The Secret Weapon F2Pool Used to Tackle Its Uncle Rate
By Shen Chen, bloXroute Labs Business Development
F2Pool and bloXroute reduced the F2Pool mining pool uncle rate by over 50% through integration with bloXroute’s Blockchain Distribution Network (BDN). In this post, we explain “the secret” of how we accomplished this milestone to illustrate how other mining pools can do the same.
Why F2Pool Chose bloXroute
F2Pool is a leading global crypto mining service provider and a top 3 ETH mining pool. They have accomplished this through a continued dedication to R&D investment and by providing the best service and state-of-the-art technologies.
A top challenge for most ETH mining pools, including F2Pool, is networking infrastructure and each pool’s uncle rate. When presented with bloXroute’s BDN solution last April, F2Pool quickly decided to partner with bloXroute to tackle this long-term challenge faced by the ETH mining community. As such, F2Pool became one of the earliest BDN adopters.
Why The BDN Matters
The ETH uncle rate is universally seen as the key measurement to indicate an ETH mining pool’s infrastructural capability and operational scale. One potential reason for a high uncle rate could be a poor connection with peers. As such, an individual mining pool can’t fully address its own uncle rate problem without the collective effort of others.
This means a mining pool can improve its performance when others are able to communicate better with it via the networking layer — exactly what the BDN uniquely excels at. So far there are 14 ETH mining pools that are using the BDN for fast block and transaction propagation. Their adoption provides the groundwork for excellent network performance.
The Secret: How F2Pool Leverages the BDN to Reduce its Uncle Rate
Over the last few weeks, F2Pool managed to significantly cut its uncle rate by more than 50%. Such an improvement has made F2Pool a more attractive mining platform for miners, as miners earn more block rewards from a regular block than an uncle block. To achieve this result, F2Pool has done a number of things right, and one of them, as recognized by F2Pool, is their full integration with the BDN.
The BDN has been propagating data much faster than the P2P network for quite some time now, but at first, the ETH uncle rate wasn’t declining as much as expected. Therefore, the bloXroute team spent great efforts to figure out the root cause and iterate on the design. One key lesson we’ve learned from the past is that a successful deployment requires teamwork between the mining pool and bloXroute, especially when it comes to problem diagnosis and product improvement.
In a nutshell, here’s the secret of how F2Pool takes advantage of the BDN:
1. Better performance starts with better BDN integration. F2Pool is taking full advantage of bloXroute’s Hosted Gateways, which allows users to always connect to the latest version of the bloXroute BDN at almost no maintenance cost. F2Pool added bloXroute’s Hosted Gateways as trusted peers to all of its ETH mining nodes.
2. Next, F2Pool minimizes the latency of full blocks sent from mining nodes to bloXroute Gateways. To achieve this, F2Pool modified their Geth image so that they could send newly mined blocks as soon as possible to the bloXroute BDN. We discovered that sending delays (latency) may cancel or reduce the propagation speeds gained from the BDN, which foregoes the opportunity to reap its full benefits.
3. Finally, they optimized the geolocation of their ETH nodes according to BDN deployment. To further boost their performance, F2Pool invested and worked with bloXroute on infrastructure optimization. bloXroute placed their Hosted Gateways in locations with lower latency to F2Pool nodes, while F2Pool relocated their nodes according to the location of existing Hosted Gateways.
These combined efforts showed a significant reduction in their uncle rate by more than 50%. The data is further outlined below.
Conclusion
Uncle rate improvement will be a constant battle for mining pools and miners until ETH 1.0 is replaced by ETH 2.0. We hope our experience with F2Pool can provide a lesson to all other mining pools striving for optimal performance, too.
bloXroute will continue to deepen our expertise and work closely with F2Pool and others to achieve increasingly better results. We strongly believe ETH 1.0 can achieve more when its uncle rate is no longer a bottleneck for increasing the gas limit.
Miners interested in reducing their uncle rate and achieving better performance with the BDN can contact me at shen.chen@bloxroute.com to learn more.
