Unfortunately, the situation with the Ethereum transactions is much worse than we expected. Everybody expected the fees in the Ethereum network to be low and transactions to be cheap. The opposite has happened, the transaction price is as high as before. The ETH is now burned as expected by the coin developers but the Ethereum users are still paying the same high price for the transactions. 🤷‍♂️

Moreover, the pool couldn’t send the transactions using low gas prices as before. We must send the payouts with the so-called base cost of gas. Currently, it is higher than 40 gwei. We are forced to change the payout model of our Ethereum pool. All the details are revealed in this post.

Default Payout Value Is 1 ETH

No panic if that is too high. You could always adjust this value. We take care of our miners and we don’t want you to receive the payout of 0.005 ETH with 0.003 ETH fees paid to leave you 0.002 ETH only. We see these situations happening in other pools every day.

Payouts Are Covered By The Miners

UPDATE: Currently the maximum gas price is set to 80 gwei so the maximum fee is $5.5.
From now on the miners would pay the fees for the payouts they receive from Ethereum Pool. We set the gas price to 51 gwei so the maximum fee is just $3 (if ETH price is $2,800). That means that if the gas price is very high the pool will wait until it gets lower to execute the payment. Let us give you an example.

Currently, Ethereum’s price is $2,800. Each transaction always costs 21,000 gas. There are different scenarios depending on the current gas price (Base Fee Per Gas).

• The gas price is 10 gwei.
  The miner pays 10 x 21,000 x 2,800$ / 1,000,000,000 = $0.588
• The gas price is 40 gwei.
  The miner pays 40 x 21,000 x 2,800$ / 1,000,000,000 = $2.352
• The gas price is 80 gwei.
  The miner should pay 80 x 21,000 x 2,800$ / 1,000,000,000 = $4.704
  That is higher than $3. So the pool will wait until the gas price becomes lower and then execute the payout. If Ethereum’s price is $2,800 the pool will execute the payouts if only the gas price is lower than 51 gwei.

Payout Value Is Adjustable

You could set the payout value on the Account Settings tab. It could be set in the range from 0.005 ETH to 10 ETH. Your mining rig IP address is required to apply the settings. Please be patient after you adjust the payout value as it could take a couple of minutes before it is shown on the statistics page due to the website cache. If you couldn’t find your IP address (How to find my IP address?) please feel free to contact our Helpdesk. We would be glad to adjust your payout value manually.

Please remember that you pay the payout fee so if you set a very low minimum payout then a big percent of the coins would be spent to cover the payout itself. Let’s assume the current gas price (Base Fee Per Gas) is 40 gwei and you set the minimum payout to 0.005 ETH.

That means that the transaction will cost you
40 x 21,000 / 1,000,000,000 = 0.00084 ETH
That is almost 17% of your payout and you receive only 0.005 – 0.00084 = 0.00416 ETH at your wallet.

What Is Base Fee Per Gas and Where To Find It?

The Base Fee Per Gas is the base cost of gas, a fixed value, smoothly changing depending on the network load. If the expected transaction numbers are high, the base cost increases and vice versa. This value substitutes the gas price used before. It could be found on Etherscan.io for example.

Just click the last block mined and search for the “Base Fee Per Gas” value.

New Statistics Pages

Thanks to the London hard fork situation we’ve upgraded the Ethereum pool API and statistics pages.

Now you could see:

• Detailed statistics of your workers
• Share statistics (valid, invalid, stale)
• Adjust the payout value

Why Some Unpaid Balance Is Left In The Pool?

Gas Price Is Not Predictable

Gas price is always different. As mentioned before the new Ethereum transaction system (so-called Type 2) uses the base fee per gas value. Before the payout is executed the pool doesn’t know the gas price which would be used. All we could set at the pool as a transaction sender is the maximum gas value. Currently, it is set to 51 gwei so each payout costs less than $3 to the miner.

The pool blocks 51 gwei x 21,000 gas to execute the payout to the standard ETH address. If the base fee required to execute the transaction was just 30 gwei then 21 gwei x 21,000 gas is returned back to the unpaid balance of the miner.

Please find the approximate calculation below
21,000 * 21 / 1,000,000,000 = 0.000441 ETH ($1.23 if ETH price is $2,800) is returned to the unpaid balance of the miner.

