Canaan Creative announces the launch of an efficient ASIC miner for Ethereum .

According to Canaan itself, the new ASIC miner is not a development of the company as such, but is distributed through its channels in China.

"It's hard to explain, but this product wasn't developed or created by Canaan engineers. It's sold by our internal team and I'm not an official Canaan product on a global scale," said the company's representative.

Ethereum's Ethash algorithm was designed to reduce the advantage of ASIC miners over public equipment, which is expected to increase the availability of mining and decentralisation of the network.

Last year, another Chinese cryptocurrency equipment manufacturer, Bitmain, announced Antminer F3 for Ethash, which was an enhanced GPU miner and at the time of launch was only twice as high as the publicly available equipment.

In response, Ethereum founder Vitalik Butterin said ASIC miners do not threaten the network, and declined to suggest that the algorithm be changed so that it would take equipment manufacturers 6 to 12 months to adapt to the new conditions, as this would distract developers from more important work.

"It's not Bitcoin. The miners here have no control over anything. If there comes a day when Bitmain will have most of the processing power in his hands and try to use it to its detriment, we will speed up Casper's development and deal with the remaining bugs," he said.

The Ethereum developers are also currently considering implementing a ProgPOW algorithm that will allow ASIC and GPU miners to be leveled before the network moves to the Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. Subject to the resolution of existing disagreements and final approval, ProgPOW may be integrated into the Ethereum code along with hard fork next year.