The long-awaited Ravencoin (RVN) hard fork, announced by the developer community last August, finally took place. Following the hard fork, aimed at eliminating ASICs and FPGAs from the mining of the currency (the latter only temporarily), the hashrate of the Ravencoin (RVN) network collapsed momentarily by 70%, returning to values typical of last July.
The battle against ASICs involved slightly changing the PoW of the currency, which has now become the X16Rv2 mining algorithm. RavenCoin (RVN) is a currency quite well known to cryptocurrency miners, as it was born in 2018 as a cryptocurrency suitable for GPU miners, without performing an ICO, IEO or other. That’s why it became so popular in early 2018, and in 2019 it was listed on the major exchanges, including Binance.
Binance in recent days has announced that it has decided to support the Ravencoin fork, updating the clients and nodes of its infrastructure to the latest releases available for the Ravencoin protocol (version 2.5.0).
PoW X16Rv2 takes down the hashrate of the Ravencoin (RVN) network
Thanks to the new revision of the Proof of Work adopted by Ravencoin (RVN), the original X16R mining algorithm now evolved to the X16Rv2 version, the ASICs and FPGAs were temporarily excluded from the mining of Ravencoin. The hashrate, therefore, has gone from the initial 27 TH/s before the fork to the current 8 TH/s, losing about 70%.
X16Rv2 introduces a new hashing function (Tiger) in three different parts of the current X16R algorithm. In the X16Rv2, it is executed before the Luffa512, Keccak512, and SHA512 algorithms, already present and used by the old PoW. In this way, any ASICs and FPGAs developed for Ravencoin will have to perform a function for which they have not been programmed, thus being excluded from the network, given the inability to perform this function.
However, FPGA programmers will probably need little to recreate a bitstream suitable for mining on the new PoW, so the hashrate may soon return to grow again, even if not to pre-fork levels. Recently, in fact, some Chinese companies announced specific ASICs for the mining of Ravencoin. It’s not clear if these ASICs will be able or not to run the new RVN PoW, but given the specifications and the possibility to mine different coins, it’s very likely that with future firmware these machines will be able to support RVN mining again, thus making the recent fork useless.
However, as reported by the community, efforts to develop a new PoW should be already underway, in order to remove future ASICs from the network.
