Zcash Open Source Miner Challenge Winners have been announced!

On October 28, 2016, the launch of Zcash made ZEC coins available for mining. Since Zcash is an open source, decentralized cryptocurrency, we believe that mining for ZEC is an important way to help strengthen and decentralize the Zcash community, contribute to computer science, and win our gratitude and a prize. Mining should be available to everyone, regardless of their access to specialized hardware; anyone should be able to use a computer to “mine” by using open source software, and add more transactions to the Zcash ledger to possibly get Zcash coins in return for their effort. By distributing the ability to perform mining with open source software, the Zcash network can be a more accessible and a truly community-supported cryptocurrency.

To achieve this, we need open source miners for anyone to use. The Zcash Company sponsored the Zcash Open Source Miner Challenge operated by Least Authority. The Winners and Runners Up of this challenge are listed on the submissions page.

Incentivizing the creation of open source miners will enable a wider community to mine for Zcash coins and take ownership of the network as a public good. While we expect a full range in size of Zcash miners to exist, the more individuals who run a miner (whether GPU or CPU) the stronger the network.