crypto mining agency Riot Blockchain rebrand to Riot Platforms whereas June noticed crypto miner Utilized Digital announce a $460 million deal to host AI cloud computing in its information heart.

Chatting with Cointelegraph, Hive Digital Applied sciences CEO Aydin Kilic and Chairman Frank Holmes reiterated the corporate remains to be closely concerned in Bitcoin and crypto mining — regardless of the identify change.

Nevertheless, they now see two nascent sectors — blockchain and AI — as being nearly symbiotic with regards to Web3 growth, with Kilic stating:

“Blockchain and AI can definitely co-exist — they’re each pillars of Web3.”

Pointing to the important thing variations between Web2 and Web3, Kilic means that AI will likely be used to improve the person expertise of Web3 over time.

“AI permits Web3 to be extra adaptive. In Web2 you may have all this metadata however you lose your privateness as a result of all the massive Web firms are secretly harvesting all this information for his or her revenue,” mentioned Kilic.

“With blockchain, you may have all this privateness and might personal your personal information. However with out that metadata, how will you may have a curated internet expertise? In order that’s the place the AI is available in to make it extra adaptive and intuitive. All of it works collectively,” he defined.

“The place AI will play a job, is the place Metaverses and DAOs will play a job. All of Web3 remains to be within the early innings.”

“The place these pillars of know-how really get utilized in novel methods which might be broadly adopted is but to be seen,” he added. 

Ethereum taught priceless classes

Hive Digital Applied sciences was the primary ever publicly traded crypto mining firm, constructing out its first Bitcoin mining heart in 2014 and going public three years later in 2017.

Holmes attributed a lot of the corporate’s capacity to leap into new know-how from classes discovered from mining each Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH).

“Our mining operations have been actually enhanced due to Ethereum mining. And if you’re mining Ethereum, it is not like driving a Jeep, you are driving a Porsche and also you it is a way more delicate piece of equipment. You want 2 to 1 employees that you’ve got for an ASIC,” he mentioned.

These classes have been essential for studying how finest to pivot and guarantee they have been able to having a broad sufficient scope of each product and technical know-how to benefit from rising applied sciences, Holmes defined.

Associated: Hive Blockchain income declines by 44% Y/Y regardless of total mining manufacturing surge

As an alternative of shopping for purely mining-focused chips, the staff at Hive made the dearer determination to buy chips that allowed for twin processing — which means that the agency might be mining on the similar time it supplied excessive efficiency computing.

“One of many issues we have been involved about was Ethereum transitioning to Proof of Stake from Proof of Work. Initially, we thought it was going to take longer, however we mentioned, okay, we will purchase Nvidia chips. And we made this determination nearly 18 months in the past to go down the trail of constructing out our Excessive Efficiency Middle web site together with it.”

Crypto nonetheless in focus

Kilic identified that the corporate remains to be targeted on Bitcoin and crypto mining.

“Our Bitcoin per exahash monthly is amongst the best within the trade. In the meanwhile we’re at 4 exahash and we’re at present focusing on six exahash for Bitcoin mining by the tip of December this yr.”

Kilic additionally shared an in depth breakdown of how their 38,000-strong fleet of Nvidia GPUs are being utilized in day-to-day operations.

“At present, 500 of them are doing both AI or HPC computing and the remaining 37,500 playing cards are nonetheless doing proof of labor mining the place they’re mining altcoins utilizing a revenue switching algorithm that varies daily. Primarily, we’re using the GPU hash energy to mine essentially the most worthwhile coin each single day.” Kilic defined.

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