This article was originally published on The Daily Chain, 20th March 2021.
“Our vision has always been to democratize cryptocurrency usage and to provide a simple and efficient option for all devices, anywhere in the world.”
The Scala team
Scala ($XLA) has long prided itself on being a lightweight and highly scalable cryptonote privacy coin.
Covered previously on The Daily Chain, Scala developed LdPoW, a light version of the Komodo delegated proof-of-work protocol (dPoW) which uses IPFS rather than the Bitcoin ledger to inexpensively store snapshots of the chain state.
The security provided by LdPoW in preventing 51% attacks, a common hazard for smaller PoW coins, helps pave the way for secure mobile mining.
As lead developer and founder Hayzam Sherif explained, “with things like LdPoW we’re trying to fix very real problems that we and countless other projects face because we’re small networks prone to being attacked.”
Having found vulnerabilities in Instagram at age 15, Sherif is well qualified to tackle such problems.
The first version of the Scala mobile miner was released in 2020 and received positive feedback from the community.
The miner came equipped with a two-layer temperature control system developed in-house by Scala to prevent overheating, and uses the Panthera mining algorithm optimized for mobile devices, also developed by Scala. The miner was praised for its ease of use, CPU core control and detailed mining logs.
However the miner did not have support for frequently requested older Android devices on armv7. Scala have now addressed this shortcoming and, together with a slew of other improvements, released a new miner featuring:
- Support for armv7 devices
- Support for older Android SDKs
- Revisited UI/UX
- Mining Dashboard
- Better stability
Misconceptions about mobile mining profitability are corrected “when we take the technological evolution and energy efficiency of the ARM CPU architecture into account the reality is quite different.”
The Panthera mining algorithm, named after a genus of cheetah, is a combination of three other algorithms combined with Blake2b. It combines RandomX with their own variant of yespower for ASIC, FPGA and GPU resistance, and adds KangarooTwelve for quantum resistance.
MasterMind is the lead application developer who programmed the mobile miner. He told The Daily Chain, “With our latest mobile miner, we are hoping to allow as many people as possible to take an active part in our ecosystem, as easily and quickly as possible, without worrying about the technical details of blockchain or crypto mining in general.”
