Skip to content

Proxy


What is Proxy Mining?

In contrast to Ethereum or Bitcoin, Zilliqa doesn’t employ PoW for its consensus protocol (such as is done in Nakamoto consensus). Instead, it leverages a pBFT-like variant as its consensus protocol and PoW as the identity creation to prevent Sybil attacks.

As a consequence, Zilliqa requires GPUs for its PoW phase and CPUs for consensus and transaction verification. To participate in Zilliqa’s network, a node is required to submit a PoW submission that meets the difficulty level. After that, the node is assigned to a shard and contributes to transaction processing and consensus within the duration of its shard membership.

In the normal case, then, a Zilliqa node requires both CPU and GPU. However, to abstract the entire process, we can split the system into two major components: a CPU cluster for transaction verification and consensus, and a GPU cluster for PoW as shown in the figure below.

With the help from existing GPU miners, Zilliqa node operators can obtain thousands of powerful GPU cards to meet the hash rate required by the Zilliqa Mainnet for PoW. Similarly, we can also set up a dedicated GPU cluster together with a mining proxy. By decoupling the CPU and GPU components in this manner, we can easily manage thousands of nodes for the Mainnet.

As the bridge, the mining proxy relays JSON-RPC messages from both sides, i.e., CPU cluster requests for mining responses provided by the GPU cluster. This request-response process is defined by the Stratum mining protocol.

"Proxy Mining"

Proxy Mining Setup

The following components are available for node operators who are interested in managing their proxy mining setup:

  1. CPU cluster - Zilliqa Client
  2. GPU cluster - ZilMiner
  3. Mining proxy - Zilliqa Mining Proxy

In this mining setup:

  • A CPU node instance will run the Zilliqa Client and carry out the pBFT consensus process to receive rewards
  • The GPU rigs in the GPU cluster will run ZilMiner to do PoW mining and provide PoW solutions directly to the CPU node

The detailed instructions on how to set up these components can be found in the ZilMiner and Zilliqa Mining Proxy repositories.