Why it was retired
This is a consensus-level change, not an outage.
Irium selects who produces each block using verifiable random sortition (VRF)
over the set of registered, eligible proposer keys — not by who does the most work. The
selection threshold is computed purely from the number of eligible keys. Hashrate is not an
input to it in any form.
Pooling hashrate therefore cannot improve anyone's odds of being selected.
Combining ten machines gives exactly the same chance as one, because the draw is over keys,
not over work. There is nothing for a pool to aggregate.
Since block 66,400 the network also pays the full 50 IRM block
reward to the single VRF-selected proposer. There is no role split and no residual
share a pooled miner could receive.
The pool had accepted 0 shares and produced 0 blocks. It was
not able to build a valid block under the current rules, and no amount of connected hardware
would have changed that.
The statistics previously shown on this page have been removed
They did not mean what they appeared to mean.
This page used to show a “Miners Online” count, a pool hashrate, and an active-miner
leaderboard. Those figures were derived by scanning recent chain blocks and attributing them
to the pool. The addresses listed were the network's own block producers, not pool
miners, and the “estimated hashrate” was back-computed from blocks won by
random VRF selection at a fixed low difficulty — so it measured luck, not hashrate.
Presenting those numbers alongside connection instructions implied a working pool with active
miners. That was misleading, so the display has been removed rather than corrected. Real chain
data remains available in the block explorer.
What actually works today
Mining Irium is still open to anyone — it just doesn't go through a pool.
Block production is hardware-neutral. A selected proposer's block is checked
against a fixed low difficulty floor, so a commodity CPU produces blocks just as readily as a
GPU or an ASIC. Extra hardware buys no advantage, and none is needed.
Run your own node and miner:
cargo build --release --bin iriumd --bin irium-miner
./target/release/iriumd # run a full node, let it sync
openssl rand -hex 32 > ~/.irium/producer.secret
chmod 600 ~/.irium/producer.secret
IRIUM_POAWX_MINER_SECRET_HEX="$(cat ~/.irium/producer.secret)" \
IRIUM_NODE_RPC=http://127.0.0.1:38300 \
./target/release/irium-miner --poawx --threads 1
Registration is permissionless and automatic — no allowlist, no approval, no operator
involvement. After a short freeze your key becomes eligible and wins its fair share of blocks
by random selection.
Full walkthrough:
Run your own producer
·
PoAW-X consensus
·
Mining guide
Note: mining requires a full iriumd node. A Stratum connection
alone has not been sufficient to produce a valid block since block 50,000, because each block
must carry a verifiable proposer assignment that only a full node can build.
If you were mining here
Your hardware was not earning Irium, and no rewards were withheld — the pool never produced a
block for anyone. If you want to keep participating, use the full-node path above; it works on
ordinary hardware and does not require an ASIC.
A future collective-mining design may return (for example, variance smoothing across
participants), but it will not be hashrate pooling, because hashrate does not affect selection
under these rules.