Payouts to Different Ethereum Address Types

The payouts require a variable amount of gas. A standard ETH address to address transaction uses 21,000 gas. A smart contract could easily use 30,000-50,000 gas or even more (Smart contract wallets are usually used by cryptocurrency exchanges). Our pool gas limit is 55,000 gas. We highly recommend all the miners use standard ETH addresses to receive the payouts e.g. Coinomi, Trust, MEW, or Metamask. They require only 21,000 gas. It saves your money!

The first payout to the miner the pool reserves 55,000 gas at the miner account. There are 2 possible scenarios.

The Miner Address Is a Smart Contract

If the transaction used 35,000 gas for example, then 20,000 gas is credited back to the unpaid balance of the miner. The address is marked as a smart contract. For all future payouts, the pool will reserve 55,000 gas at the miner account. At the moment there is no workaround to avoid that. Ethereum network has no functionality to predict the gas value required by the smart contract before its execution.

Let us give you an example.
The miner has 0.61 ETH of the unpaid balance. He set the payout value to 0.6 ETH. The payout process has been triggered.
Let’s say the Ethereum price is $2,800, the base fee per gas is 20 gwei, and the miner uses an address generated on the crypto exchange. For example it requires 40,000 gas.

• 55,000 gas is reserved at price 51 gwei -> 55,000 * 51 / 1,000,000,000 = 0.002805 ETH ($7.85)
• 40,000 gas at price 20 gwei was required to execute the payout 0.0008 ETH ($2.24)
• 0.002805 – 0.0008 = 0.002005 ETH ($5.61) would be credited back to the unpaid balance of the miner

The Miner Has a Standard Address

If the transaction used just 21,000 gas, unused gas is credited back to the unpaid balance of the miner. The address is marked as a standard address (not a smart contract). For all future payouts, the pool will not reserve any additional gas at the miner account. 21,000 gas would be used. That means that if you use the standard Ethereum address the amount blocked at the pool is always less compared to the smart contract address. Starting from the second payment from the pool, all the coins would be sent to the miner except the 21,000 gas x (difference between the 51 gwei and base fee). This amount would be credited back to the unpaid balance of the miner as discussed above.

We apologize for any inconvenience we could have caused you. Unfortunately, the current situation was created not by us but by the Ethereum developers. We don’t see any positive sides of this Ethereum update currently. The only thing is that every minute almost 4 ETH is burned creating deflation that according to the ETH developers is going to lead to the coin price increase.

Remember to join our Telegram chat and follow us on Twitter to get all the news as soon as possible.

There has been much controversy surrounding this change – on the one hand, it aims to expand block capacity so that in situations where a large number of transactions are published to the network, a long wait to send a transaction can be avoided. It also offers a simple solution to calculate the cost of gas when publishing transactions.

However, the latter change has generated a lot of controversy among the mining community. But before describing the problem in more detail, let’s briefly recap what the gas is on the Ethereum network and what its cost affects.

How Transactions In Ethereum Are Executed

Any transaction on the network (whether it is a simple transfer of tokens or funds or a smart contract operation) is a set of operations in a special machine language developed specifically for Ethereum and executed by its EVM virtual machine. Each operation has a price; the more complex the code to execute, the more “expensive” the transaction is for the computer checking it in the blockchain (usually a mining pool that forms new blocks by including these transactions in them). To compensate for machine time, the concept of gas, and its cost, was invented. What is Gas in Ethereum? Ethereum Transaction Fees. The unit cost of gas for a transaction is set by whoever sends the transaction. The higher the cost per unit of gas, the more likely the miners are to include your transaction in the upcoming blocks.

In situations where the network was too overloaded with too many transactions waiting to be sent, senders had to set a higher and higher cost per unit of gas to get their transactions into the new blocks sooner and sooner. This gave rise to a cascading effect, with each successive new transaction being posted at a higher unit gas cost than the previous one.

Of course, miners liked that very much – the higher the cost per transaction, the higher the profit from each mined block (remember, that’s 2 ETH basic reward per block plus the sum of all fees for the transactions included in that block).

