FPGA-based Mining of Lyra2REv2 Cryptocurrencies
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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. In this work, we present the first hardware implementation of the specific instance of Lyra2 that is used in Lyra2REv2 and we explain how several properties of this algorithm can be exploited in order to optimize the design. Moreover, we present an FPGA-based hardware implementation of a full miner chain for Lyra2REv2 on a Xilinx Multi-Processor System on Chip. Our proposed Lyra2REv2 miner chain is shown to be significantly more energy efficient than both a GPU and a commercially available FPGA-based miner. Finally, we also explain how our simplified Lyra2 and Lyra2REv2 architectures can be modified with minimal effort to also support the recent Lyra2REv3 chained hashing algorithm.
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