Monero: A new miner, growing concerns and the current state of the XMR token

• Bitmain has announced the launch of the first professional XMR miner.
• While XMR’s value has dropped by double digits in the last month, a rebound might be imminent.

The world’s leading manufacturer of cryptocurrency mining servers Bitmain has announced the launch of its latest product, the Antminer X5, dubbed the first professional Monero [XMR] miner.

According to its announcement, the Antminer X5 has a hashrate of 212 kilo hashes per second (KH/s) and consumes 1,350 watts of power. Built to be one of the most powerful XMR miners available on the market, Bitmain confirmed that the Antminer X5 has a power efficiency of 6.37 joules per kilo hash (J/KH).

Read Monero’s [XMR] Price Prediction 2023-24

The XMR mining community is not thrilled

Following Bitmain’s announcement, members of the XMR mining community took to Reddit to air their concerns. As gleaned from posts made on the r/monero Reddit forum, XMR miners were concerned about the recent development of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for mining the altcoin. 

ASICs are specialized hardware that can mine cryptocurrencies much more efficiently than general-purpose hardware like Central Processing Units (CPUs) and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). This means that if ASICs become widely adopted for mining XMR, it could lead to a centralization of mining power in the hands of a few large mining operations.

The Monero community has a long history of resisting ASIC mining. In 2019, the Monero network underwent a hardfork to implement a new mining algorithm called RandomX. RandomX was designed to be ASIC-resistant, making it difficult for ASICs to mine XMR efficiently.

However, with the Antminer X5 set to flood the market in a few days, ASIC manufacturers have figured out a way to develop ASICs that can mine XMR using RandomX.

XMR requires a pick-me-up

At press time, the altcoin exchanged hands at $146.19, according to data from CoinMarketCap. In the last month, XMR’s value has decreased by 10%. 

Source: CoinMarketCap

Interestingly, the price decline has occurred despite the significantly positive market sentiment that has trailed the token.

Source: Santiment

On a D1 chart, XMR accumulation has slowed. Under their respective center lines, XMR’s Relative Strength Index (RSI) and Money Flow Index (MFI) were 43.51 and 43. 36 as of this writing. This suggested that XMR distribution outweighed accumulation among daily traders.

However, while XMR’s price dwindled in the last month, its Chaikin Money Flow (CMF) indicator initiated an uptick. The Bollinger Bands also suggested that the token was “oversold.”

Source: XMR/USDT on TradingView