A month ago I predicted that DigitalNote XDN difficulty would fall sharply after the Monero CryptoNightv7 Fork and that the CryptoNight ASICs may turn to DigitalNote XDN. I was correct on the first, unfortunately the second prediction may be correct as-well; since the fork DigitalNote XDN went from a good coin to mine, to a great one... until within the last 24hrs the difficulty spiked by ~32x. What can cause this? Must be the ASICs.
The majority of us mining XDN were merge mining it along with Monero XMR just over a month ago, likely on Minergate. We are now left with few options, most of which mean missing out on Monero XMR's low difficulty if you want any XDN.
(and still rising along with total hashrate)
I'm not sure how 'exactly' the ASIC's work, but I assume the firmwares can be updated to some extent. I can't imagine Bitmain or any of the other scum/ASIC manufacturers would see it feasible to build miners for XDN specifically, but updating the recent CryptoNight X3 paperweights seem more logical (if possible).
The following charts may confirm that CryptoNight ASICs are not dead after-all...
*Charts via ChainRadar