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Zilliqa, the high-performance scalable blockchain to host decentralized applications, announced today that public mining for testIL ZIL is now available on testnet v3. Last Friday, the Zilliqa team announced the launch of testnet v3, Mao Shan Wang. Mao Shan Wang is a public testnet in all respects with the same features as the next mainnet and includes the public extraction.
ZIL testnet mining products on testnet are for testing purposes only and will not be negotiable or usable on the mainnet.
Purpose of the Public Testnet Mining
The mining on Zilliqa requires a different set-up compared to the one on Bitcoin or Ethereum, due to the specific design of Zilliqa involving PoW, sharding and pBFT. Therefore, Zilliqa is opening public mining activities on testnet v3 to ensure that miners have sufficient time and opportunity to test and acclimatize to the Zilliqa mining process. This test is also important to help identify the improvements needed for the possible stability and security of the mainnet.
Main aspects
- Miners will only have to run the Proof of Work process for the first 5 minutes of each ~ 1.2 hour cycle, which will result in a lower cost of electricity. (The PoW timing window may change for mainnet)
- You can double Zilliqa and Ethereum, as PoW on Zilliqa is only for 5 minutes of every ~ 1.2 hours.
- The pBFT consent process for transaction validation is intense for the CPU and can not currently be accelerated by the GPUs. This means that the existing ASICs are not suitable for the Zilliqa extraction.
- Miners are rewarded based on their contribution of signatures valid for the DS era (~ 1.2 hours), so mining prizes are much more distributed than the existing winning game models.
- Miners with a higher hashrate can be selected in the DS committee. DS nodes will remain in the network without running PoW any longer, since only 1 out of 300 DS nodes each DS age (~ 1.2hrs) will be removed from the network and will have to rejoin with PoW. (This report is subject to change for mainnet)
The recommended specifications for running a node on the public testnet are:
- Linux x64 operating system like Ubuntu 16.04.5
- Intel i5 processor or later
- 8 GB DRR3 RAM or higher
- Any GPU card with at least 20Mh / s (for example 1 x GTX 1060 with 3GB vRAM) (Optional)
- NAT environment with UPnP functionality supported on the user's router
Note that in the initial phase of the public v3 testnet, the Zilliqa team will restore the testnet at least once a week to include bug fixes and problems detected during testing and reported by the community. Resets are expected to become less frequent as the testnet stabilizes.
Testing tools
Zilliqa engineers worked with the community to offer miners different options for block explorers and wallets: these tools will help miners visualize the mining process and track the creation of final transaction blocks. If you want or need ZIL testnet for testing purposes, users can request them through the TestNet tap of the Zilliqa community.
- Zilliqa Official Block Explorer – https://explorer.zilliqa.com/home
- Viewblock Explorer – https://viewblock.io/zilliqa
- Web Wallet – Zilliqa Web Wallet – https://wallet.zilliqa.com/home
- Wallet extension Chromelet Moonlet – https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/moonlet-wallet/aepcjklheilpnnokjfpgncfcdakhbgci
- Appberry Chrome Extension Wallet – https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zilliqa-light-wallet/pcaeihaibgpndmlpnchfnlhbgmlifmoj
- Faucet for the ZIL testnet request – Testnet Faucet: https://zilliqa-faucet.firebaseapp.com/
The Zilliqa team is also inviting applications for its ecosystem concession program to build a mining operating system. The team would like to support community developers in developing a Linux-based operating system for mining, similar to the distro ethos, to simplify the extraction on Zilliqa.
Detailed instructions on testnet extraction are now available on GitHub.
