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Mining

This document aims to make it easier for mining pools and miners to integrate alephium. This document mainly includes:

  • the communication protocol between the mining pool and the full node
  • how the miner calculates the block hash based on the mining jobs

Regarding the implementation of the communication protocol between mining pool and miners, you can refer to the stratum protocol here. Note that mining pools does not follow exactly the protocol.

In this document I will use the code of mining-pool and gpu-miner as a reference.

Mining Pool

The mining pool needs to connect to the alephium full node to get mining jobs, and the default mining api server is localhost:10973.

The mining pool communicates with the full node through a binary protocol, the format of the message is as follows:

Text Only
MessageSize(4 bytes) + Message(1 byte MessageType + Payload)

Getting Jobs From Full Node

Every time the full node receives a new block, it sends a Jobs message to the mining pool. You can also set the time interval in the mining configuration of the full node to send Jobs messages when there are no new blocks.

Because there are 16 chains in alephium now, there will be 16 block templates in each Jobs message. And the block template consists of the following fields:

  • fromGroup and toGroup: the chain index of the block template.
  • headerBlob: the serialized binary data of the BlockHeader, excluding the first 24 bytes(nonce).
  • txsBlob: the serialized binary data of the transactions.
  • targetBlob: the serialized binary data of the Target.

You can refer to the code provided here to learn more about the format of the Jobs message and how to parse the Jobs message.

Once the mining pool receives the Jobs message from the full node, it can send the mining jobs to miners based on their hashrate. For each chain, calculating the nonce only requires the targetBlob and headerBlob fields. Therefore, the mining pool can save bandwidth by excluding the txsBlob field when sending mining jobs to miners. You can refer to the code provided here.

Submitting Blocks To Full Node

Once the mining pool receives a valid nonce from the miner, it can send the block to the full node, where the block is composed of nonce, headerBlob and txsBlob, you can refer to the code provided here.

Then you can refer to the code provided here to construct a valid SubmitBlock message and send this message to the full node.

After the full node verifies the block, it will send a SubmitBlockResult message to tell the mining pool whether the block is valid, you can refer to the code provided here to parse the SubmitBlockResult message.

Miner

Calculating the BlockHash

In alephium, the size of the nonce is 24 bytes, and the hash of the block is: blake3(blake3(serialize(blockHeader)). As mentioned before, blockBlob in each job is the serialized binary data of BlockHeader excluding the nonce field. Therefore, when the miner calculates the block hash, it needs to preappend the nonce to the front of the headerBlob, you can refer to the code provided here and here.

Checking the ChainIndex

In addition to checking the target, the miner also needs to check the chain index of the block as alephium encodes the chain index into the block hash. You can refer to the code provided here to check whether the chain index of the block hash is correct.