EMCD, Vnish partner to improve Bitcoin miner returns

EMCD and firmware provider Vnish announced a partnership at Consensus 2026 in Miami to help Bitcoin miners recover lost hashrate and lower operating costs. The companies said the service pairs Vnish’s per-chip firmware tuning and diagnostics with EMCD’s pool-side changes to reduce rejected shares and fees.

The offering includes hashboard-level diagnostics to identify underperforming chips, firmware adjustments to change voltages and performance settings per ASIC, network routing improvements to reduce latency to pool servers, and periodic operational audits. The companies said the work is intended to improve output from existing machines rather than require new hardware.

The partners framed the effort against tighter miner margins since the 2024 block reward halving and elevated network difficulty in 2026. The companies cited mining difficulty above 135 terahashes per second and industry estimates that electricity costs to mine one Bitcoin have in some cases topped $74,000, shrinking the room for operational waste.

Company materials say common factory firmware often applies identical voltage and frequency settings across all ASIC chips on a board. That uniform setting can limit stronger chips and push weaker chips to run hot, reducing overall board efficiency. The materials estimate factory settings can leave as much as 25% of a board’s potential performance unused.

High latency and unstable connections to pool servers can cause shares to be rejected or recorded as stale. EMCD and Vnish estimate rejected or stale shares can reduce monthly income by roughly 2% to 5%. The companies also pointed to pool fee differences, noting a gap between 1.5% and 4% can have a measurable effect on a miner’s annual gross output.

Vnish supplies firmware that allows per-chip voltage and clock adjustments, which the firms say can raise effective hashrate and lower power consumption for some machines. EMCD focuses on pool routing, connection stability and faster support for operators who encounter problems that could cost accepted work.

At Consensus 2026 in Miami, EMCD founder Michael Jerlis said, “Before, pools and machine manufacturers were just service providers. Now they are working more closely with miners on operations and performance.” The companies also highlighted Vnish’s 26.4% reported global firmware market share as a basis for scaled deployment.

The partnership’s materials outline steps for operators: run diagnostics, apply firmware-level tuning where beneficial, improve network paths to EMCD servers, and use audit reports to prioritize fixes that offer the best return on investment. The companies presented the approach as a way to recover incremental performance and reduce costs without adding rigs.