It’s Official, Ethereum’s ProgPoW Gets Third-Party Audit Approved for its ASIC Resistance Funding

On April 26, 2019, Ethereum’s core developer, Hudson Jameson, announced the news that Ethereum’s ProgPoW has gotten its funding third-party audit approved. This was revealed during the held Ethereum core developer meeting reports Cointelegraph.

As for the source of funds, it was supposedly “crowd-sourced” through donations and the goal of raising 50,000 DAI, which is an Ethereum-based stablecoin pegged against the USD, has been attained. Jameson further confirmed that the audit is anticipated for some time,

“this week or next week hopefully.”

Brief Overview on ProgPoW

ProgPoW is short for “Programmatic Proof of Work” and is supposedly an extended version of Ethereum’s current algorithm, Ethash. Its central goals are to reduce centralization and to increase the competitiveness of graphics cards. Said goals are possible due to the constant flux in “the statement of the problem in mining” and graphics cards explains 2 Miners

2 Miners further note that:

“ProgPoW regularly changes the statement of problem in mining (as mentioned earlier). GPUs are able to adapt quickly, thus narrowing the gap in performance compared to ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits).”

That is, by using GPUs to its full extent, the overall efficiency advantage of ASICs will decrease because the latter specializes in a “specific task” and not other aspects like the former does. Also, with the randomness in problem-solving, ASICs cannot be used due to its single ability, making it less flexible compared to GPUs.