A Standalone FPGA-based Miner for Lyra2REv2 Cryptocurrencies

TL;DR

This paper introduces the first FPGA-based hardware miner for Lyra2REv2, demonstrating significant energy efficiency improvements over GPUs and commercial FPGA miners, and discusses adaptability to newer algorithms.

Contribution

It presents a novel FPGA implementation of Lyra2REv2 mining hardware, optimizing for energy efficiency and outlining modifications for future algorithm support.

Findings

Significantly more energy efficient than GPU and commercial FPGA miners.

First hardware implementation of Lyra2 in Lyra2REv2.

Supports potential adaptation to Lyra2REv3.

Abstract

Lyra2REv2 is a hashing algorithm that consists of a chain of individual hashing algorithms, and it is used as a proof-of-work function in several cryptocurrencies. The most crucial and exotic hashing algorithm in the Lyra2REv2 chain is a specific instance of the general Lyra2 algorithm. This work presents the first hardware implementation of the specific instance of Lyra2 that is used in Lyra2REv2. Several properties of the aforementioned algorithm are exploited in order to optimize the design. In addition, an FPGA-based hardware implementation of a standalone miner for Lyra2REv2 on a Xilinx Multi-Processor System on Chip is presented. The proposed Lyra2REv2 miner is shown to be significantly more energy efficient than both a GPU and a commercially available FPGA-based miner. Finally, we also explain how the simplified Lyra2 and Lyra2REv2 architectures can be modified with minimal effort to also support the recent Lyra2REv3 chained hashing algorithm.