Whalesburg Maintenance Release: 0.3.1 - 20x Hashrate Growth, Optimized Pool Performance and UI/UX Improvements

We’re pleased to announce our 0.3.1 maintenance release of the Whalesburg Smart Mining Platform. After our last major release (0.3.0) which included the addition of ETH mining we’ve upgraded several components of our pool. We’ve also seen over 20x growth of our pool in the past month! Originally starting with a hashrate of ±10GH, our overall pool hashrate was increased to ±200GH. This increase in hashrate was accomplished with zero degradation in service quality and was achieved while ensuring a stable environment for our users. The infrastructure we’ve built out has proven to be robust and scalable — a necessity for a successful project. We just wanted to say thank you to both the community and to our amazing devops team for accomplishing such unprecedented growth in such a short period of time!

At Whalesburg, our goal is to make cryptocurrency mining as user friendly as possible therefore we’ve added some adjustments to both the UI/UX as well as the backend to optimize performance and ensure a pleasant and effortless user experience. Although we have included a variety of upgrades in this release, we are continuously collaborating with stakeholders & partners on a daily basis in order to ensure that we document and roadmap all requested changes and platform improvements. Our future vision for Whalesburg includes major upgrades and pool components which will be incorporated through various major releases (as well as several minor releases) as indicated on our roadmap.

Front End

We’ve upgraded our Smart Mining Platform user interface with a variety of graphic alterations, interface optimizations, tooltips and visual data sets. The front-end improvements will allow the user to easily interpret displayed data (aggregated from real time mining statistics such as ROI, Time to Next Block, Difficulty, Profitability etc.) to allow the user to understand exactly how his miners’ effort is calculated. The user will also maintain a detailed breakdown of his assets and pending payouts in his user administration panel.

Front End Improvements Summary

• Added more details on workers statistics:

• Displaying orphan blocks in pool blocks statistics:

• Add tooltips:

• More detailed balances info:

• Add currency selector on profits chart:

• Internal changes (dependencies upgrade, refactoring, various internal bugfixes)
• Miscellaneous visual improvements

Payouts

We realize that all the improvements in the world will not compensate for a lack of steady payouts to our most important asset.. our customers! To allow for an optimal user experience, mining pool payouts have been improved upon, ensuring that payouts continue to be effortless and automated for both pool operators and pool clients. We’ve pre-emptively employed a fix which ensures pool payouts for mining participants as well as perfected the coin addition process allowing for quick and simple integration of new coins into our pool.

Payouts Improvements Summary

• Fix the issue when current day stats were not returned by daily stats API
• Update Ruby to the latest version
• Update Rails to 5.1.2
• Use serializable isolation level in updating transactions instead of pessimistic locking in order to improve fault tolerance of the service
• Add new coins support as easy as possible — move all the coins configurations to the separate file. Adding new coins is a matter of updating this file and adding new field to the database
• Decrease the API response time with new DB indexes
• Double application level constraints on the database level in order to improve fault tolerance
• Fix bug with minimal deposit amount
• Fix the critical bittrex api issue that might lead to wrong calculations
• Add more validations for each step of payout process in order to mitigate wrong calculation risks
• Make payouts process more automated

Security/Redundancy

Both user security and platform security is of the utmost importance with the Whalesburg pool. We place extra emphasis on ensuring that our users can confidently trust our pool to protect both their information as well as their funds (before payout). We have added increased internal monitoring, Sentry reporting, failover options as well as an updated proxy. Whalesburg will continue to strive to set the precedent with a new standard of Platform IT security.

Smart Stratum Proxy

We have added various reporting tools and data aggregating components to our platform to ensure that we capture real time data in order to properly mitigate any potential downtime. These reporting tools include sentry reporting & alerting as well as basic grafana metrics which are implemented in order to insure constant data aggregation (for improvement & analytical purposes).

Reporting & Data Analytics Improvement Summary

• Fix tcp buffer overflow. (Incorrect json)
• Added Sentry reporting
• Added Basic Grafana metric

Hash Power Distribution

Our fault tolerance has been updated in order to ensure guaranteed pool uptime. Fault tolerance improvements will also ensure more stable payouts for pool participants. Since our pool calculates mining profitability in real time and allocates hashing power to the most profitable coin, we have incorporated test distribution which continuously asks for this calculation and hash power allocation. Rest assured, we’ve programmed our mining pool to ensure that it does all the heavy lifting — so you don’t have to.

Smart Distribution & Fault Tolerance Improvements Summary

• Update dependencies
• Improve fault tolerance of the service
• Add a testing distribution

That’s all for now! Keep an eye on updates from us: we’re continually improving our product and to make your experience even better. Also we appreciate your feedback, so be sure to connect with us and share your thoughts and comments.

Thanks for your support!

Start mining with MVP 0.3.1 at https://pool.whalesburg.com

Stay tuned!

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