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Blake256 Potocol Labview Testbench

Blake256 algorithm was one of the SHA3 candidates but didn’t win the competition that while being more secure compared to SHA256. Blake256 is used in many Crypto coins these days and we will look into the one called Blakecoin, the coin that use Blake256 only as Proof Of Work (POW) for mining. You can read more about Blakecoin on their official website https://blakecoin.org

Blakecoin is not the only currency that is based on Blake256 algo, there’s more well-known coins out there like Photon, Lithium, Blakebitcoin, Electron and Universal Molecule (We’re not pretending to have full list of Blake256 coins here due to nature of the crypto currencies). The good thing about all these coins is that all of them are built on the same blockchain and can be merged mined together, which means you’ll receive payouts in all coins at the same time as a reward for your mining. You can find more info merged mining here: https://blakecoin.org/merged-mining/

At the time of writing this article, the value of the Blakecoin (or any other Blake256-based coins) staying pretty low compared to Bitcoin or any other popular coin or token. There’s simple explanation to that: all the Blake256 coins are relatively new and they have never been super popular in the crypto world which means they don’t have a lot of miners and commercial hardware that could bring them all the way up to stand with Bitcoin side by side. Let’s try to help them 🙂

Since we’re working on hardware and software for crypto mining, we’ve implemented simplified version of Blake256 algo via LabView that only operates 2 blocks of data at 512 bits each. That will be enough to implement Blakecoin’s Proof of Work approach and start mining in real world. Blake256 protocol model implements guidelines and requirements from SHA-3 proposal BLAKE.” Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Luca Henzen, Willi Meier, Raphael C.-W. Phan, version 1.3, December 16, 2010, https://decred.org/research/aumasson2010.pdf blake256 labview front panel

We’ve used test blocks from FPGA-Blakecoin-Miner project and Blake256 test vectors from the SHA3 proposal to verify our model and set sail to FPGA design and actual mining. 

You can find our Blake256 testbench project on GitHub.