But it was inconvenient for ordinary users – not only that they had to overpay for sending a transaction in situations of network congestion (and these happen more and more often due to the increasing number of smart contracts and popularization of the coin in general), but also it’s not clear what exactly the cost of gas should be, to make sure that your transaction will be sent soon and not just hang for hours in the waiting list (not to mention that sometimes users were mistaken by an order of magnitude, manually entering gas cost when trying to push through a transaction, and sent, for example, 1 ETH with 10 ETH commission).

EIP-1559 – The New Transaction Concept

The response to the high and unpredictable transaction fees in Ethereum was EIP-1559. It introduced a new concept – the base cost of gas – a fixed value, smoothly changing depending on the network load (if the expected transaction numbers are low, the base cost smoothly decreases, as soon as there are more of them – smoothly increases). From now on, whenever a new type of transaction is sent, the base cost of gas multiplied by the amount of gas spent is always used for calculation, no more and no less. This eliminates the possibility of errors with sending transactions with disproportionately large commissions, and it is easier for the wallet programs to calculate the cost of commissions, as they are formed according to a fairly simple and predictable scheme. The new type of transaction is called a “type 2 transaction,” and canonical transactions are called a “type 0 transaction” – and don’t ask what happened to type 1 transaction 🙂

However, in addition to the above, it was proposed to “burn” commissions formed in this way (i.e. coins spent to form transactions will disappear irrevocably) – this will create a deflationary model, which in theory can make ETH value higher in the future (as the number of coins in circulation will grow slower than now). However, it also means that miners will stop making profits from the number of fees, being left with only the basic reward per block (2 ETH). That was the reason for heated debates, and to sweeten the bitterness of the parting, the notion of a “tip” was also added – some small amount on top of the standardized commission to make it more interesting for miners to include your transaction into a block (but the math is done in such a way that a very small amount is enough to make sure the transaction will get into one of the next blocks – so no significant amounts are involved – they are expected in the range of 1 to 9 gwei). In any case, it was still decided to accept EIP-1559 and run it in a hard fork process called London at block 12,965,000.

How The Miner Fees Are Burned?

The total gas amount of all transactions included in the block is taken, multiplied by the base gas cost for that block, and then that amount is destroyed irrevocably. For Type 2 (new) transactions, this will be exactly the total amount of fees per transaction (not counting tips, if any). For older transactions, since the cost of gas for them is much higher, it will mean only a fraction of the total amount of fees.

At first, the reduction will not be too noticeable, since most wallets and other software will continue to send transactions of the old type, the commission for which will not be burned in full.

Let’s have a look at the Ethereum Ropsten (Testnet) block 10,774,793.
This block contains just 2 transactions. The first transaction is Type 0 and the second one is Type 2.

Base Fee Per Gas was 10 wei (0.00000001 Gwei).

The block contained 2 transactions 21,000 gas each so 21,000 x 10 x 2 = 420,000 wei were burned in this block or just 0.00000000000042 Ether. Not a disaster, right?

How The Mining Rewards Change?

What does the EIP-1559 implementation mean for us as miners? First, the revenue generated from Ethereum mining will gradually decrease – the more Type 2 transactions hit the block, the more fees will be burned, consequently reducing the revenue from each block found. Thanks for Eden Network (formerly Archer DAO) we will try to keep miner rewards as high as possible with the so-called Miner-extracted Value (MEV) profits.

Secondly, as the number of Type 2 transactions in the network increases, we will have to switch to them as well, accordingly, all payments to miners will at some point be made at their expense (by taking away the cost of the transaction from the amount to be paid).

Currently, 2Miners leaves everything as it is (payments to miners at the expense of the pool), but in the future we will closely monitor the network and make a corresponding announcement, additionally introducing new pool features (it will be possible to specify the minimum payment amount individually, so as not to lose money on frequent payments).

UPDATE: Unfortunately, we were forced to change the payout model of 2Miners Ethereum pool. New 2Miners Ethereum Pool Payout Model

Remember to join our Telegram chat and follow us on Twitter to get all the news as soon as possible.

Ergo (ERG) – New Coin In 2Miners

The new cryptocurrency is available in 2Miners pool – ERGO.

POOL: erg.2miners.com
SOLO: solo-erg.2miners.com

Ergo could be mined with 3 GB video cards! Check all the details in our definitive guide How to Mine Ergo: A Detailed Guide for Beginners and Miner Setup.

ERG pool is constantly growing. We already have almost 300 miners online and 5% of network hashrate.

