September 18, 2019 — Kadena’s public blockchain testnet is now fully open to the public! The latest version of our testnet (v3) includes important updates for miners and interested participants, including the announcement of our mainnet hash function (Blake2s) and the release of our Mining Client. In this post, we’ll explain what these new testnet features mean for the community.

We considered many factors and listened to our community when making our choice of a mining algorithm. We wanted a hash function that was GPU mineable and not immediately ASIC mineable (but for which an ASIC can be made), to encourage the steady growth of the network over time.

Blake2s is also a well understood and tested hash function. We determined that Blake2s fit our goals for Kadena’s public blockchain and, from talking to miners, the needs of our mining community.

While we are in testnet v3, miners can use our new mining client and/or run nodes connected to our network to begin test-mining Kadena’s public blockchain. Note: this is not “pre-mining” the network. Any Kadena coins that miners receive will be reset upon launch. However, test-miners do gain a headstart in setting up their mining configurations ahead of our mainnet launch in Winter 2019.

Start with the main README file and follow the instructions for installing Chainweb-node based on your operating system. The simplest way to test-mine is to run the mining client, while more experienced miners can run a node and connect it to our public testnet. Detailed instructions can be found here.

*Questions? *Head over to our Discord and chat with the Kadena team.* *We’re here to answer questions, as well as give updates to any network resets that may occur with testing.

Try out our web wallet and smart contracts in the Pact browser. With Pact testnet in your browser, you can write your own smart contracts that deploy to the Kadena testnet.

What’s next? Stay tuned for a desktop wallet, token economics, gas pricing model, and the launch of mining our public blockchain!