After the recent hype, Dogecoin has received its first significant release since November 2019. The Bitcoin mining scene is heating up, with large firms making moves and accumulating mining machines. EIP-1559 will be included in the London hard fork, and the Geth Ethereum client has released a big update with v1.10.0.

Learn about industry news, development updates, community happenings, and other aspects of the PoW world.

Mining industry

Bitcoin

The Bitcoin mining scene is heating up. Bitfarms recently announced an agreement to purchase 48,000 MicroBT mining machines, expecting to grow their hashrate from 1 EH today to 8 EH by the end of 2022.

Mining hardware heavyweight Bitfury will be merging with Good Works Acquisition to form Cipher Mining Technologies, which will have an enterprise value of $2B and, by the end of 2025, a mining capacity of 745MW.

The Bitcoin network difficulty was reduced by 1.27% on March 6, slightly increasing revenue for miners.

Ethereum

How will fees change after the implementation of EIP-1559? Barnabe Monnot from the Ethereum Foundation has done the first simulations aiming to answer this question and provide an overview of how mining fees will look during times of congestion.

The amount of gas that users are willing to pay may vary depending on their needs, which means there are many different scenarios for how EIP-1559 will affect the market. For most cases, demand is expected to be lower than the block limit, which would mean users would pay miners fair prices.

Ethereum revenues have been reduced compared to the last highs, as the congestion on the network decreased, coming to lower fees.

Dev and network

Bitcoin

Bitcoin Core #16546 introduces a new signer interface, allowing interaction with external hardware signing devices through the HWI or any other application that implements the same interface.

This PR simplifies the user experience by enabling Bitcoin Core to directly communicate with HWI. The PR includes full documentation on how to use the new signer interface along with HWI. The new signer interface is currently only accessible through RPC methods.

Ethereum

According to Ethereum Core Devs Meeting #107​ [2021-03-05], EIP-1559 will be included in the London hard fork, together with the push back of the difficulty bomb.

EIP-3298, proposing the removal of refunds for the SSTORE and SELFDESTRUCT opcodes has also been proposed for London.

Ethereum Optimism has announced that it will be able to launch on mainnet in March, earlier than expected, thanks to funds raised from a16z, which enabled them to expand their team.

Geth v1.10.0 has been released, featuring many improvements, such as snapshots, snap syncs, and offline syncing.

Litecoin

MWEB, or Mimblewimble Extension block, is set to be released on March 15. This upgrade will bring Grin fungibility and privacy features to Litecoin.

Dogecoin

Dogecoin Core 1.14.3 is out, with improved sync speed as the main highlight. The network is steadily updating to the new version, with about 5% of the network switching over per day.

Decred

Decred v1.6.1 has been released.

This release improves the VSP ticket purchase experience for Decrediton users and adds a block voting policy through which voters can force PoW miners to upgrade.

Firo

Firo had a new software release, Firo v0.14.5.3, that resolves some bugs.

Ethereum Classic

Hyperledger Besu released an upgrade that introduces a keccak256 hasher that can be used to validate solutions or CPU mine. The implementation included reliable Keccak mining and a new dev network to help achieve ECIP-1049.

Application

Ethereum

MetaMask has released a custom networks API for layer2 and EVM sidechains connection on their UI, allowing waller developers to implement connection to L2 seamlessly.

Dogecoin

The DogeDEX project has been released, aiming to provide a non-custodial way for users to store Dogecoins without giving up access to their private keys.

Community

Ethereum

On February 26, the EIP-1559 community call took place, attended by both Ethereum network developers and miners and mining pool representatives. Here’s a short Twitter thread summarizing the event.

Decred

Decred is about to go into User Activated Hard Fork mode. This will decentralize the treasury, which will only enable treasury funds to be spent after stakers vote.

Grin

There has been some discussion on the Grin community on Keybase. Several proposals on how the general fund should be spent were made, such as a split fund proposal and Pay in Grin.

Beam

Beam Outreach, a community-driven initiative designed to support Beam and incentivize community members to promote the project and the need for financial privacy, is officially live.

Nervos

Nervos has launched a new community initiative, TrailBlazer, to encourage the community to participate in different initiatives and be rewarded in CKB.

Conflux

ConfluxPortal is planned to be upgraded to v0.6.0 in the Chrome and Firefox extension stores between 11:00–13:00 (GMT+8) on March 9, 2021. CIP-37 will adopt a new address format, base32check (which will start with the network ID: “cfx:…”). Read the forum post for more information.

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PoW Round-Up is our bi-weekly report on the major news and mining insights in and around the Proof of Work ecosystem. Monitor and help secure the PoW world with f2pool.