At the first moment, only Nbminer and lolMiner were working at the pool. Thanks to the T-rex and Teamredminer developers we’ve updated the pool and all the mining software is now operating perfectly without any issues.

At the end of the month, both PPLNS and SOLO ERGO mining pools have been switched to the new version of the 2Miners API system. That provides new features to the miners such as share statistics and rig statistics. You are now also allowed to change the minimum payout for ERGO payments.

New API and Node Updates

These cryptocurrency nodes were updated

• Nervos CKB 0.43.1
• Cortex v1.10.25

Ethereum node would be updated very soon as the London hardfork is expected at the beginning of August.

We are still working on the migration of all our mining pools to the new API system. 2 new servers have been deployed for these purposes. Ethereum and Ethereum Classic databases were transferred to them so we expect the new statistics to be implemented for ETH and ETC very soon.

New Mining Software

Quick start archive with the mining software has been updated. These are the new mining software versions available

• gminer 2.62
• t-rex 0.21.4
• lolminer 1.31

Ergo bat files have been added.
The archive password is 2miners

Remember to join our Telegram chat and follow us on Twitter to get all the news as soon as possible.

What is Ergo

As you can see on the official website, Ergo positions itself as smart money. According to the website, Ergo builds advanced cryptographic features and radically new DeFi functionality on the rock-solid foundations laid by a decade of blockchain theory and development.

The developers outline six main components that make the project stand out against others in the crypto niche. They are vision, consensus, light clients, survivability, economy, and applicability.

Vision of Ergo Developers

According to the website, Ergo was created in response to stagnation in the blockchain area. As a result, the developers implemented various technical and economic ready-to-use ideas that add value but do not reduce the known advantages of blockchain systems.

Ergo’s primary focus is to provide an efficient and secure way to implement financial contracts, which are the most widely used application of blockchain technology. Unlike the traditional financial system, no bailouts, blacklists or other forms of discrimination should be possible on the core level of Ergo protocol.

So they want to implement something similar to what Ethereum looks like today. It's important to note that Ergo works on a separate blockchain.

Ergo Consensus Algorithm

Autolykos, Ergo consensus protocol, is based on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm. PoW was chosen because it’s widely studied and has high security guarantees.

However, Autolykos has several meaningful differences from Bitcoin’s PoW. For example, you can mine Ergo’s native token ERG with just 3GB of RAM, which makes the niche much more accessible. Ergo also has storage rent to reclaim lost and forgotten coins.

Ergo’s Light Clients

The developers are making an example of Bitcoin Core full chain wallet: it takes a few weeks to sync and load all the data. This is highly frustrating, so Ergo enables light clients (i.e. programs that let you interact with the network) to synchronize with the network by downloading less than a megabyte of data. Thus, a regular user with any device can join the network and start using Ergo.

Thinking Long-Term

Ergo is prepared for the changes that might be expected in the future. For example, miners can vote to increase or decrease maximum block size, storage fee factor, etc.

For more fundamental changes Ergo is going to follow a soft-forkability approach. If an overwhelming majority of the network accepts a new feature, it is activated. Old nodes which vote against the new feature continue to operate normally. Thus hard forks should not be required in Ergo.

Ergo’s Economy

This is the most curious part of the project. What makes Ergo special is the storage fee for outdated coins. If a cryptocurrency remains in the state for 4 years without being moved, a miner may charge a small fee for every byte kept in the state.

It is similar to cloud storage services when users pay to store their documents, music, and other files outside their devices.

It gives Ergo several advantages. First of all, ERG mining will always be stable. On the other hand, Bitcoin’s max supply is 21 million which means that transaction fees will be the only source of income for miners after the last coin is issued. In this case, Ergo miners will have an additional source of income.

Secondly, state size growth becomes controllable and predictable reducing hardware requirements for Ergo miners. And lastly, by collecting storage fees from outdated boxes, miners return lost coins to circulation. It helps prevent a drastic decrease of circulating supply due to lost keys.

Ergo Applicability

The developers want to make the Ergo network a popular place for smart contracts execution. Ergo’s script is Turing-complete which means that the functionality of Ergo-based apps is unlimited.

