Kratum

Kratum is a Stratum pool server that supports the Kadena blockchain, based on the popular NOMP (Node Open Mining Portal).

Background

Kadena’s unique parallel-chain architecture makes massive throughput possible but requires extensions to the standard Stratum mining protocol. Massive has used NOMP, which uses Node Stratum Pool in turn, as the foundation to add these extensions to.

Design

The structure of the source NOMP and Node Stratum Pool projects has been mostly preserved (except for updates to their syntax and style) so bugfixes can be downstreamed from them, but this decision bears some maintenance cost too. In particular, the projects’ event-driven control flow can read like spaghetti code.

A notable structural departure is the migration of NOMP’s MySQL database to the Appwrite platform for compatibility with Massive’s interface. MPOS compatibility has been dropped in the process and Appwrite self-hosting opted against, so future contributors might consider implementing either feature or both.

Caveats

The Kratum server was effectively submitting Kadena blocks through April 2023. However, lack of access to competitive mining hardware (such as Bitmain’s Antminer KA3) has likely allowed breaking changes to be introduced since. Open-sourcing this software is intended to let developers with adequate hardware help reproduce and resolve any new issues.

Deployment and development

Kratum is developed using Node.js 12.x due to Ubuntu LTS availability. The server requires a hosted Appwrite project, which you can configure by referring to their documentation, and a working Kadena Chainweb node, the configuration of which is documented in that repository. To import the other dependencies and run the server on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, follow the steps below.

1. Import the system dependencies:

   $ sudo apt update
   $ sudo apt upgrade -y
   $ sudo apt install -y nodejs npm

2. Go to your working directory of choice.

3. Copy this repo to your directory:

   $ git clone https://github.com/nopool/kratum

4. Switch to the repo directory, import the package dependencies, then recompile those that were compiled against a newer Node.js version:

   $ cd  kratum
   $ npm i
   $ npm rb

5. Rename the server config template default.json then edit the file by replacing [Insert node identifier here] with a unique ID to log for your server instance (you can run multiple instances), [Insert project ID here] and [Insert API key here] with your Appwrite settings, and [Insert wallet address here] with the Kadena key that you want to assign block rewards to.

6. Anytime after your Chainweb node has synced with the rest of the network (which you can check by matching the block height of your node at https://[domain]:1789/chainweb/0.0/mainnet01/cut with that of the Kadena block explorer), run the server:

   $ npm start

Testing

NoncerPro seems to be the only non-ASIC Kadena mining software that’s publicly available and still functional. That miner can be used to test Kratum with the provided batch template.

License

Copyright 2022– Massive Computing, Inc.

This program is free software, excluding the brand features identified in the Exceptions below: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

Exceptions

The Kratum, NoPool, and Massive logos, trademarks, domain names, and other brand features used in this program cannot be reused without permission and no license is granted thereto.