We announced the launch of Testnet v3, Mao Shan Wang, last Friday. Mao Shan Wang is a fully-fledged public testnet with the same features as our upcoming mainnet, and this includes public mining. We are excited to share that public mining for testnet ZILs on our Testnet v3 is now available.

You can find detailed instructions on testnet mining here: https://github.com/Zilliqa/Zilliqa/wiki/Mining

Purpose of Public Testnet Mining

Mining on Zilliqa requires a different set up as compared to mining on Bitcoin or Ethereum, due to our specific design involving PoW, sharding and pBFT. Therefore, we are opening up public mining on our testnet to ensure that miners have sufficient time and opportunity to test and acclimatise to the Zilliqa mining process. Such testing is also important to help us identify improvements needed for the eventual stability and security of our mainnet.

The testnet ZILs produced from mining on our testnet are for testing purposes only, and will not be tradable or usable on our mainnet.

Key Facts

• Miners will only need to run the Proof of Work process for the first 5 minutes of every ~1.5 hour cycle, which results in a lower electricity cost. (PoW timing window may change for mainnet)
• It is possible to dual-mine Zilliqa and Ethereum, as PoW on Zilliqa is only for 5 minutes of every ~1.5hrs.
• The pBFT consensus process of validating transactions is CPU-intense, and cannot currently be accelerated by GPUs. This means that existing ASICs are not suitable for mining Zilliqa.
• Miners are rewarded based on their contribution of valid signatures per DS epoch (~1.5hrs), so mining rewards are far more distributed compared to existing winner-takes-all models.
• Miners with a higher hashrate may be selected into the DS committee. DS nodes will get to stay in the network without running PoW longer, as only 1 out of 300 DS nodes every DS epoch (~1.5hrs) will be removed from the network and have to re-join with PoW. (This ratio is subject to changes for mainnet)

Mining Requirements

The recommended specifications to run a node on our public testnet are:

• x64 Linux operating system such as Ubuntu 16.04.5
• Intel i5 processor or later
• 8GB DRR3 RAM or higher
• (Optional) Any GPU cards with at least 20 Mh/s (e.g 1 x GTX 1060 with 3GB vRAM)
• NAT environment with UPnP feature supported on your router (Most recent routers should have this feature)

Channels for mining discussion

For mining discussion, please reach out to us on our Gitter or Telegram channels.

Gitter channel: https://gitter.im/Zilliqa/Mining

Telegram channel: https://t.me/zilliqaminer

If you face an issues or errors while joining the Mao Shan Wang testnet, please do submit your log.txt files to this Google form here: https://goo.gl/forms/y21CZrSwotvyNoKY2.

Maintenance Schedule

Note that in the initial stage of our public Testnet v3, we will be resetting the testnet at least once a week to include fixes to bugs and issues detected by the community during testing. We expect the reset to become less frequent as the testnet stabilises.

You can follow us on our Gitter and Telegram channels to be kept updated on the maintenance schedule.

Tools for Testing

We have also worked together with our community to offer miners several options for block explorers and wallets — these tools will help miners visualise the mining process and track the creation of final transaction blocks. If you need testnet ZILs for testing purposes, you can also request them through our community’s Testnet Faucet.

Block Explorer

Zilliqa Official Explorer: https://explorer.zilliqa.com/home

Viewblock Explorer: https://viewblock.io/zilliqa

Web Wallet

Zilliqa Web Wallet: https://wallet.zilliqa.com/home

Moonlet Chrome Extension Wallet: 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 Requesting Testnet ZILs

Testnet Faucet: https://zilliqa-faucet.firebaseapp.com/

Help us make the Zilliqa ecosystem better!

We are now calling for applications for our ecosystem grant program to build a Mining OS. We would like to support our community developers in developing a Linux-based operating system for mining, similar to ethOS distro, to make mining on Zilliqa easier.