Block Inc., the financial services company co-founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, has unveiled a potential competitor to an industry-standard piece of Bitcoin mining hardware.

Named the Proto Rig, the modular make-up of the newly launched crypto miner marks a step up on previous one-time-use Bitmain machines, which currently own some 80 percent of the market.

The announcement was made this month at Proto customer Core Scientific's facility in Dalton, Georgia, where Proto Rigs have been deployed. Core Scientific is the first customer of the new rigs.

Efficiency is the main theme of the Proto Rig, which, rather than revolutionizing the Bitmain chip, instead makes it smaller, modular, and less power-intensive. Its 3nm transistors produce less heat and have a lower power draw than Bitmain’s 5nm parts, resulting in better rack-level efficiency.

Indeed, Block Inc. claims 1.5 times better power per foot of rack space than current alternatives, while its touted 10-year+ lifecycle improves upon the historic 3-5 year upgrade cycle for Bitcoin mining machines.

“Mining hardware hasn’t really changed in years,” said Thomas Templeton, hardware lead at Block.

“Machines break often, are hard to repair, expensive, and time-consuming to upgrade, and don’t make the most efficient use of power or space. With Rig, we set out to change all of that–and contribute to hardware decentralization in the process,” Templeton added.

Notably, Perry Hothi, blockchain solutions architect at Block, implied that the Proto Rig was the result of taking lessons learned by the data center industry and applying them to Bitcoin mining hardware.

“When you look at the data center world, they’ve been doing it for 10 times as long [as Bitcoin miners]. There’s a lot of innovations they made that work for us,” said Hothi, in an interview with mining-focused podcast, The Mining Pod.

The company also announced the launch of its complementary software package, dubbed Proto Fleet, which makes it easier to observe and manage mining operations for its Proto Rig.

If the Proto Rig lives up to its hype, it has the potential to eat into the 5nm-based mining rig market share currently dominated by Bitmain. If it takes off, the result could see a gradual but large-scale hardware replacement by crypto mining data center firms globally in the coming months and years.

Proto Global, LLC, as an affiliate of Block, Inc., is Block’s suite of bitcoin mining products and services.

Core Scientific has previously said Block’s "revolutionary" 3nm ASIC chip - announced last year - represents a "significant leap forward in the industry, as it significantly enhances Bitcoin miner efficiency and cuts down on costs."

At the time of the original chip announcement, Core Scientific said it was deploying its own custom rigs alongside the new ASICs.