The first and oldest mining pool of Bitcoin dubbed Slush Pool, has pronounced support for AsicBoost on March 6, 2018.

Users of Slush Pool who have the technology rooted in the application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chips in the hardware they use for mining can seamlessly connect to the pool to enhance efficient mining thus more profitable.

Slush Pool CTO, Pavel Moravec spoke to Bitcoin Magazine saying that the proposed protocol extension which is already implemented allows miners to use overt AsicBoost instead of stratum protocol, which was initially not possible. He further stated that mining can now get closer to the theoretical lower limit regarding power consumption so that there is no sufficient space to find optimization.

AsicBoost was founded in 2016 by Timo Hanke, the former CoinTerra CTO. Its technology makes the most of a quirk in the Bitcoin’s proof-of-work algorithm that allows for miners to take a shortcut to find a new block. However, this can be effected both overtly and covertly, although the latter variant is presently not so operative on Bitcoin.

Technically, an update of the Slush Pool software is uncertain. It allows the hashers or miners of Slush Pool to considerably change what a Bitcoin “block header” looks like the part of the block that consists of data about the block itself.

Similar data has been used to indicate soft fork upgrades readiness, but it can as well be also utilized for AsicBoost and theoretically for less obvious things such as internal accounting.

Even though Slush Pool which also owns around 11 percent of the total hash power on the network presently, is well-matched and compatible with AsicBoost straightaway, currently no recognized mining hardware takes advantage of the technology.

Earlier this week, Little Dragon Technology LLC, which currently holds the patented AsicBoost technology had publicly announced its plans to join the Blockchain Defensive Patent Licence (BDPL) initiative as the first company. This assurance makes the AsicBoost patent open to any other company that wishes to joins the BDPL, but on the condition that the companies also share their charters under the same license.