Early in February, the Aion Engineering team released the complete Aion Miner module on Github. This release included two reference miner clients and a solo mining pool.

1. CPU Miner

2. CUDA Miner

The CPU and CUDA miners submit solutions to the Kernel through the solo pool. The solo pool also acts as a reference for the community to build future public Aion mining pools.

Equihash Algorithm

One of the core benefits of the Equihash algorithm, is its memory hard property for increased ASIC resistance. Memory hard algorithms demand a large amount of memory needed to generate PoW solutions, while limiting tradeoffs between CPU and memory usage. Since being optimized by Zcash, many PoW networks have followed suit by implementing the exact same implementation and parameter set of Equihash as done by Zcash. The parameters used by Zcash, Bitcoin Gold, ZenCash, Hush and Zclassic (Bitcoin Private) are 200,9.

The prevalence of Zcash’s parameter set in other networks has begun to tip the cost effectiveness of building an ASIC design for this parameter set.

Aion’s Equihash2109

In order to increase Aion PoW algorithm’s resistance to future ASIC designs and to diversify active Equihash parameter sets, we’ve implemented to first novel set of optimized Equihash parameters, since the Zcash implementation — Equihash2109.

The implementation of 210,9 as the parameters set for Aion’s Equihash2109, doubles the amount of memory required, while balancing the need to meet block times.

What’s Next?

Designing Aion to become the common fabric that connects the hundreds of thousands of blockchains in the future, requires innovation at multiple layers in our architecture. Following the PoW release, future Aion blockchains are based on two key consensus mechanisms — delegated proof of stake and proof of intelligence. We are excited by the initial proof-of-intelligence prototypes we have developed for neural network training as an input into the consensus model. Scaling this concept to allow for a broad set of neural network tasks, and leveraging this resource as a user will be a fundamental innovation in consensus models and on-chain functionality.

Getting Involved

If you are interested in participating in the Beta Test Net please sign-up using the link below. In addition, if you have experience in building mining clients or pool software, please reach out and we’d love to get you involved!

Github: https://github.com/aionnetwork/aion_miner

Forum: https://forum.aion.network/c/mining

Beta Sign-up: http://bit.ly/BetaTestAion