A Standalone FPGA-based Miner for Lyra2REv2 Cryptocurrencies
This work addresses energy efficiency for cryptocurrency miners using Lyra2REv2, though it is incremental as it builds on existing algorithms with hardware optimizations.
The authors tackled the problem of implementing a hardware miner for the Lyra2REv2 cryptocurrency hashing algorithm, presenting the first hardware implementation of its specific Lyra2 instance and achieving significantly higher energy efficiency compared to GPU and commercial FPGA miners.
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.