Lyra2RE
Lyra2RE is a hashing algorithm for mining cryptocurrency developed by the Vertcoin’s team to replace the Scrypt-N algo. The goal was to reduce consumption of electricity on mining VTC tokens and to keep the coin ahead of ASIC-mining. The change of algorithm was announced in July of 2014 and successfully carried out by developersю
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Lyra2RE Review
Lyra2RE is a NIST5 based chained algorithm with customizable parameters useful for thwarting future ASIC threats. Lyra2RE is a proof-of-work algorithm, where the letters RE in the name are an abbreviation of Reduced Efficiency. In fact, Lyra2RE consumes ~30% less power when compared Scrypt-n and ~17% less than X11 algorithm and offers lower GPU temperatures to boot. That is a huge incentive to mine Vertcoin and was a direct response to calls from community to make Vertcoin more power efficient. Lyra2RE allows the Vertcoin developers to change memory usage and time cost independently.
Lyra2RE is a chained algorithm consisting of five different hash functions: Keccak, Skein, Groestl, Blake and Lyra2. The big difference between Scrypt-N and Lyra2RE is that Lyra2RE will not be using an “N schedule” at this point in time, simply because there is no idea what the future will have in store for cryptocurrency enthusiasts. In the event that implementing an “N schedule” would become necessary, Lyra2 offers that flexibility.
Due to the chained nature of the algorithm, GPU miners will be inherently hard to optimize, meaning that power draw and heat can be reduced. This has been a desired feature for some time with Scrypt-N coins seeing dropping hashrates due to high energy consumption, despite Vertcoin having consistently the highest $/Day/Normalized MH/s than other coins.
Lyra2RE aims to be ASIC-resistant at heart, allowing for less disruption to miners in the future due to the ability to change algorithm parameters rather than change algorithm all together. It will also free up development time to focus on new features without having to worry about constantly implementing new algorithms every time there is an ASIC threat.
Lyra2RE Miners
The mining pools software which will help users to mine cryptocurrency based on Lyra2RE algorithm is described below:
- P2Pool: https://github.com/metalicjames/p2pool-Lyra2RE
- stratum-mining: https://github.com/metalicjames/stratum-mining-Lyra2RE
- node-stratum-pool: https://github.com/sammy007/node-stratum-pool/tree/lyra2re
- node-multi-hashing-pool: https://github.com/sammy007/node-multi-hashing/tree/lyra2re
- Python Module: https://github.com/metalicjames/lyra2re-hash-python
Lyra2RE Coins
There is a list of cryptocurrencies which work on the Lyra2RE algorithm:
| Cryptocurrency | Consensus |
|---|---|
| Vertcoin (VTC) | PoW |
| Crypto (CTO) | PoW |
| LyraBar (LYB) | PoW/PoS |
| ZoomCoin (ZOOM) | PoW |
| Tianhe (TIA) | N/A |
| ZCoin (XZC) | PoW |
| HexxCoin (HXX) | PoW |
| Zoin (ZOI) | PoW |
| Verge (XVG) | PoW |
| SHIELD-Lyra2RE (XSH) | PoW |
| Unitus-Lyra2RE (UIS) | PoW |