Proto Hashboards From Block Now Sold to Individuals via Sazmining

Individuals can now buy Proto immersion hashboards, the bitcoin mining hardware built by Jack Dorsey's Block, through Sazmining's hosted mining service. Sazmining opened orders on October 16, 2026, with a starting price of $1,397 and an interest-free payment plan spread over 18 months. Buyers own the hardware, Sazmining runs it at a US facility, and the bitcoin it mines goes to the owner's own wallet. Until now, Proto's immersion systems had gone mostly to large mining operators.

What Buyers Get for Their Money

Sazmining is selling individual hashboards rather than complete mining systems, so the minimum spend is much lower. According to the company, each board produces about 200 TH of hashrate at an efficiency of around 15 J/TH. The offer is open to both retail and institutional customers. Its main terms:

• Ownership: the buyer holds title to the boards, and Sazmining handles installation, monitoring and upkeep.
• Running costs: owners pay one combined rate that covers electricity and maintenance. The announcement does not give the rate.
• Payment: buyers can pay by card or in bitcoin, USDT or USDC. Paying in crypto earns a discount.
• Warranty: Proto covers each board for one year.
• Timeline: hardware ordered now is expected to start running in November or December 2026.
• Fine print: final pricing, terms and any sales tax are shown at checkout.

Background: Block's Mining Bet and Sazmining's Model

Proto is the bitcoin mining business of Block (NYSE: XYZ), the payments company led by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. For years Dorsey has called bitcoin the base layer of "a more open financial system." Block has built bitcoin features into Cash App and launched Bitkey, a self-custody wallet. In 2021 Dorsey said mining was the missing piece and argued that running a miner should be about as easy as plugging a device into a wall socket. In January 2022 Block said publicly that it was building an open mining system to make mining "more distributed and efficient."

Sazmining was founded in 2018 and is based in Sheridan, Wyoming. It calls itself an Airbnb for bitcoin mining: customers own the machines and the company runs them in professional data centers. Its facilities are in the United States, Norway and Paraguay and run on renewable power. Sazmining says the carbon-free share of its fleet's energy is more than 20 percentage points higher than that of the Bitcoin network overall. The retail launch builds on an earlier multi-megawatt supply agreement between Sazmining and Proto, which both firms say they plan to expand if demand grows.

Why Selling Single Hashboards Matters

In general, a hashboard is the circuit board that holds a miner's hashing chips. A full mining system combines several boards with power delivery and cooling. In immersion setups like Proto's, the cooling works by submerging the hardware in a non-conductive fluid. Selling boards one at a time gives smaller buyers access to the same efficient equipment that has mostly been available to large operators, without the cost of a full rig.

Kent Halliburton, Sazmining's CEO and co-founder, said the company's incentives match its customers' because the firm "only earns when we produce bitcoin" for them. He said Proto's durable design should mean more time spent hashing. He also presented mining as a different way to build up bitcoin holdings. A buyer pays a fixed price on a given day, while a miner's cost is spread over the machine's working life, and the mined coins arrive without an exchange or custodian in the middle. Halliburton admitted that the benefit cannot be measured ahead of time. He called it diversification, not a promise.

Our Assessment: What to Watch

This launch puts high-efficiency mining hardware in reach of individual buyers, and it extends Block's long-standing push to spread mining beyond large industrial firms. Still, the sources leave out the numbers that decide whether a hashboard pays for itself. The combined power and maintenance rate is not published, and returns also depend on the bitcoin price and on network difficulty. Historically, hosted mining has also exposed owners to the operator's own risks: uptime, solvency and how long contracts last.

Key things to watch:

• Whether the boards start running in the promised November–December window.
• The actual hosting rate shown at checkout, and how it compares with expected output.
• Whether the multi-megawatt Sazmining–Proto deal grows, as both sides say they hope.
• Whether Proto sells hardware to retail buyers through other hosting partners.