Ergo’s Price

On July 22, 2021 ERG costs $4.98. It’s a 5100% increase compared to the minimum of $0.09 registered on March 13, 2020. But it’s also a 83% decrease compared to the maximum of $29.58. This price was registered on April 27, 2018, according to Coingecko.

You can't see this leap on the chart, but ERG reached $5-6 in April 2018.

Ergo’s local peak in 2021 was registered on May 19. Back then the price reached $18.

ERG increased by 1775% over the last year. This is more than the yearly growth of Bitcoin or Ethereum.

Where to Buy Ergo

Ergo (ERG) is traded on several popular crypto exchanges: Coinex, Waves, and Gate. According to Coingecko, Waves offers the best liquidity. You need more money to move the ERG exchange rate by 2% in either direction.

Wallet for Ergo

Ergo offers two options: Ergo’s official wallet and Yoroi. The former is a fully functional desktop wallet, whereas the latter works in the web browser. Ergo wallet offers a wider range of options. It has a multi-signature feature that allows you to perform crypto transactions on the wallet only by mutual consent of several people.

You can download Ergo wallet here or Yoroi here.

Ergo Mining

As we already mentioned, requirements to mine Ergo are reduced. GPUs with 3GB of RAM would suffice, similarly to the popular Ravencoin cryptocurrency.

To start mining on 2Miners pool, you need to create a wallet (one of the mentioned earlier) or use a crypto exchange address. Then download the mining software. We recommend lolMiner which we already covered here, nbminer, TeamRedMiner and T-rex.

lolMiner and nbminer work with both AMD and Nvidia GPU. TeamRedMiner works only with AMD cards, while Nvidia is suitable only for Nvidia GPUs.

You can find all mining software in the archive linked here. The password to the archive is 2miners, no spaces or dots at the end.

After you download the files, edit the bat file. You should replace the wallet address with yours, the one you created before. You can also change the rig name and replace RIG_ID with a new name containing only Latin letters, numbers, and symbols “_” and “-“.

Here is lolMiner setup to mine Ergo:

lolMiner.exe --algo AUTOLYKOS2 --pool erg.2miners.com:8888 --user YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS.RIG_ID

Here is nbminer setup to mine Ergo:

nbminer -a ergo -o stratum+tcp://erg.2miners.com:8888 -u YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS.RIG_ID

Here is TeamRedMiner setup to mine Ergo:

teamredminer.exe -a autolykos2 -o stratum+tcp://erg.2miners.com:8888 -u YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS.RIG_ID -p x

Here is T-Rex setup to mine Ergo:

t-rex.exe -a autolykos2 -o stratum+tcp://erg.2miners.com:8888 -u YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS.RIG_ID -p x

Ergo Mining on Miningrigrentals and NiceHash

Hashpower rental is possible for Autolykos2 algorithm. Please find below the settings for the most popular rig rental services: Nicehash and Miningrigrentals.

Here is Miningrigrentals setup to mine Ergo:

Name: 2Miners ERG
Type: Autolykos v2 (ERGO)
Pool Host: erg.2miners.com:8888
Workername (-u): YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS
Password (-p): x

And this is how to setup NiceHash to mine Ergo:

Custom pool name: 2Miners ERG
Algorithm: Autolykos
Stratum hostname or IP: erg.2miners.com
Port: 8888
Username: YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS
Password: x

All the settings are always available on How to start page of the pool. If you know what is SOLO mining and if you want to go SOLO for Ergo join follow these simple steps.

Remember to follow us on Twitter to get all the news as soon as possible.

New Servers for Ethereum Mining Pool

Despite the decreasing ETH price this month 2Miners Ethereum pool hashrate has exceeded 20 TH/s on average.

Due to the high demand, we needed to add more servers to the Ethereum PPLNS pool system to keep the service going at the same high level. In June we released 2 more servers in Europe, 1 in Asia, and 1 more in the US. So there are 7 servers for Europe, 3 for Asia, and 3 for the US in total right now.

New Pool API

We are still developing the new pool API and the new statistics dashboards. This June we successfully released it for the Expanse (EXP) pool. The same dashboards would be available for Ethereum and other coins very soon. If you are curious about how is it going just go to EXP pool and choose any miner you want. All the statistics are transparent as always.

This process takes a little more time than we expected as we are constantly improving the code and implementing new ideas. Next month we expect the new API and statistics to be available for many more pools on 2Miners. Expanse is just our testing ground.

