To combat the cloud miner abuse , botnets and also reduce the load on mining pools and nodes, we are implementing the Lyra2Z algorithm as a transition while waiting for MTP development to complete.

The new algorithm is a chained algorithm using Blake256 first round and Lyra2 (timecost = 8, r=c=8) for the final round.

Our initial tests show that GPUs will enjoy a slight advantage at slightly more than 3X efficiency compared to a CPU though we expect that with further optimisations, the multiple will be increased further.

We are confident that this transition pool will create a more healthy mining environment with more decentralised mining with GPUs now playing an important role in securing the network. We hope that with the GPU advantage, cloud mining and botnets will become less profitable. This also has a big benefit towards mining pool operators in reducing the load on their servers and our initial estimates show a 100X reduction in processing load making it much more profitable and easier to run a mining pool.

This change will take effect on block 20,500 or roughly 10 days from now and we would like to also extend a special thanks to djm34 for assistance with the GPU mining software.

We will announce more details soon along with updated wallet and miner binaries before the fork. We are expected to release the new wallet sometime this weekend which will also hopefully resolve those having issue with syncing.