Sazmining Becomes First to Sell Jack Dorsey's Proto Immersion Hashboards to Individual Miners

Sazmining has started selling Proto's immersion hashboards directly to individual buyers, the first time Block's mining hardware has reached the market at the hashboard level rather than through large operators. Sazmining CEO Kent Halliburton confirmed the launch on the show, calling it an industry first on two fronts at once: the first retail-available immersion product of its kind, and the first financed offer of its kind in the mining hardware market.

WHAT'S ACTUALLY FOR SALE

Each Proto hashboard delivers roughly 200 terahashes per second at an efficiency of about 15 joules per terahash, cooled by full immersion in dielectric fluid rather than air or hydro cooling. Immersion cooling cuts the maintenance load that comes with air-cooled rigs, which Halliburton said is the main practical upside for buyers: less downtime, more consistent output.

The full price is $4,187 per hashboard. Instead of paying that upfront, buyers put down $1,397 and finance the remaining balance at 0% interest over 18 months, working out to roughly $155 a month through a third-party financing partner. Sazmining handles installation, operation and maintenance at its US facility, and mined Bitcoin goes directly to the buyer's own wallet rather than sitting with the company. Units are expected to be energized sometime between the second half of November and the end of December 2026.

THE TAX ANGLE, WITH A DISCLAIMER ATTACHED

Halliburton flagged bonus depreciation as a reason some US buyers might prefer the financed structure: a buyer can potentially write off the full $4,187 purchase price on this year's taxes while only having paid $1,397 out of pocket. He was explicit that this is not tax advice and buyers should check with their own CPA, specifically one who understands Bitcoin, since he said he has seen accountants talk clients out of mining positions without understanding what they were looking at.

WHY DORSEY'S COMPANY IS DOING THIS AT ALL

Halliburton framed the launch as a supply chain story more than a product story. Bitmain currently supplies a large majority of the mining hardware on the market, a concentration Halliburton pointed to on the show as the real problem, regardless of which single company holds that position. Proto chipping into that share, in his framing, is a decentralization move independent of whether Proto's hardware wins on specs alone.

He drew the same line to mining pools, where two pools currently control close to half of Bitcoin's total hashrate. Spreading hardware ownership across individual buyers rather than a small number of industrial operators, he argued, makes the network harder to coerce or shut down, because there is no concentrated point of failure to pressure.

HOW IT STACKS UP AGAINST AIR-COOLED HARDWARE

Sazmining also sells Bitmain's air-cooled Antminer S21 XP, which runs at roughly 13.5 joules per terahash, making it more efficient on paper than Proto's 15 joules per terahash board. Halliburton's position is that the efficiency gap is outweighed by immersion's lower maintenance burden over the life of the hardware, though he said he genuinely does not know yet whether the market will agree. He said he expects to have real purchasing data within a couple of months once both products have been live side by side.

This story comes from the Simply Bitcoin Live show. Watch the full episode.