Mining ZANO Using the ProgPoWZ Proof of Work Algorithm

The Zano (ZANO) crypto project is relatively new, launched last year, as a hybrid PoW/PoS coin aimed at e-commerce related applications according to the developers with 1 ZANO block reward. The project executed a 1:1 Boolberry (BRR) coin swap, but what seems to be most interesting about it is the fact that it is the first coin to use a ProgPoWZ as a mining algorithm (based on ProgPoW) and as far as we know it is still the only one to use it. Even though it is one of the early ProgPoW-based projects out there it still does not seem to have attracted that much interest from users or have a very large user base. What attracted our attention is the fact that ZANO has just been added to Whattomine and you can track mining profitability easily there, though currently not in the first few in terms of profit.

ZANO can be CPU mined (pointless at the moment) or mined using AMD OpenCL or Nvidia CUDA GPUs and it is also available on MiningRigRentals where you can rent mining rigs offering ZANO hashrate or lease your own hashrate for others to mining ZANO. There is a Progminer fork (source) with support for ProgPowZ as well as official precompiled binaries for CPU, AMD GPUs and Nvidia GPUs and ProgPoWZ has also been supported for a while now by TT-Miner – a closed source miner for Nvidia GPUs with 1% developer fee. Performance wise TT-Miner does seem a bit faster compared to the Nvidia CUDA progminer, 23 MHS (TT-Miner) vs 21.5 MHS (progminer) on GTX 1080 Ti.

ZANO currently hovers a bit below the 500th place according to CoinMarketCap and is being traded on a few smaller exchanges with 4.4 Million USD market cap and almost 1% of that as daily volume at the moment. ZANO is available for mining on two mining pools with almost 95% of the hashrate focused on Lukypool and the remaining hashrate on Fairpool. If you are familiar with ProgPoW mining then mining ZANO should not be much different with its ProgPoWZ algorithm, and even though the two algorithms are not entirely the same you can expecte to get pretty much the same performance as hashrate on both algorithms with your mining GPUs. Just like with ProgPoW here there is also a fairer performance balance between AMD and Nvidia GPUs based on the level of the GPU you have available – lower-end video cards will be slower for both the red and the green camp, while higher-end will be faster – no unfair advantage due to different video memory specifics as the algorithm is actually more GPU intensive compared to Ethash for instance.