I built a forever open-source, easy to use, mining pool source with Kawpow support

Introduction:

It's no secret that mining pools, and the mining process as a whole, have been becoming more and more centralized in recent years. In many coins, a single pool is most often responsible for the majority of the hashrate on the network. 51% attacks notwithstanding, it’s much safer and better for a community to have multiple options when mining. It’s my theory that viable, easy-to-use, open-source software would not only help to solve this issue, but it would provide another way for many less-technical individuals to supplement their income passively while contributing to a project. Anyone should be able to setup and host a mining pool with minimal difficulties.

Foundation:

So for the past two years, I’ve been rebuilding NOMP from the ground up, with an emphasis on scalability, simplicity, and reliability. In some ways, the new source, Foundation, is a complete rewrite, but I kept the bones of the project, while gutting pretty much all of the extra/unnecessary features (coin-switching, UI, CLI, etc). The result addresses many of the issues brought up by users over the years and implements a number of features left out of the original solution, while simultaneously boasting cleaner source code and an expansive testing suite. Some of the main improvements notwithstanding the rewrite itself, bug fixes and those mentioned above include the following:

• Segwit/Bech32 compliance
• Updated stratum methods according to documentation
• AsicBoost support
• Reorganized configurations that are more intuitive/cleaner
• Reorganized database schema that is more intuitive/cleaner
• Solo-mining functionality for users
• Merged-mining functionality for users
• PPLNT made the default payout scheme (removed PROP)
• Reorganized/reworked API to improve statistics management
• API caching to cut down on database workload
• Updated Node version from v0.10.x to v15.x+
• Full SSL/TLS support
• CI/coverage/linting pipelines

With all these changes and improvements upon the initial source, Foundation is no doubt one of the most sophisticated open-source mining pool solutions currently available, and one of the few that is still being actively developed. It will always be open-source. You can access it here: https://github.com/blinkhash/foundation-server/

Blinkhash:

On top of this, while building Foundation, I had the idea for a platform that acted as a central “hub” for mining pools. Perhaps the most difficult part of running a mining pool, for the pool owner, is marketing. Until now, all options for mining pools have come with their own UI. The pool owner is responsible not only for setting up the infrastructure but also hosting the attached website and directing traffic to it. Foundation + Blinkhash removes all of that from the equation.

Instead, once Foundation is setup and reachable on a server, all that’s necessary is for a pool owner to create an account on the Blinkhash platform: https://blinkhash.com/. In the “Pools” page of their dashboard will be a button that reads “Link a Mining Pool”. All that’s necessary is for the user to fill out this multi-step form with their pool’s information and the platform will handle the rest. After a few minutes, the pool will be “linked”, active, and reachable to anyone. Some examples of linked pools include the following:

• https://blinkhash.com/mining/c19a9909-8be9-4cf9-bef4-408ca8165594
• https://blinkhash.com/mining/f25cc817-e7bd-4bd1-88d2-53731cef6844
• https://blinkhash.com/mining/11a9b195-8b8b-4f3f-bd5c-f55905933f5c
• https://blinkhash.com/mining/81c1e010-8dc3-484c-8a80-3b0655088b40
• https://blinkhash.com/mining/d190d4e5-ce5b-43d8-ae5b-7233892de504
• https://blinkhash.com/mining/549d1a8b-02ca-4af5-92c3-2ce368ec93ea

TLDR:

• Platform (WIP): https://blinkhash.com/
• Discord: https://discord.com/invite/8xtHZFKJQY
• Github: https://github.com/blinkhash/

I rebuilt NOMP from the ground up with an emphasis on scalability, simplicity, and reliability, and added Kawpow support. I’m also in the process of building out a platform that allows users to “link” their pools to leverage a streamlined UI + analytics module (https://blinkhash.com/mining/11a9b195-8b8b-4f3f-bd5c-f55905933f5c) for free (at least for now). At this point, mining pools built with Foundation have been able to mine more than 1,000 RVN blocks with no issues.

Note that at this point, though, development on both Foundation and Blinkhash is still ongoing. While both are completely usable, there are a few pages on the platform that still need to be built out (/mining specifically). Feel free to join the Discord (https://discord.com/invite/8xtHZFKJQY) to follow development and keep track of everything happening in the Blinkhash ecosystem!