1) This a modified version of scrypt was created by people with extensive experience porting software algorithms into both ASIC and FPGA implementations. Anything can be done in and ASIC, but the design used provides very little benefit over a lite-weight CPU core, it is likely the most cost efficient implementation will be a very cheap ARM core connected to a stick of DRAM.

2) The algorithm will be modified if/when needed to keep CPU mining. This will be part of the code base on the official launch version of the client. By forcing changes into the POW algorithm if needed, this lowers the benefit of optimizing in the first place since the time frame to gain a benefit is low.