Accepting Submissions: Zcash Open Source Miner Challenge

All coins are created equal. All coins should be equally accessible.

Last week, we announced our dedication to incentivize more open source miners to be available to the Zcash community, through the Zcash Open Source Miner Challenge. We believe that mining for ZEC is an important way to contribute to our growing and enthusiastic community.

The Challenge is now live and we are accepting submissions until 27 October at 23:59 UTC. All details are now available on the Zcash Open Source Miner Challenge website; there you can also find the form to submit your entry. Please read all criteria, rules and guidelines before submitting. If you’d like your code to be considered for the $30,000 of prizes that will be awarded, you must also post your code to a public GitHub repository.

The technical guidelines for this challenge are:

  • Submissions must be or must include an Equihash solver. Full Zcash miner submissions are also acceptable, provided that their Equihash implementation can easily be separated and meets the Submission Guidelines.
  • The CPU code should be in plain C99, optionally with use of intrinsics, inline or standalone assembly, pthreads or/and OpenMP.
  • The GPU code, if any, should be in OpenCL and/or CUDA (but we’ll favor OpenCL).
  • The Equihash solver portion must build and run on Linux/x86_64, and in particular on recent Ubuntu and on CentOS 7 (systems where we test zcashd)
  • At the minimum, the Equihash solver must support Zcash’s current Equihash parameters, which are n=200, k=9 (and preferably other parameters as well).
  • The Submission must be a correct Equihash solver.

To learn more about the judging criteria and the timeline, please visit the Challenge website.

You can also join in the mining conversations on the Zcash Forum or email [email protected] with any specific questions.