Mining eCash (XEC) on the Zulu Mining Pool

What is the Zulu Mining Pool?

According to the Coin.Dance website most of the eCash (XEC) blocks found within the last several days were mined on the Zulu Pool.

As seen in the above screenshot the Zulu Pool is a "HathorMM" Pool. The "MM" after Hathor stands for merged mining (in other words, you can mine different coins at the same time without additional work or electricity).

The coins being merged mined need to use the same mining algorithm. Hathor (HTR) is a cryptocurrency / proof-of-work blockchain which uses the same mining algorithm as eCash (XEC).

I decided to try out the Zulu Pool with a s9i Antminer mining machine.

There are other mining pools which support merged mining but I found merged mining to be much more profitable on the Zulu Pool.

After about 24 hours of mining (note: accidentally disconnected, it was my own fault, from their pool a couple of times during this) the following amounts of eCash and Hathor were earned:

• eCash (XEC) = 247889.74 (or 0.24788974 BCHABC as the Zulu Pool has not yet updated their display)
• Hathor (HTR) = 4.14

At the time of this writing the USD market value of eCash (XEC) is $0.00002614. Earnings come out at about $6.47 USD.

At the time of this writing the USD market value of Hathor (HTR) is $0.3941. Earnings come out at about $1.63 USD.

Total earnings (eCash + Hathor): $8.10 USD.

Electricity rate or cost here was $0.0818 USD per kilowatt-hour (kWh).

The s9i Antminer mining machine (using Braiins OS (BOS) mining firmware) was, at most, using 1.42 kilowatts.

1.42 kilowatts costs (based on the above referenced $0.0818 per kWh) $0.116156 USD per hour and, for 24 hours, a total cost of $2.78 USD (or exactly $2.787744 USD).

Total earnings ($8.10) minus electricity costs ($2.78) = $5.32 USD.

As mentioned in the foregoing there are other mining pools which support merged mining (e.g., mining Bitcoin Cash and Namecoin). That being said, earnings for merged mining on some of those pools appears to be substantially less than what can be earned on the Zulu Pool.

For example, the same s9i Antminer would earn about 0.003 Namecoin (NMC) after merged mining on one of those pools for 24 hours. At the time of this writing the USD market value of Namecoin is $1.26 USD so the earnings (0.003 Namecoin) would amount to about $0.00378 USD (in other words, less than 1 cent/penny).

Some pools offer more than just two merged mine coins (for example, a miner could earn four different coins using no additional work or electricity). However, from what I’ve experienced the combined earnings are still relatively low (and less than that which was earned on the Zulu Pool).

This article is intended to be a straightforward and easy to understand review of mining eCash (XEC) on the Zulu Mining Pool. There are other factors which are not covered in this article including, though not limited to, the following:

• Available payout method (only one method at the moment) which the Zulu Pool calls PPDALN+ mode
• Zulu Pool’s total hashrate for eCash (XEC) (which can of course change at any moment and affect payouts as the payment method is dependent upon blocks being found. no blocks = no payouts until blocks are found by the pool)
• The fact that the pool is in beta

To register an account at the Zulu Pool you’ll need to contact them at their Discord server and request an account. Pool user account registration is done manually for the time being.

Update 1 (date of update: Jan. 25, 2022):

I wrote the above article for the eCashNews.today site where it was published on July 20, 2021 at ecashnews.today/blog/mining-ecash-xec-on-the-zulu-mining-pool

Until today (Jan. 25, 2022) the article was not published here at Nandibear.com but it has been stored in our database from outset.

Apparently the eCashNews.today website is closing down (this from their Telegram channel):

I'm not a big (or any particular size really) supporter of eCash (XEC) but I don't want the article to disappear. I think the article is helpful and others will find it useful.

Article word count: 588

Count including updates (if any): 689