It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
Verus Coin (VRSC) is an interesting crypto project available for a while already that offers a hybrid PoW/PoS mode of operation, so you can mine and stake VRSC coins. The idea of the project and its custom VerusHash algorithm is to be mined with CPU and even though GPU miners do exist for the algo, they do not offer a performance advantage over a powerful processor. Near the end of last year Hashaltcoin FPGA mining support was made available publicly for the VerusHash algorithm with much better efficiency compared to existing CPU/GPU miners and that quickly drove away regular miners. This required a revision of the mining algorithm and the latest VerusHash 2.1 made FPGA miners unable to be used and brought back CPUs as the main choice for mining.
The preferred choice for mining Verus Coin (VRSC) is with CPU and the miner you need is called hellminer, or alternatively you can try with nheqminer. Hellminer is the faster, but closed source even though there is no developer fee it is limited to a single pool only – LuckPool, available for Linux and Windows, so you might want to go for it first. The Nheqminer miner fork (about 10-20% slower compared to hellminer) for VRSC is a bit slower in terms of performance, but is open source and available for Linux, Windows and MacOS and can work with all of the available mining pools.
As already mentioned there are miners for GPUs as well, but they do not offer performance advantage over CPU mining, in fact a multi-GPU mining rig might offer similar or slower performance to a higher-end processor, but with a much higher power usage. So while it is not very reasonable to mine VRSC with GPUs, you can at least try to see what your hardware is capable of and how it relates to CPU performance. There is a ccminer Verushash fork available for Nvidia GPUs as well as AMD Verushash miner available for AMD GPUs.
As far as performance is concerned, AMD’s latest generation Ryzen CPUs do seem to have some advantage over Intel processors, but in general the more cores you have, the better hashrate you can expect to get. Ryzen 3900X (12C-24T) does about 30 MH/s, while an Intel 6850K (6C-12T) does manage to get you just about 11 MH/s hashrate. As a comparison a GPU mining a GTX 1080 Ti does manage to get you just about 6 MH/s per GPU, so as we’ve explained it might not be very wise to mine VRSC with anything other than a higher-end processor, although it is possible to also use GPUs from AMD and Nvidia.
If you need a mining pool where you can try mining Verus Coin (VRSC), then you probably want to head on to Luckpool where most of the hashrate is currently located, alternatively you can try Lepool or Zergpool. The largest pool LuckPool has some nice features to miners such as awarding the block finder with a fixed reward as well as a hybrid solo mining mode where you still get rewarded even when not finding a block yourself. VRSC is currently traded on multiple smaller crypto exchanges such as SafeTrade, STEX, Graviex, AAcoin, Kuang Exchange.
Last month we have tested the freshly released Scala (XLA) mobile phone miner for Android smartphones and were pretty impressed by what we saw. Probably the best, though definetly not the only smartphone-based crypto mining software out there, although the DefyX algorithm used by the project can also be mined with computer CPUs at a much higher hashrate. A Smartphone crypto miner such as the one being developed by XLA is giving much better power efficiency for the hashrate it produces, even if the hashrate itself is not that high. This is definitely nice, but would’ve been even nicer if the project was only from smartphones with mining done only on them similar to what MIB Coin (MIB) does, because now most miners will just go for CPU mining Scala anyway.
Back to the XLA Mobile Miner, there has been some improvement to the software in terms of features since the initial release with the latest version 1.3 focusing on significant performance improvement apparently. With the first version (on the left) using Huawei Mate 30 Pro smartphone to test we got around 50 H/s as hashrate utilizing 4 out of the 8 available cores. Repeating the test on the same device with the latest version 1.3 (on the right) has shown significant boost in hashrate up to about 170-180 H/s again with 8 out of 8 cores used. As with the first release going for all 8 cores to be used for mining very quickly rises the temperate of the mobile processor above 65 degrees Celsius which is not considered very safe for a smartphone. This is specifically for the high-end Huawei Mate 30 Pro, performance can vary and the usability of the number of available CPU cores can vary from device to device. If you decide to give the miner a go feel free to post your performance result and the model of the device in the comments below.
– To download and try the latest Scala Mobile Miner v1.3 for Android-based smartphones…
Coinevo (EVO) is another crypto project forked from Monero that is based on the RandomX algorithm, though using its own variation called RandomEVO that you might be interested in checking out if you have some spare CPU power to throw at mining something relatively new. Do note that although EVO is a PoW coin it apparently also supports Masternodes and about 2/3 of the block reward goes to the nodes and 1/3 to the miner. You need to use a dedicated fork of XMRig (XMRig-EVO) in order to mine Coinevo as the specific algorithm is not widely supported as some of the other variants of RandomX.
There is an official EVO mining pool as well as another alternative EVO mining pool with more hashrate available, though the majority of the hashrate seems to be from solo mining apparently (in general not a lot of hashrate). There is an exchange called EREX, a very low volume crypto exchange not much EVO trading going on. Performance wise the RandomEVO algorithm is doing better on AMD Ryzen than on Intel CPUs, here is a comparison of what hashrate you can expect to see: about 2850 H/s on Intel Core i7 6850K (6C-12T) and about 9800 H/s on AMD Ryzen 3900X (12C-24T).
– For more information about the Coinevo (EVO) crypto project using the RandomEVO algo…