Greetings and welcome! If you have found this page you may be interested in learning more about what Masari is, where to buy and sell, how to mine and hodl, and where it’s going. This article seeks to provide answers to all of those questions.
For a more in depth history and background on Masari, refer to the community made article by Penguin FA.
What is Masari?
Masari (MSR) is a peer-to-peer internet currency using the well researched and cryptographically sound RingCT and CryptoNote protocols. This means that every transaction origin, amount, and destination is obfuscated by default. Masari is an open source project with several CryptoNote first developments such as Uncle Mining (via the SECOR protocol) and a fully client side web wallet.
Masari operates in a decentralized proof of work (PoW) setting. The current algorithm used, CN-Fast, is egalitarian and ASIC resistant by design; encouraging both CPU and GPU miners. Block times are now 60 seconds thanks to the SECOR protocol, unlike the common 120 seconds present in most CryptoNote coins. The mining reward is variable and currently around 7MSR, with a max supply of 18.5 million with tail emissions.
Masari did not have an ICO.
Why not just use Monero? Why does Masari exist?
Currently, CryptoNote coins are unable to scale efficiently due to the inherent default privacy features taking up a big portion of every transaction’s size. While the recent bulletproof implementation has reduced the fees for Monero and other CryptoNote coins significantly, there is still a concern as cryptocurrencies continue to become more mainstream.
Masari aims to solve this problem with layer 1 scalability solutions, while keeping privacy guarantees at its core as a Monero fork. With the SECOR protocol, fully client side web wallet, and introduction of a synchronized PoW “sharding” Blocktree protocol, these items will advance the CryptoNote space by providing a low fee, secure, private, and fungible money. While the roadmap differs from Monero, any compatible developments in Masari will be shared upstream such as this pull request implementing one of the best difficulty algorithms in the space.
As an open source project, readers are encouraged to visit the public repo to view activity by the development team, as well as the home page for the public roadmap.
What is Uncle Mining and Blocktree?
Uncle mining rewards miners who produce stale or orphan blocks (typically because they do not belong to a large pool and then hear about blocking later due to network propagation delays), which promotes a more decentralized network while simultaneously increasing the safety of the chain by expanding the amount of work on the main chain from that done in the uncles.
Blocktree is a PoW “sharding” solution which increases transaction throughput by mining multiple blocks in parallel. The network will be split into multiple “branches” from the main chain, or “tree” automatically as required based on the current block size. Periodic checkpoints will be used during the first pass of our implementation in order to protect sub-chains from attacks due to variable hash rates as well as difficulty adjustments to ensure the security of each sub-chain. Advantages to Blocktree include easier to compute blocks and the ability to retain network efficiency under heavier loads.
More information can be found from the following white papers that Masari has released:
How do you fund development?
Masari is completely funded by community donations. You can donate to community funding proposals, or directly to development through the following addresses:
- Masari — 5nYWvcvNThsLaMmrsfpRLBRou1RuGtLabUwYH7v6b88bem2J4aUwsoF33FbJuqMDgQjpDRTSpLCZu3dXpqXicE2uSWS4LUP (viewkey: 99e21e00cce073c126e9aed800c9e2e82518534b3924b035a29436ff4f75bc0c)
- Monero — 4A57eA3so6bEE8FUcaN1KtMXD3sxjjbvcKD3MF1pUgRi5PNHTpB7sYN2DmJv3EXxtZCWeG88tsVLzdfZJcmUFm52SbrfJWr (viewkey: c7a7c141581ac4436ba8bfb81dd67234720c565c696ef154a25c7e7314ce4b08)
- Bitcoin — 1J1he4qtTuNpCxyEBozkeKfDpoeYxfE3rj
How do I volunteer?
The Masari Project is always looking for new volunteers. If you have a skill, let us know in the following ways:
- For marketing items, check out open tasks on Taiga and ping @BazookaJeff#9512 in discord to discuss getting added.
- Add your skills and availability in the #volunteer discord channel to be pinged about open tasks that you can help contribute your time and skill to complete.
- View and contribute to developer tasks that are currently tracked on trello. Ping @cryptochangements#5156 on discord to be added to the board.
- For official inquiries about podcasts, interviews, or other related matters, email [marketing@getmasari.org] or DM the official Twitter @MasariCurrency.
Community meetings are also held every other Saturday (on even numbered weeks) at 15:00 UTC in the #meeting-table discord channel. Come join us to talk future development, funding, marketing, how you can help, or anything else that tickles your fancy!
Where do you buy or sell Masari at?
There are five exchanges that currently trade MSR/BTC:
SouthXchange also offers MSR/DASH and MSR/USD pairings.
How do you mine and hold Masari?
Masari is easy to mine with a CPU or GPU. For seasoned miners, any CryptoNight program will work and there is a list of available pools. Make sure to record the mnemonic seed so you can import to an applicable wallet. For new miners, follow these steps:
- Generate a paper wallet, download a CLI or GUI wallet, or create a web wallet. It is very important you back up your private keys and/or mnemonic seed.
- Download an open source, vetted mining program such as xmr-stak, srbminer, teamredminer, or another program of your choice.
- Choose a pool to mine with. The goal is to be as decentralized as possible, so when making a choice please contribute to the network health by using a pool that isn’t a majority of the total network hash rate.
- Setup your miner. Most programs nowadays are very easy to setup, and usually include a readme. When starting the miner for the first time, it will walk you through the configurations such as algorithm, wallet address, pool, etc. The algorithm name varies, but popular naming conventions are “masari”, “cn-fast”, and “cn-half”.
- Make sure you are connected to the pool by going to the pool website, providing necessary information to log in, and look at the hashrate.
What’s next for Masari?
Masari’s community has played a huge role in its development. From a logo rebrand to a website rebrand and new server, the community is and always will be a significant factor of our story. Masarians will forge the path towards more exchanges, more listings, and more services, while the developers continue to work pull requests and commits. Stay tuned as we develop the Blocktree protocol, as well as a new GUI wallet on the horizon that will be ported from the client side web wallet. The road ahead is long, but we invite you to join the journey with us!
Thank you for reading, and we hope to see you around!
Resources
Website — tutorials | wallets | roadmap | funding system | mining pools