ASIC miners has rapidly captured more than 30% of the ZCash hash rate. Miners are afraid that mining on ASICs will gain controll over 51% of the network in a couple of weeks.

The Zcash Foundation, together with the University of Luxembourg, conducted a network survey and found that, as of the end of May 2018, ASIC mining accounted for more than 30% of the total hash rate of the ZCash network.

According to a report, published on 6 June, ASIC miners managed to increase their share in the ZCash network within two weeks at the end of May to more than 30%. At the same time, about 87.5% of this volume is contributed by only four mining pools.

“In the short period of time of this study (2 weeks) we could put an upper bound on the ASIC/FPGA potential presence in Equihash mining ecosystem as of end of May 2018 at 20 – 30% of total mining operations,” the study said.

“Most of the mining power (95%) is concentrated in pools so any large hidden ASIC/FPGA operation should be present in one or several of the pools. Moreover, four pools concentrate 87.5% of the total mining power.”

In June, ASIC miners, produced by Bitmain, continued to increase their control over the network. According to the mining pool Altpool.pro, within the first 2 weeks of June, ASIC miners managed to capture 40% of the network hash rate, and in the near future they may gain control of more than 50%. That poses a potential risk of an 51% attack.

Bitmain, Chinese manufacturer of mining equipment, announced the release of Antminer Z9 mini. With 10 KH/s, this is the world's first Equihash ASIC miner which allows users to mine coins like ZCash, BitcoinGold, Komodo and others. The hashrate of the device is 10,000 Sol/s with a power consumption of only 300W.