Xelis: Hard Fork Downtime Compensation – Miners Get +264%!

On December 30, 2024, the Xelis network underwent an emergency hard fork to patch a security vulnerability. Unfortunately, the hard fork encountered issues due to the large number of nodes that hadn’t updated, causing widespread downtime across all pools, including ours (even though all ours were up-to-date.

Our Commitment to Excellence

At Vipor, we prioritize providing the most optimal mining experience. This includes maintaining dedicated nodes on every stratum, supported by a load balancer. In total, we operate 38 Xelis nodes. Following the hard fork, all our nodes went out of sync. Resolving the issue required immediate attention, including updating every node to a new binary (multiple times) and waiting for them to resynchronize with the network. As a result, Vipor was unable to hit a block for approximately 2.5 hours.

Developer Compensation

The Xelis developer generously provided compensation to all affected pools based on:

• The pool’s hashrate during the downtime.
• The duration of downtime.
• The effort required to restore node functionality.

Vipor received 300 Xelis as compensation.

The Xelis developer left it up to each pool of how to distribute this, and what to keep for themselves for the extra work.

Unlike other pools that issued block bonuses for future mining, we chose a more transparent and equitable approach: distributing all received funds directly to miners that were mining during the downtime.

Despite the significant effort required (over 12+ hours of work), we retained none of the compensation for ourselves, even foregoing any pool fees as well.

Calculating Miner Compensation

To ensure fair distribution, we restored to a local instance, a database backup taken shortly after the downtime and ran queries to calculate each miner’s effort during the affected period. Here’s how we did it:

1. Understanding Shares: Mining shares have difficulty values. For example:
   • 10 shares with difficulty 1 = 1 share with difficulty 10.
2. Downtime Period: The downtime was defined as the period between the last block mined before the hard fork and the first block mined after:
   • Last block before hard fork: Block 1375998
     • UTC: 12/30/2024, 10:03:21 PM
     • Unix: 1735596201549
   • First block after hard fork: Block 1376156
     • UTC: 12/31/2024, 12:24:12 AM
     • Unix: 1735604652683
3. Effort Calculation:
   • Total pool difficulty during downtime: 4,050,531,568,974.68.
   • Each miner’s share of the total difficulty determined their percentage of the compensation.

Perspective: Compensation vs. Normal Mining Rewards

Under normal circumstances, based on our hashrate and a time to find (TTF) of 2 minutes, we would have mined approximately 70 blocks during the downtime (at assumed 100% effort). With a current block reward of 1.17762887 Xelis, this equates to:

• 82.433 Xelis expected earnings.

Instead, we’re distributing the full 300 Xelis, resulting in miners receiving +264% more Xelis than they would have earned under normal conditions.

Donating Compensation

Some of you have asked if there’s a way to donate the compensation amount you’re receiving. Unfortunately, due to the way we’re crediting accounts, there’s no easy method to handle this without delaying compensation further. While we deeply appreciate your generosity, the best way to donate is by setting a specific percentage of your future earnings as a donation through your miner dashboard.

Handling SOLO Miners

Compensating SOLO miners presented unique challenges due to the nature of SOLO mining and data limitations. After extensive analysis, we decided to compensate all miners as if they were pool mining. While some may disagree with this approach, we believe it’s the fairest compromise, given that pool miners are receiving significantly more than standard earnings.

Next Steps

All miners have been credited compensation amounts directly to miner accounts. To check your compensation:

• Navigate to the Balance Changes tab in your miner dashboard.

The timestamp in balance changes should be around January 11, 2025 at 1:43 PM EST

Thank you for your understanding and support during this unexpected downtime (that we had no control of). At Vipor, we’re committed to transparency and fairness, ensuring the best possible experience for all our miners.

Full Transparency

We’ve provided a CSV file listing all credited addresses and their respective amounts. For miners who have chosen to hide their address, we’ve obfuscated these entries to protect their privacy. This ensures transparency while respecting individual preferences.

To further demonstrate our commitment to transparency, this CSV file allows anyone to audit the payouts and verify that all miners were fairly compensated. By cross-referencing the credited amounts with the effort calculations outlined above, it’s possible to confirm that every address was paid accurately.

If your address is on this list and you would like to be removed, please get in touch with us on Discord and we will update the file accordingly.