The Antminer E3 was released in July 2018 and was the first ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) to be used for mining Ethereum. The E3 was designed by Bitmain, a Chinese company that is the leading manufacturer of ASICs.

The E3 was released with a retail price of $800 and was sold out within days. The Antminer E3 quickly became the most popular Ethereum miner as it was more efficient than GPU mining rigs that were being used at the time.

The Antminer E3 was designed to mine Ethereum at a rate of 180 MH/s while consuming just 800 watts of power. This made it much more efficient than GPU mining rigs that were being used at the time, which were only able to mine at a fraction of that hashrate while consuming significantly more power.

The Antminer E3 quickly became the most popular Ethereum miner and was responsible for over 15% of all Ethereum hashrate at its peak in September 2018.

However, since then, Ethereum has transitioned from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), rendering ASICs like the Antminer E3 obsolete. While the Antminer E3 can still technically mine Ethereum, it is no longer profitable to do so as the mining rewards are now earned through staking ETH instead of through mining.

For this reason, the Antminer E3 has been largely abandoned by the Ethereum community and is now only used by a small minority of miners.