17th May 2022 Nebra Miner Update - 82,000 miners shipped!
Hey folks,
We're excited to announce that we have now shipped just over 82,000 Indoor and Outdoor Nebra hotspots with roughly 40,000 of them now on the blockchain. We're working to clear the batch 4 & 5 backlog as quickly as possible and we appreciate your patience
Light Hotspot activation
With the light hotspot activation on May 11 we have seen confusion around the update's impact.The network is currently still having issues with PoC, causing a significant percentage of hotspots not to earn any rewards at the current time.
You can follow the Helium status updates here: https://status.helium.com/
You can find more in-depth statistics about the status of the network by Heliumanalytics.
The challenges per block are currently reduced and will slowly ramp up to the old levels to ensure the validators can hold up.
Hotspots are currently still following the blockchain. Hotspots are still syncing but can participate in PoC without being fully synced. Hotspots will transition into light hotspots once they synced above block 1350664, which is the block when the chain var was issued. Hotspots are supposed to stop syncing with the chain in the following weeks. There currently is a slim chance that the light hotspot activation will be rolled back, but the Helium team is trying to prevent it.
Port forwarding is not required anymore, as Helium has switched to the gRPC protocol instead of a p2p network. This allows the network to scale much better. We would still recommend keeping the port forwarding rule activated for now due to the slight chance of a rollback.
Instead of the hotspots connecting via p2p they will now connect to a validator which issues the challenges. This shifts the rewards for challenges from hotspots to validators, 0.9% to 2.11% of the overall earnings.
The light hotspot update doesn’t correlate with the light hotspot hardware. With the current hardware requirements, at least 1GB of RAM is still required to run the miner software. It will take some time before light hotspot hardware will be viable. The miner software will slowly transition from the old erlang based code to the rust-based gateway-rs code.
Nebra Dashboard
As you may know, we've recently switched our dashboard into a paid product. This was our initial plan when we launched the miners, with a free period available to buyers who purchased in batches one through to five.
You can view the paid packages here. There will still be a free version that allows all customers to receive software updates and access to a local diagnostics page. The paid version will include features such as:
- Private API (planned)
- Remote restart
- Hardware diagnostics
- Premium firmware (live chat will be implemented)
- Prioritised support
- HNT reward splitting (coming soon)
- And more features coming soon
Distributors
The lovely folks Mapping Network are one of our newest distributors (Canada based) with units shipped to them from batch 5 and now available from stock.
To announce the launch, they are running a giveaway. Visit this link to enter: https://giv.gg/PEns0L
Click on the banners below to visit any one of our distributors who have stock of our miners.
