Spurred on by an endorsement from none other than Elon Musk, Dogecoin surged to new highs as memes flooded Twitter last week.

The Bitcoin network has reached yet another all-time high mining difficulty, while transaction fees accounted for close to half of all mining revenue on the Ethereum network. We also cover news from Firo, Litecoin, Decred, Vertcoin, Beam, Grin, Handshake, Siacoin, Ethereum Classic, Nervos, and Conflux.

Mining industry

Bitcoin

With the recent increase in the bitcoin price, mining manufacturers have seen a surge in sales. The first batches of devices are starting to be deployed to the network, bringing it once again to the highest hashrate it has ever seen.

Ethereum

In the last month, Ethereum transaction fees accounted for nearly $400M of the approximately $900M in revenue miners received.

Source

Dogecoin

Where to start? Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX CEO and Founder, initiated a social media campaign on Twitter using Dogecoin memes, leading to a frenzy in the markets for DOGE and other coins, bringing them to price levels not seen in years and flooding Twitter with DOGE memes.

According to our PoW ranking page, DOGE has entered the top 4 PoW coins by daily production, right after Litecoin.

At current price levels, Litecoin and Dogecoin’s daily production together surpasses Ethereum’s, ranking second only to Bitcoin. So wow!

Dev and network

Ethereum

Two EIP drafts are under discussion.

EIP3238 will delay the difficulty bomb to summer 2022 in order for mining on the Proof of Work chain to continue normally while Ethereum 2.0 continues to be developed.

EIP3224 seeks to create a standard for human-readable descriptions for smart contract interactions to help users better understand what they’re doing.

Litecoin

Non-interactive MWEB transactions were not in the original plans for Litecoin but will now be included thanks to continued improvements in the space.

Decred

Decred is preparing to implement a consensus change. This is a controlled and user activated hard fork.

Vertcoin

Vertcoin underwent a hard fork on January 30 when the block height reached 1,500,000. The mining algorithm changed from Lyra2REv3 to Verthash at that time.

We have adjusted our VTC pool payout threshold from 50 VTC to 1 VTC.

Firo

The Firo network is performing a mandatory software upgrade to v14.5.2 and calling for nodes to update as soon as possible. Following community consensus, this release enables the restoration of funds after the 51% attack.

Beam

Beam Testnet Eager Electron 5.3.10262 has been released. Atomic swaps for ETH, WBTC, USDT, and DAI have hit the testnet, with the mainnet release coming soon. Learn more in the release notes here.

Community

Ethereum

ETHDenver is ongoing. Check out one of our talks, and come meet f2pool and stakefish in the virtual castle!

Vitalik Buterin has published an explainer article on zk-SNARKs.

Grin

Grin core developer Tromp has introduced the Mimblewimble CoinSwap proposal to the community. The document proposes a possible design for a “trustless” Mimblewimble CoinSwap service to which users submit self-spend data throughout the day (or other desired time period) that are validated, aggregated, and published at the end of the day.

Firo

Following a clear community decision, Firo has burned 168101.68037691 FIRO to remove them from the circulating supply. Read more here.

Handshake and Siacoin

A New ASIC miner unveiled by f2pool supports Handshake and Siacoin.

Developed by Goldshell, the HS5 offers a 2,700 MH/s hashrate with 2,650W of power consumption to mine Handshake. It can switch to mining Siacoin with 5,300 GH/s of hashrate with a power consumption of 1500W.

Ethereum Classic

The ETC Cooperative recently introduced ECIP-1049, which advocates for changing Ethereum Classic’s mining algorithm as part of a strategy to improve network security in response to the network being 51% attacked in January 2019. Read more here.

Nervos

Nervos has released its yearly review of the network’s biggest achievements in 2020.

Conflux

Conflux has released its latest Quarterly CFX Transparency Report for November 2020–January 2021.

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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.