Bitcoin mining has become more accessible to a broader set of customers. Sazmining announced on Thursday that it is now selling immersion hashboards from Proto directly to individual and institutional buyers through its mining-as-a-service platform. Until now, the hardware had largely been in the hands of large-scale operators.

Each hashboard delivers roughly 200 TH at around 15 J/TH — a measure of the energy consumed per unit of computing power, where lower numbers indicate greater efficiency. The immersion label points to a cooling method that submerges hardware in a thermally conductive, non-conductive fluid to draw heat away, a technique favored in industrial-scale mining operations. Buyers own the machines outright, while Sazmining handles deployment, monitoring, and maintenance at a facility in the United States. Mining rewards are paid straight to the owner's wallet, an arrangement that sets the service apart from cloud-mining contracts, in which customers typically rent hashpower rather than owning the machines that produce it.

The move follows a multi-megawatt supply deal between Sazmining and Proto, the bitcoin mining arm of Jack Dorsey's Block (NYSE: XYZ), an agreement that both companies expect to expand as demand grows.

"Because of our aligned-incentive model, Sazmining only earns when we produce bitcoin for our clients," said Kent Halliburton, CEO and co-founder of Sazmining.

Halliburton also pitched mining as a form of diversification for acquiring bitcoin: rather than paying the market price on the day of purchase, a miner's costs are spread across the machine's working life.

Wyoming-based Sazmining, founded in 2018, operates renewable-powered facilities across the United States, Paraguay, and Norway. The company says its fleet runs more than 20 percentage points ahead of the Bitcoin network's carbon-free share.

Proto is Block's bitcoin mining play. Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, has spent years arguing that bitcoin is the foundation of "a more open financial system," funding everything from Cash App's buy-and-send rails to the Bitkey self-custody wallet. Back in 2021, he framed mining as the obvious missing piece: "Bitcoin mining should be as easy as plugging a rig into a power source."

Block formally announced in January 2022 that it was building an open bitcoin mining system, with the stated aim of making mining "more distributed and efficient." With Sazmining now selling that hardware directly to individual and institutional owners, the project has moved from blueprint to buyers.

This article first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and was written by Mathew Di Salvo.