According to reports from EMCD, the new partnership combines EMCD's mining pool infrastructure with Vnish's firmware technology, which holds a 26.4% global market share. The collaboration aims to help Bitcoin miners identify where they are losing money and improve profitability without requiring additional machine purchases. As reported by EMCD founder and CEO Michael Jerlis at Consensus 2026 in Miami, the approach represents a shift from traditional service providers to more integrated partnerships with miners.
The partnership addresses significant cost pressures facing Bitcoin miners following the 2024 Bitcoin halving, which reduced block rewards while mining difficulty in 2026 has remained above 135T. According to EMCD reports, the electricity cost alone to mine one Bitcoin has moved above $74,000 for many miners. This leaves minimal room for operational inefficiencies, with the difference between profit and loss often determined by electricity prices, machine performance, pool fees, and rejected share rates. The financial pressure has reached a breaking point, with public miners selling over 32,000 BTC in Q1 2026, exceeding their total sales for all of 2025, as operators liquidate assets to cover operational costs when mining itself is unprofitable.
The partnership focuses on addressing performance losses at multiple levels of the mining operation. As reported by EMCD, factory firmware typically applies the same voltage settings across ASIC chips, but stronger chips may be held back while weaker chips can overheat, leaving up to 25% of potential hardware performance unused. Vnish's custom firmware directly attacks this by optimizing voltage settings, which can cut power consumption and boost hashrate, with the partnership claiming this alone can deliver up to +24% more hashrate for users. Additionally, pool fee differences between 1.5% and 4% can significantly impact annual gross output, while rejected shares can reduce monthly income by another 2% to 5% due to high latency to pool servers.
According to EMCD, the partnership includes hashboard diagnostics, tuning, network-loss reduction, mining optimization steps, and audits from experts from both companies. The service focuses on identifying performance leaks and providing clear improvement steps. Vnish firmware can help tune ASICs more precisely, improve hardware performance, and reduce wasted power, while EMCD is developing better routing and tools to reduce rejected shares. The partnership's distributed infrastructure, with servers in multiple regions, is designed to reduce pool inefficiency by automatically connecting to the fastest available server, aiming to keep rejection rates below 0.2%. As reported by Jerlis, the partnership aims to cut fees and give miners more profitability through integrated optimization services.
The partnership benefits from recent favorable network conditions, with mining difficulty falling 2.43% to 135.59 trillion, directly boosting hashprice back above $35 per PH/s per day. This recovery in the core mining revenue metric provides a critical near-term tailwind for all miners, including those using EMCD's platform. The primary external condition for broad industry profitability remains a Bitcoin price above $74,000, which currently trades near $75,000, providing a supportive backdrop for the partnership's efforts. However, the main risk remains execution and timing, as EMCD's tools must demonstrably close the efficiency gap for a large enough segment of miners before they permanently exit the network, with success hinging on converting technical gains into real, retained profit.