Node Updates

All the mining pools require constant monitoring and upgrading. In June we updated the nodes of multiple coins.

• Aeternity Node 6.1.0 – bug fix
• Beam Fierce Fermion 6.0.11647 – hotfix
• ZCash 4.4.1
• Flux (ZEL) 5.0.2

New Mining Software

New mining software has been released so we’ve updated our Quick Start Archive. The archive password is 2miners

• gminer 2.57
• t-rex 0.20.4
• teamredminer 0.8.3

We’ve also updated the Firo bat files.

Remember to join our Telegram chat and follow us on Twitter to get all the news as soon as possible.

Ethereum Mining Pool News

This month cryptocurrency prices have spiked multiple times. This has caused the huge Ethereum network load which brought extra rewards to the miners. Some days we’ve even stopped the Ethereum payouts for a short period of time. This lets the pool mine the blocks with extremely high rewards. May 13 was a very lucky day for the miners as we’ve seen the rewards as high as 10 ETH or even more. However, May 19 was even more outstanding with the 20-40 ETH per block.

Please remember that the standard reward is just 2-3 ETH. Why does the Ethereum block reward change that much?

Currently, the Ethereum transaction fees are very low. We have not seen them like that for a long time.

Still, the number of Ethereum miners in the 2Miners pool is growing. That’s why this month we’ve added 2 new ETH servers to satisfy the constant demand for high-quality service. Currently, more than 40 000 miners are Online in our Ethereum pool.

Follow these simple steps if you have not started ETH mining yet.

Ethereum Classic Mining Pool Update

We’ve increased the number of PPLNS shares from 12 000 to 50 000 for Ethereum Classic (ETC) PPLNS Pool.

This will not change the average reward anyhow. This should just help the small miners with a low hashrate (for example a single GPU) to participate in a larger amount of blocks.

How does PPLNS pool reward system work?

New Dashboards – Work In Progress

We are working hard to implement the new version of the dashboards. It will contain such features as reported hashrate and detailed share statistics. This requires a complete code redesign. Actually, we’ve already started to deploy it. The current statistics pages you see now are working much faster than before even if they look the same.

We plan to release the new statistics pages in the nearest weeks (or even days). Below you could find the first teaser screenshot from the Beta testing server.

BEAM and Callisto Node Updates

Callisto (CLO) 2Miners nodes were updated to the latest version Geth/v1.9.15-stable-8d80fb96
You could always monitor the current state of the nodes on a special Stats Page.

Beam nodes have been also updated to the latest software version Fierce Fermion 6.0.11638
The Beam 6.0 Hardfork is expected on block 1 280 000. There is nothing special to do for the miners. If you use 2Miners pools you are all set. However, it is required though to update your wallets to the latest software version to continue using the network. All details of the future update could be found on the Beam website.

Telegram Bot Updates

6 new currencies were added to our Telegram monitoring bot @pool2minersbot

• INR – Indian rupee
• GBP – British pound
• CHF – Swiss franc
• AUD – Australian dollar
• CAD – Canadian dollar
• MXN – Mexican peso

We highly recommend our bot for rig monitoring purposes. You could also use one of the third-party applications.

Remember to join our Telegram chat and follow us on Twitter to get all the news as soon as possible.

60 000 Miners Online

A new milestone has been reached. More than 60 000 miners are currently mining in our pools. 35 000 miners in Ethereum pool, 15 000 miners in Ravencoin pool. Thank you for mining with us.

Ethereum Berlin Hardfork

A hard fork has happened in the Ethereum (ETH) network at block 12 244 000. 2Miners Ethereum pools were updated. At the moment we use the latest node software Geth v1.10.2. You could always check the node operation on Ethereum Network Stats page.

At the moment of the fork, we stopped the payouts in the Ethereum pools for about 2 hours just to make sure the new network was operating fine.

The miners don’t need to change anything in their settings. This hardfork had no influence on Ethereum rewards. However, now they are lower than before. Why does that happen? Read our post Ethereum Mining Profit Is Down. What Happened and What to Do?

Transparent MEV Rewards on 2Miners

2Miners Ethereum Pool Blocks tab shows now MEV-rewards if they were included in the block.

