Alpha announces first ever Litecoin ASIC miner

MANCHESTER, UK: UK-based Alpha Technology has announced it will start developing the first purpose-built ASIC mining hardware for Litecoin, signing a partnership deal with Indian designer and manufacturer Dexcel Designs. The 'Viper' Miners will have two models, the 5Mh/s version and the 25Mh/s version.

The company announced it would begin taking pre-orders for affordable and efficient litecoin ASICs in the first week of January, for shipping in early/mid 2014. They will be taking 30 percent as a deposit. These miners will not only be able to mine Litecoin, but all Scrypt cryptocurrencies.

Alpha Technology is providing its mining and cryptocurrency expertise while Dexcel Designs will handle hardware development, production, and quality assurance.

It would represent a significant increase in computing power backing the litecoin network. At present, most mining of the world's second most popular cryptocurrency still takes place on regular graphics cards/GPUs (as did bitcoin previously).

Alpha Technology has been working with Bangalore-based Dexcel Designs for about six months, beginning with a FPGA conceptualization of litecoin's primary Scrypt hashing algorithm before designing dedicated ASIC hardware.