The Zano (ZANO) crypto project is relatively new, launched last year, as a hybrid PoW/PoS coin aimed at e-commerce related applications according to the developers with 1 ZANO block reward. The project executed a 1:1 Boolberry (BRR) coin swap, but what seems to be most interesting about it is the fact that it is the first coin to use a ProgPoWZ as a mining algorithm (based on ProgPoW) and as far as we know it is still the only one to use it. Even though it is one of the early ProgPoW-based projects out there it still does not seem to have attracted that much interest from users or have a very large user base. What attracted our attention is the fact that ZANO has just been added to Whattomine and you can track mining profitability easily there, though currently not in the first few in terms of profit.

ZANO can be CPU mined (pointless at the moment) or mined using AMD OpenCL or Nvidia CUDA GPUs and it is also available on MiningRigRentals where you can rent mining rigs offering ZANO hashrate or lease your own hashrate for others to mining ZANO. There is a Progminer fork (source) with support for ProgPowZ as well as official precompiled binaries for CPU, AMD GPUs and Nvidia GPUs and ProgPoWZ has also been supported for a while now by TT-Miner – a closed source miner for Nvidia GPUs with 1% developer fee. Performance wise TT-Miner does seem a bit faster compared to the Nvidia CUDA progminer, 23 MHS (TT-Miner) vs 21.5 MHS (progminer) on GTX 1080 Ti.

ZANO currently hovers a bit below the 500th place according to CoinMarketCap and is being traded on a few smaller exchanges with 4.4 Million USD market cap and almost 1% of that as daily volume at the moment. ZANO is available for mining on two mining pools with almost 95% of the hashrate focused on Lukypool and the remaining hashrate on Fairpool. If you are familiar with ProgPoW mining then mining ZANO should not be much different with its ProgPoWZ algorithm, and even though the two algorithms are not entirely the same you can expecte to get pretty much the same performance as hashrate on both algorithms with your mining GPUs. Just like with ProgPoW here there is also a fairer performance balance between AMD and Nvidia GPUs based on the level of the GPU you have available – lower-end video cards will be slower for both the red and the green camp, while higher-end will be faster – no unfair advantage due to different video memory specifics as the algorithm is actually more GPU intensive compared to Ethash for instance. The following to crypto exchanges offer support for ZANO trading at the moment: Stex, qTrade and Trade Ogre.

The Beam project has announced their plans for an upcoming hard fork that will occur at Block Height 777777, expected to be reached on June 28th this year. The most notable change in this hard fork is the switch from BeamHash II to the new BeamHash III algorithm for mining. Do note that since this is a hard fork after the Block Height 777777 is reached, wallets earlier than 5.0 will stop working, so the users will need to upgrade the wallets to version 5.0 or later to access their funds. The Node and the Desktop Wallet binaries should be released around the end of May, so about month before the hard fork.

The wider memory operations in the design of BeamHash III apparently allow better use of the fuller capabilities of a GPU card. Making it easier to saturate the given bandwidth of the GPU card, reducing the potential advantage of other devices, especially FPGAs. The stronger algorithm binding of the new scheme utilized in BeamHash III will make “unknown optimizations” potentially used for secret mining, more unlikely. The lesser compute dependency of BeamHash III reduces the potential advantage of multi-chip ASICs over GPUs whilst also allowing GPUs to run lesser clock rates, for more improved hashrate. And a single chip ASIC would likely not be economically feasible.

To read the full details of the official announcement of the next BEAM Hard Fork…

The latest TT-Miner 4.0.0 comes with added support for the new algorithm to be used by Ravencoin starting May 6th – KAWPOW, a variation of ProgPoW, as well as the ProgPoW to be used by used by the Veil project for GPU mining with both available for trying out on testnet. The latest TT-Miner also brings support for Tecra (MTP), EtherCore (ERE) and Hanacoin (HANA), so a more significant major release. In order to avoid possible problems with running the miner make sure that instead of overwriting existing older version you are extracting the latest miner to a new folder.

Do note that if you get a missing DLL error when trying to run the miner on Windows you may need to download the latest Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015, 2017 and 2019.

TT-Miner supports ProgPOW, Ethash, UBQhash, MTP, Lyra2REv3, Epic, EagleSong and Kadena (Blake2S) algorithms on Nvidia GPUs and is available for Windows and Linux as pre-compiled binaries, a closed source miner with 1% developer fee for all of the supported algorithms.

For more information and to download and try the latest TT-Miner 4.0.0 for Linux/Windows…

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