Zcoin Releases MTP, a Proof-of-Work Algorithm to Provide Faster, Lightweight Verification for a Fairer Mining Process, Including CPUs

JUNE 23, 2017 — Zcoin (zcoin.io), the first cryptocurrency to implement the Zerocoin Protocol and use Zero-Knowledge proofs for financial privacy and anonymity, today announced the public release of the first working implementation of MTP as a proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm, promoting high performance, high security and egalitarian computing.

MTP (Merkle Tree Proof) PoW was created by Alex Biryukov and Dmitry Khovratovich, the same scientists who created Equihash. MTP is a solution to the disparity between ordinary miners and power users that can use GPU, FPGA and ASICS to gain a significant advantage and mount a cheap attack. In an effort to promote egalitarian computing, MTP aims to establish the same price/cost for a single computation unit on all platforms, keeping a single device from gaining a significant advantage for the same price. Both users and attackers are equal in the price-performance ratio conditions, stopping automated large-scale attacks. Furthermore, hashing in MTP is highly memory intensive with Zcoin’s reference implementation using 2 GiB of RAM, and machines infected by trojans in botnets would experience noticeable performance degradation and alert the user of an attack.

“One of the main reasons the Equihash scientists sought to create MTP was to improve upon the drawbacks of a long initialization phase,” said Poramin Insom, founder and lead developer of Zcoin. “Ultimately, MTP shortens the phase and keeps the algorithm “progress free’ and independent of any previous events, leading to more decentralized mining.”