MEV stands for Miner-extracted Value. Ethereum mining pool gets extra profits by including some special arbitrage transactions in the blocks. You don’t need to add any additional settings to your mining software to get MEV rewards. Just keep mining and you get this extra ETH. Read more in our FAQ. We also recommend you to have a look at our post 2Miners MEV Strategy: More Profit for Miners with Help of Archer DAO.

Monero PPLNS System

We’ve increased the number of PPLNS shares from 20 000 to 100 000 for Monero (XMR) Pool. This will not change your average reward anyhow. This should just help the small miners with a low hashrate (for example a single CPU) to participate in a larger amount of blocks.

How does PPLNS pool reward system works?

ZEL Is Now FLUX

Flux Hardfork has happened at block 835554. Our miners didn’t need to change any settings. ZEL is now called FLUX. We’ve updated the ticker on 2Miners as well. The URL has been updated too. The old URL for ZEL is just redirecting you to the new one now.

Block reward was decreased from 56.25 FLUX to 37.5 FLUX!

Right after the fork, the payouts were stopped for about a day. We needed to be sure that the network was operating fine. Now everything works fine.

New Minining Software

This month our Quick Start Archive with mining software has been updated multiple times when the software developers were releasing the new versions. At the moment it contains such programs:

• gminer 2.53
• lolminer 1.26
• t-rex 0.20.1
• teamredminer 0.8.1.1

The archive password is 2miners
All you need to do to start mining is to download the archive and change the wallet address in the bat file.

Remember to join our Telegram chat and follow us on Twitter to get all the news as soon as possible.

Pool Website Translated to 20 Languages

This month we’ve added 2 new languages: Arabic and German.

We understand that it is not always very easy to make a translation. Some words like “share”, “pool”, “uncle block” etc. could be translated or could be kept in English. Every language is different. We kindly ask you for help. If you see any error please don’t hesitate to contact us. We will fix that.

50 000 Miners Online

We’ve reached another important milestone. More than 50 000 miners are currently mining in our pools. We are thrilled to have you here. We are doing our best to provide the highest level of services to our miners.

Ethereum MEV Extra Profit

2Miners has announced its Miner-extracted Value (MEV) profits strategy. Archer DAO has been chosen as a strategic partner for the MEV extraction. Let’s describe MEV in simple terms. The specialized software is watching the incoming transactions in the blocks to seek opportunities to step in the middle of a chain of token exchanges and profit from the exchange rate difference.

We are distributing MEV rewards among our Ethereum miners. In the nearest future, we add a monitoring system that allows everyone to track the additional MEV profit being earned. Read more on this post 2Miners MEV Strategy: More Profit for Miners with Help of Archer DAO.

Monero Minimum Payout

We have decreased the minimum payout on Monero (XMR) pool from 0.1 XMR to 0.01 XMR.

xmr.2miners.com

That means you could reach the minimum payout 10 times faster now.

GRIN and MWC Updates

GRIN developers found a problem in their code on March, 18. This was an official GRIN devs message: “We identified an invalid BP rangeproof on the main chain about 8 hours ago. We expect to release a fix that would invalidate those 8 hours. Please consider halting further mining until then.” Because of that some of the GRIN blocks were rejected and the miners lost their rewards. Our GRIN pool was completely stopped for 2 days. Now they are back online.

Just 2 weeks before that network issue (at the beginning of March) gate.io exchange upgraded its Grin wallet and started to support slatepack addresses for Grin. The address was absolutely the same for everybody. The exchange gave a special memo number for each of the users. You could not deposit any amount of Grin you want. You needed to deposit the amount ending with your memo number. The Grin address on gate.io was always grin1n26np6apy07576qx6yz4qayuwxcpjvl87a2mjv3jpk6mnyz8y4vq65ahjm. Let’s say your memo was 456789. That means you could only deposit 100.456789 Grin or 345.456789 Grin etc. Read more

Unfortunately, after the recent GRIN problems, the deposits on gate.io are closed again but we hope they would be re-enabled in the future. You still needed to mine to Grin++ wallet as it is the best solution for GRIN network.

MWC is a fork of GRIN so they had exactly the same problem. The only difference is that miners lost not hours of mining rewards but days! At the moment the MWC network is operating fine. The pools are working too and the hotbit exchange is receiving the deposits without any issues.

