Bitcoin mining has always been a margins business, now more so than ever. The difference between profit and loss can come down to electricity prices, machine performance, pool fees, or even how many shares get rejected before they reach the network.
That pressure became more serious after the 2024 Bitcoin halving. The block reward dropped, while mining difficulty in 2026 has stayed above 135T. For many miners, the electricity cost alone to mine one Bitcoin has moved above $74,000.
That leaves less room for waste, and a business can quickly become unprofitable. This is the problem EMCD and Vnish are trying to address.
The new partnership brings together EMCD’s mining pool infrastructure with Vnish’s firmware technology, which holds a 26.4% global market share.
The goal is to help miners find where they are losing money and improve profitability without simply buying more machines.
At Consensus 2026 in Miami, EMCD founder and CEO Michael Jerlis described a market where miners need more practical support from infrastructure providers.
“Before, pools and machine manufacturers were just service providers,” Jerlis said. “Now, it looks like they became more partners with the miners.”
Where Bitcoin Miners Are Losing Money
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The losses often start at the machine level.
Factory firmware usually applies the same voltage settings across ASIC chips. The problem is that chips do not perform equally. Stronger chips may be held back, while weaker chips can overheat. According to the partnership materials, this can leave up to 25% of potential hardware performance unused.
Then come pool-related costs. A pool fee difference between 1.5% and 4% may seem small, but over a year, that gap can eat into a meaningful share of a miner’s gross output.
Rejected shares create another quiet drain. When the latency to pool servers is high, miners still spend electricity on calculations that do not get accepted.
EMCD and Vnish estimate that this can possibly reduce monthly income by another 2% to 5%.
Jerlis summed up the pressure clearly.
“All miners have the same troubles,” he said, pointing to operating costs, electricity prices, software providers, and equipment sellers.
How the Partnership Helps
The EMCD–Vnish service focuses on practical fixes rather than broad promises. It includes hashboard diagnostics, tuning, network-loss reduction, mining optimization steps, and audits from EMCD and Vnish experts.
In simple terms, the service looks at where a miner’s setup is leaking performance, then gives them clear steps to improve it.
Firmware is a major part of that. Vnish can help tune ASICs more precisely, improve hardware performance, and reduce wasted power. For miners operating close to breakeven, even small gains can matter.
“Custom firmware helps to cut power consumption,” Jerlis said.
The pool side matters too. Jerlis said EMCD is working on ways to improve how miners connect to pool servers, including better routing and tools to reduce rejected shares.
That matters because mining rewards depend on accepted work. Electricity spent on rejected work is simply lost money.
Jerlis said the partnership is designed to improve miner profitability from several angles at once.
“Together we will cut our fees and give miners more profitability,” he said.
A More Hands-On Mining Model
After the halving, miners are under pressure to operate with more discipline. Cheaper power still matters, but it is no longer enough by itself. Machine tuning, firmware, pool reliability, latency, and support all affect the final result.
Jerlis said EMCD was built around this need for direct miner support. When the company started, many miners struggled to reach pool operators when something went wrong.
EMCD’s early advantage was 24-hour support. The Vnish partnership extends that same approach into optimization.
“We need to help them to acquire more Bitcoins, to tune their machines, to spend less money,” Jerlis said.
That is the core story. The EMCD–Vnish partnership is about helping miners survive a market where small inefficiencies now have a much higher cost.
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