EMCD, Vnish partner to cut miners’ costs after halving

EMCD announced a partnership with firmware firm Vnish at Consensus 2026 in Miami to offer combined pool services and ASIC tuning aimed at lowering operating costs for Bitcoin miners.

The companies framed the deal as a response to the 2024 block reward halving and continued high mining difficulty, which remained above 135 trillion in 2026. Partnership materials state that electricity costs for some operators have risen above $74,000 to mine a single Bitcoin, squeezing margins and making small inefficiencies more costly.

At the hardware level, the firms point to uniform factory firmware settings as a source of lost performance. Factory firmware often applies the same voltage to all ASIC chips despite individual chip variation, which the partnership materials say can leave as much as 25% of potential performance unused. Vnish’s tuning adjusts ASIC parameters to recover some hashrate and reduce power draw. Vnish has promoted firmware gains of up to 24% more hashrate for some users.

Pool-side issues are part of the partners’ focus. The companies note that pool fees typically range from about 1.5% to 4%, and that those differences affect gross returns over time. They estimate that rejected shares, driven by network latency to pool servers, can reduce monthly miner income by about 2% to 5%. EMCD is developing routing improvements and tools intended to cut rejected shares and stabilize payouts.

The joint offering includes hashboard diagnostics, firmware tuning, network-loss reduction, step-by-step optimization and expert audits from both firms. The partners describe the service as a set of operational fixes to identify where miners lose performance and provide concrete adjustments.

EMCD founder and CEO Michael Jerlis told attendees miners need more hands-on support from infrastructure providers. He said, “Before, pools and machine manufacturers were just service providers. Now, it looks like they became more partners with the miners.” He added that custom firmware “helps to cut power consumption.”

The companies said the service is aimed at operators working close to breakeven where modest efficiency gains or fewer rejected shares can affect profitability. According to their materials, the package is intended to help miners recover lost performance and lower operating costs without purchasing additional machines.