Zcoin Seeks to Bring Back Fairer Mining Through the World’s First Working Implementation of MTP

Berlin, Germany, May 29, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Zcoin ($XZC), a leading cryptocurrency that provides financial privacy and promotes decentralisation
is the first project to launch a working version of MTP v1.2 (Merkle Tree Proof), a new ASIC resistant
Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm on their testnet. This is an important development against the
backdrop of Bitmain announcing the launch of its ASICs for Cryptonight (as used in Monero), Ethash
(as used in Ethereum) and Equihash (as used in Zcash).
MTP was created by Alex Biryukov and Dmitry Khovratovich in June 2016 to address the problem of
miner centralisation caused by ASICs and to allow commodity hardware such as CPUs and GPUs to
participate in the security of the network with the general principle that a certain cost will yield
approximately the same performance. It accomplishes this by using memory-hard computing where
every task is amalgamated with a certain procedure requiring intensive access to RAM both in terms
of size and (very importantly) bandwidth, so that transferring the computation to GPU, FPGA, and
even ASIC brings little or no cost reduction. With funding from the Zcoin project, Version 1.2 of MTP
was published in January 2018 that strengthened the algorithm against attacks discovered through
both academic peer review and a Zcoin funded MTP bounty program.
MTP is a memory-hard Proof of Work algorithm that can use large memory sizes from 2 GB to 8 GB.
This compares favorably to other leading PoW algorithms such as Scrypt (128 kb), Cryptonight (2 MB)
and Equihash (144 MB). In the past, ASIC-resistant algorithms are often taken advantage of by
botnets (infected computers that are controlled to mine cryptocurrencies). However, MTP discourages
the use of botnets due to its high memory usage which would likely alert the user of an infected
system due to the noticeable impact on system performance. Despite its high memory usage in the
mining process, MTP’s proofs remain lightweight and efficient to verify by nodes as it is an
asymmetric proof of work, requiring a lot less memory and time for proof verification than it does for
proof computation (i.e. mining).
This is an early but positive step in Zcoin’s implementation of MTP. Zcoin will be refining its MTP code
and performing extended testing along with launching bounties for open sourced miners and pool
software prior to MTP’s deployment on its mainnet. It is hoped that with the implementation of MTP,
casual users would be able to mine Zcoin with their existing hardware and allow Zcoin to achieve a
fairer and wider distribution of its coins which are necessary for a cryptocurrency to gain widespread
use and adoption.
About Zcoin: Zcoin $XZC (zcoin.io) is a cryptocurrency launched in September 2016 that aims to
solve privacy and decentralisation issues on the blockchain. It was the first cryptocurrency that
successfully implemented the Zerocoin protocol that provides financial privacy through the use of zero
knowledge proofs. Zcoin continues to pursue and research privacy and decentralization technologies
such as zk proofs without trusted setup, MTP and privacy-preserving voting systems on the
blockchain.