TL;DR: we release SmartPool on the revived Ropsten testnet, works for both Parity and Geth. Our pool pays 10x more for every share, please join before the subsidy is over.

One week after our alpha release on Kovan testnet and a few days after Ropsten was rescued, today we are happy to release SmartPool on the revived Ropsten testnet. Let us recall that in our last release on Kovan testnet, we have provided the main smart contract and the SmartPool client that interacts with parity and ethminer. In this release, there are several major changes as follows.

Our SmartPool client can support both Parity and Geth, i.e. it is client agnostic.

We also fixed several bugs that we found after the Kovan release. The workflow is also simplified to make it easier for miners to setup.

The pool payment scheme is pay per share for now. Future advanced schemes (e.g. full pay per share) can be implemented in the next release. To incentivize miners to join SmartPool, we are paying 10 times more for every share.

With the current difficulty in Ropsten, it is already hard to use CPU to mine and get more testnet Ethers. With no offence to the GPU donors, this is the downside of using GPUs to defend Ropsten against the spam attacker. Thus, SmartPool is a good solution for CPU miners to join, defend Ropsten together and get more testnet Ethers while doing so.

We have tested our system with real CPU and GPU, obsolete and slow one though. Our pool has mined several blocks with different types: empty blocks, blocks with real transactions, blocks with uncle(s), uncle blocks. However, we note that the implementation is still buggy (we can never test enough!). Thus, please report any bugs (via github, gitter) that you encounter during your time playing with SmartPool.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the SmartPool donors for their generous donations. Please consider donating to support further SmartPool development.