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Ycash Mining Pool Implementation Details

Ycash is a chain fork of Zcash. To implement a mining pool for Ycash, the following Ycash-specific changes need to be implemented.

1. Equihash Parameters

Ycash uses Equihash <192, 7>. So the mining pool code needs to update the Equihash parameters to n=192, k=7. Note that this also includes changing the personalization string. While the first 8 bytes of the personalization string remains the same (“ZcashPoW”), bytes 8-12 should be updated to (little endian)192 and bytes 12-16 should be updated to (little endian)7.

See: https://github.com/ycashfoundation/ycash/blob/master/src/crypto/equihash.cpp#L36

2. Address formats

Ycash transparent addresses begin with “s” (instead of Zcash’s “t”). So the coinbase mining reward transaction should pay the mining reward to an “s” address.

3. Founders reward

There are 2 changes:

  1. At the time of the Ycash/Zcash fork in July 2019, the Zcash Founders Reward was 20% of blocks until the first block halving at block height 850,000. In contrast, the Ycash Development Fund donation rate is 5% perpetually and is paid out to a new set of addresses. So the coinbase "founders reward" should be updated to:

  2. Ycash Development Fund addresses are regular addresses (not multisig addresses like in Zcash). So, if you are building the coinbase Txn manually (and not using getblocktemplate), the coinbase output script should change from:

    Zcash: OP_HASH160 scriptID OP_EQUAL

    To Ycash: OP_DUP OP_HASH160 keyID OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG