Post Genesis Update

Timeline for Zen Protocol, June 30th to July 14th, 2018

The Zen Protocol blockchain launched with the release of the genesis block at June 30th 2018, 17:00 UTC.

With a completely new codebase, the stability of the blockchain was the key concern for the first days of operation. We had a smooth launch, with only minor issues affecting the platform. This post provides a timeline of events on the Zen Protocol since mainnet launch.

Note: how to install the Zen Protocol client.

Some people have experienced difficulty with installing the client.
Please remember to install all of the dependencies, as explained our installation instructions. If you are running macOS or Linux, please make sure that your version of Mono is up to date.

If you are having trouble with installation, we invite you to join our technical support group on Telegram.

June 30th to July 9th: Launch, difficulty adjustment and GPU mining.

The genesis block was released on June 30th, 17:00UTC. We wanted everyone to have the opportunity to mine, which is one reason we included a CPU miner with our node. We were surprised to see how quickly hash power came online, indicating the use of GPU miners or large CPU server farms. Our difficulty adjustment algorithm quickly responded to the hashpower available, taking about 90 minutes to hit the target block time. Hashpower at release was approximately 20 to 50 GH/s, rendering CPU mining inefficient, except for testing purposes. Understandably, some were disappointed that they could not find blocks using their home computers.

Development of GPU miners.

We responded to the rapid deployment of hashpower by getting to work on creating competitive open source mining tools, while providing a community bounty for a functional GPU miner.

• AMD
  We developed an AMD miner in house within three days. This miner is currently the most efficient way to mine using AMD-branded GPUs. You can get the AMD miner here.
• Nvidia
  We offered a bounty for an open-source GPU miner which was claimed by Protovist.

Hashpower climbed to about 120 GH/s over the first few days of the blockchain’s operation.

July 9th to July 14th: efficiency gains, pools and exchanges.

July 9th: Optimized Nvidia miners, and the launch of the first pool.

On July 9th we made a significant optimization to the Nvidia miner. Soon after, the first public pool, Leafpool, launched, along with their own Nvidia mining software. These two events led to a very significant gain in total network hashpower, with current hashrates approaching 9 TH/s (9000 GH/s). Leafpool later released open source code for their miner.

July 11th: Pool centralization and hashpower glitch.

The increased hashpower securing the network is a good thing. However, the lack of alternatives for miners led to a large centralization of hashpower around Leafpool, creating a point of failure. On Wednesday this risk played out in real time.

Leafpool had a technical issue, apparently unrelated to the Zen Protocol node itself, which prevented it from issuing shares to miners. As Leafpool was generating the majority of the hashrate, the network had become dependent on them. In their absence, block production was severely affected.

Once Leafpool came back online, block production resumed, and the network continued normal operation.

Analysis

The focus of hashpower on a single pool had several causes:

• Leafpool provided the easiest mining solution
• The Leafpool miner is somewhat more efficient
• The same miner is incompatible with other pools
• The Zen Protocol node is unoptimized for large solo-mining operations.

Solutions: the near future.

• We will create mining binaries for Windows and Linux, compatible with other pools.
• We will incorporate existing open source improvements to mining code, to make an efficient Nvidia miner with full pool compatibility.
• We will create better support for pools. This includes a documented standard for Stratum pools, and support for pool developers. We currently know of one other pool developer, AtomMiner, currently testing ZP mining.
• Solo mining support and optimization. We want to encourage the community to solo-mine.
  If you are already mining ZP using leafpool, please get in touch — we will provide you with technical support for solo mining. We are working on some simple optimizations that will make it considerably easier to run large numbers of mining rigs using a single node.

Longer term solutions

We are developing a secure and rational way to use multiple hash functions, called Multi Hash Mining (MHM), already covered in our paper and more recently in a blog post.

The rationale for multi-hash mining is, in brief:

• Any single hash function can be optimized, offering increasing returns to scale for the relatively small number of organizations capable of financing and developing ultra-efficient mining systems.
• This naturally leads to a certain amount of centralization.
• Hashpower does not directly represent the interests of coinholders. The way in which miners behave is not guaranteed to reflect coinholders’ interests. This applies equally to new blockchain rules chosen solely by a vote of hashpower.
• Coinholders may not wish to devote the entire future issuance of the blockchain to security via hashpower.

In a system where multiple hashing algorithms can produce blocks, some of these negative effects can be reduced. A vote of coinholders can determine the percentage of blocks found by each algorithm, providing coin holders with more influence over the protocol, disrupting the formation of mining monopolies, and allowing coinholders to select “algorithms” that allocate some fraction of coin issuance to other purposes.

It’s important to note, given the above, that Zen Protocol is not guaranteed to be a “SHA-3 blockchain”. SHA-3 is a temporary measure for the Malkuth release. The next major version of Zen Protocol that we create will offer coinholders the option to move to a multi-hash mechanism. This means that coin holders could vote to split the coin reward among other hashing algorithms, rather than grant all of them to SHA-3 miners, or to PoW miners in general.

For more information on our plans to develop “non-outsourceable proofs”, a technology that could substitute for pools in general, see Ash’s recent blog post.

July 11th: Exchanges.

Two exchanges enabled trading of the Zen Protocol native token on July 11th, using the ticker symbol “ZP”. They are TOP.ONE and Bilaxy. We’d like to thank the TOP.ONE team in particular for providing translation of many of our documents into Chinese.

Our initial recommendation for exchanges or other services accepting ZP (or any other asset created on Zen Protocol) was to require 50 confirmations. With the blockchain showing its stability, we think it’s reasonable to reduce required confirmations. We recommend a minimum of 15 confirmations from August until the release of the next major version of the Zen Protocol.

Summary

As expected, the first weeks of the Zen Protocol have seen us focusing on the basic building blocks of the protocol — its stability, security and usability. The coming weeks and months will give more scope for the improvements and extensions that will lead to the next major release.