Miner Tooling

There are several ecosystem projects focused on building miner tooling. Here are some of them:

Decentralised Apps

GuapSwap

GuapSwap allows miners to swap mined erg for native tokens.

Lithos

Lithos is a project that aims to create a decentralized mining pool infrastructure. It provides a low-risk opportunity for lenders to earn yield on their ERG by providing collateral to mining pools while promoting increasingly decentralized block production. The project plans to enable miners to directly insert necessary transactions into blocks in a fully decentralized and trustless manner. This brings significant benefits to miners outside of just decentralization. Recently, Lithos has completed collateral contracts, and the ability of miners to directly insert necessary transactions into blocks has been successfully demonstrated during the ERGOHACK VI event.

CYTI

CYTI, or Choose Your Token ID, is a tool that helps miners in their mining operations. It allows an entity to mint tokens with a given character sequence at the beginning of the token ID. A token minter creates a CYTI request, and miners generate the proper token ID using the CYTI miner software. When one of the miners succeeds, they receive the fee from the CYTI contract and the token with the right token ID is sent to the token minter.

Innovations in mining

Log-Space Mining

Log-Space Mining is a technique that allows miners to mine more efficiently. It allows smart contracts to retain historical data, enabling new light miners to operate in an online mode. This concept, known as Logarithmic Space Mining, allows for the compilation of unnecessary parts of the blockchain data into the blockchain itself. New miners don't need to carry historical data, and as they continue to mine, they assist other light miners in bootstrapping. This eliminates the need to carry old historical data, allowing old miners to discard historical data for lighter mining.

Smartpools

SmartPools are a decentralized alternative to traditional mining pools. They replace centralized mining pools with autonomous on-chain smart contracts. Keep an eye on Lithos Protocol for the next generation of these.

Subpooling

Subpooling is a strategy that miners can use to increase their chances of earning rewards. It is a smart contract-based mining pool that allows groups of friends to pool together their hash rates in order to get mining pool rewards quicker than they would alone. Subpooling allows members to mine to the same address without worrying about one person controlling the funds. The goal of this dApp is to help encourage the decentralisation of mining pools while also promoting small-time miners who may not be able to get block rewards fast enough on normal mining pools.