After stewards of Monero, the biggest anonymity-focused cryptocurrency, debuted hard fork to prevent ASIC mining, 4 new ASIC-compatible Monero projects emerged
One hard fork later, there are four new Monero projects. — Privacy-centric cryptocurrency Monero hard forked to version 12 of its protocol yesterday.
Context & Ripple Effects
Monero had become valuable enough to attract specialized hardware: after its price ran from $0.50 to $12 and adoption spread through venues like AlphaBay adding Monero support, ASIC makers had a real market to sell into. The version 12 hard fork is the project's answer — an attempt to keep mining on commodity CPUs and GPUs by breaking existing chips.
The move fits a pattern already visible in the space: Bitcoin Gold launched with the same anti-ASIC rationale (its fork explicitly aimed to thwart specialized mining chips), and Obelisk's cofounder has since described how hard these resistance efforts are to sustain, noting some new coins are even optimized for secret ASIC designs. The four ASIC-compatible Monero projects that appeared within a day are the counter-move arriving almost instantly.
First-order effects
- Existing Monero miners on CPUs and GPUs get their edge back immediately, while anyone who bought Monero-targeting ASICs loses the coin they were built for — and gains four spinoff chains where those chips still work.
Second-order effects
- ASIC manufacturers are pushed toward backing or optimizing for the compatible forks rather than fighting the main chain, effectively funding rival Monero projects; other privacy coins watching this must now decide whether repeated anti-ASIC forks are worth the community split.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, proof-of-work ecosystems stratify into ASIC-resistant mainlines and ASIC-optimized sidechains, with every resistance fork functioning as a speciation event — and the Obelisk critique suggests chipmakers will increasingly design in secret against future protocols, making resistance a permanent arms race rather than a one-time fix.
The trend: Major proof-of-work cryptocurrencies are repeatedly forking to resist ASICs, and each fork now spawns ASIC-compatible offshoots, turning mining hardware politics into a structural driver of chain fragmentation.