Cortex News

Great News for Cortex (CTXC) Miners!

1. We’ve reduced the reward confirmation time in the 2Miners pool from 10 000 to 500 blocks (from 2 days to 2 hours).
2. Binance Exchange has re-enabled CTXC deposits.

POOL: ctxc.2miners.com
SOLO: solo-ctxc.2miners.com

2Miners Overclocking Guides

Overclocking is a very important and popular topic in all our chats and media. Thanks to our miners we’ve prepared a couple of posts with overclocking basics.

1. How To Overclock Nvidia and AMD Graphics Cards on Different Algorithms. This post is more application-oriented. You could find the basic settings for both Nvidia and AMD GPUs and read the basic overclocking principles.
2. Beginning Miner’s Guide and GPU Overclocking on Different Algorithms. This post has a more theoretical nature and it is much longer. If you want to understand the overclocking process better we would highly recommend it as well.

New Blog Posts

We’ve prepared some interesting mining-related and crypto-related posts this month that we strongly recommend you to read.

• Ethereum Mining Profit Is Down. What Happened and What to Do? – provides you the answers to the most common mining rewards-related questions.
• Nvidia RTX 3060 Mines Ethereum without Restrictions. GPU Test Results – tells you the 3060 story. The first GPU with an intentional hashrate-drop on Ethereum mining has been cracked 🙂
• Definitive Guide: How to Create and Sell NFTs. 2Miners Crypto Art Collection – NFT is one of the most popular topics this year. We’ve created a guide on how to create and sell them.

Remember to join our Telegram chat and follow us on Twitter to get all the news as soon as possible.

Miner-extracted Value (MEV) has been a hot topic more and more lately, especially with the future adoption of EIP-1559 which would make the miners’ profits lower (as there will be no high-priced transactions in the blocks). Therefore, each and every mining pool is seeking opportunities to make up for the decreased revenue — and we are no exception.

How does MEV work? In essence, it is an automated process when some additional income may be made by arbitraging certain transactions — mostly for the p2p exchange platforms when the funds swap is done without a centralized exchange. Specialized software can watch the incoming transactions in the blocks to seek opportunities to step in the middle of a chain of token exchanges and profit from the exchange rate difference. For this to work, the intercepting transaction has to be executed early in the block so it takes over the exchange process and gains an advantage.

As you may guess, this requires two sides of the story — first, a miner (or a mining pool) with a high enough hash rate that could execute the insertion of the transaction, and second, a sophisticated algorithm that seeks for such exchange opportunities and prepares such transactions for the mining pool.

Of course, 2Miners has been closely following the topic for quite some time now, and now there are several different solutions available for the MEV integration for the miners — the most known, perhaps, is FlashBots. However, the most known does not necessarily mean the most profitable or smart. Therefore, we have been carefully surveying the scene to find the MEV partner for our pool to work with.

For several months already we have been closely working with Archer DAO, our chosen partner for the MEV extraction, and are deeply impressed by the algorithms they carry and the agility of the team behind it. As you’re reading this, we are already including some of the MEV transactions in our blocks, bringing the increased revenue for the miners. Of course, like any emerging technology, there are still questions to be solved to make MEV mining at 2Miners be up to par with everything else we make — transparent, useful, and totally open, but please be assured that by the time EIP-1559 lands, we will be making every effort in having our miners benefit from each and every MEV transaction executed through our pool — with no additional work required to be done by individual miners.

MEV rewards are already being distributed among our Ethereum miners. Ethereum Pool Blocks tab shows now MEV-rewards if they were included in the block. These extra rewards are distributed like the normal ETH rewards according to the PPLNS-scheme.

Please follow our blog in the coming months as we keep improving the reporting and unveil the way for our miners to see and track the additional MEV profit. With the help of Archer DAO we are also working on adding the new MEV-providers to our blocks right now.

If you have not yet tried our pools, today is a great opportunity to try and see why we are the platform of choice for thousands of loyal miners — from relatively big enterprise farms to hobbyists with just a couple of GPUs. They value us for great monitoring options, transparency, live support in Telegram, and more.

Learn how to make your mining more effective in our article “How To Overclock Nvidia and AMD Graphics Cards on Different Algorithms”.

Remember to join our Telegram chat and follow us on Twitter to get all the news as soon as possible.