The machines in our Batch 1 earn two coins at the same time, on the same electricity. This isn't a trick — it's merged mining, one of the most elegant mechanisms in proof-of-work.
Merged mining (technically AuxPoW — auxiliary proof of work) lets a miner reuse the same hash work as valid proof for more than one blockchain. Litecoin is the parent chain; Dogecoin accepts Litecoin's Scrypt work as its own. Your ASIC hashes once, and that single stream of work simultaneously competes for LTC blocks and DOGE blocks. No extra power, no performance penalty, no switching.
For most of the past several years, Dogecoin rewards have contributed a substantial share of total Scrypt mining revenue — frequently 40–60% depending on relative prices. A Scrypt machine evaluated on Litecoin alone looks mediocre; evaluated on the merged LTC+DOGE stream it competes head-to-head with Bitcoin ASICs on dollars per kilowatt-hour. Several pools extend the same mechanism further, paying out additional merged coins (such as Bells and Pepecoin) on top — small individually, free collectively.
Scrypt ASICs are a smaller market than SHA-256 with a few serious models: Bitmain's Antminer L9 (16–17 GH/s), the ElphaPex DG1+ (14 GH/s) which our Batch 1 deploys, and the older L7 still common on the used market. Efficiency is measured in joules per megahash; current-generation units cluster around 0.4 J/MH. Because fewer machines are manufactured, Scrypt difficulty grows more slowly and steadily than Bitcoin's — a meaningful difference for revenue durability.
Merged mining doubles your coin exposure, not your certainty: revenue now depends on two volatile prices instead of one. DOGE in particular is sentiment-driven, which cuts both ways. And like all mining, rising network difficulty erodes per-machine output over time. We model share economics on conservative price assumptions for exactly this reason — the merged stream is the upside, not the promise.