Our campaign has had an amazing first week, and we are already approaching 15% of our campaign goal. It’s been incredible to see all the different locations from which people are backing this campaign. We have also received a ton of great feedback that will help us to make UltraMiner FPGA even better.
All of this is hugely encouraging. We understand that our funding goal is substantial, and there’s a reason for that. In order to offer you a Kintex UltraScale+ dev board at an affordable price point, we have to meet a Minimum Order Quantity (MOQ) from Xilinx. With the progress we have made in the first week, thanks to your generous support, we are confident that we will do so!
We come from the cryptocurrency community, and we understand the importance of openness and transparency. Nowadays, unfortunately, cryptocurrency mining projects are often built around closed software, with high Dev Fees, from which only privileged groups can benefit. This is the exact issue we want to address. We have a public GitHub repo where we will release our FPGA bitstream designs and the source code of our mining software. If you are a crypto developer – or if you are interested in learning how to build a miner – please have a look and send us some feedback. We would be more than happy to discuss how to promote more development of open source FPGA projects in the crypto community.
We intend to work continuously on new mining algorithms in order to improve the return on investments (ROI) in UltraMiner, and we would like to hear from you about where you think we should focus our energies. To that end, we created a survey on SurveyMonkey so you can help us evaluate candidate algorithms. If you have time, please take a look and let us know what you think. We are looking forward to working with you to improve the ROI of this miner.
Behind the scenes, we have been working on Developer Edition design modifications. This includes the addition of GPIO breakout and PCIe connectors, which we are currently testing by way of an FMC connector. We are nearly done with these design changes and are now removing excess components to make UltraMiner production ready. We are also in the process of ordering a small quantity of FPGAs from Xilinx. In the coming weeks, we will send them to the manufacturer so they can produce a new round of prototype boards.
In addition to the above, we have started sending prototype boards to reviewers for validation. In the near future, we will begin posting videos that show how those prototypes function while mining cryptocurrency. So stay tuned for for these updates!
Feel free to contact us by email, at dev@agilmine.com, or through [Discord]((https://discord.gg/R36gzXM), Twitter, or Facebook.
Thanks to everyone for all the support. We look forward to sending out those UltraMiners!