BITCOIN AND ETHEREUM DRIVING NVIDIA AND TSM GROWTH DUE TO ASIC BLOCKCHAIN MINING, NASDAQ FOLLOWS

BITCOIN AND ETHEREUM DRIVING NVIDIA AND TSM GROWTH ASIC MINING BLOCKCHAIN, NASDAQ FOLLOWS

Recently I’ve been looking into the technology that powers the mining industry. There have been a few reports of a possible correlation between GPU companies, such as NVIDIA and AMD, and cryptocurrencies like BTC or ETH. I decided to delve further into this.

There are two types of mining. GPU and ASIC. Due to the growth of the Bitcoin network more powerful resources such as found in application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are now being used in order to mine coins. One of the leading companies producing these hardware solutions is Bitmain, which employs a special grade of transistors by TSMC that use a proprietary technology called FinFET. This same chip is used by its competitor Bitfury. NVIDIA also uses their chips… Yes, that is right. (In the case of NVIDIA, it used TSMC’s 16nm node, while AMD uses Global Foundries 14nm. - Another semiconductor company that has been trying to get an IPO since 2012)

Although TSMC is a large company involved in other big productions such as designing the chip for the iPhone (The next generation of iPhones is expected to use TSMC's 10-nanometer chips) it is safe to say that there is a correlation here that ties it all together, BTC, TSMC, NVIDIA, AMD and NASDAQ.

Ethereum on the other hand uses a slightly different proof-of-work algorithm, a non sha256 one making it resistant to ASIC mining. Below you can see that there is no apparent correlation between the Ethereum and TSMC price.