Coin age

Introducing Coin-Age

Coin-age is a tried and tested algorithm used across many blockchain projects. The basic concept is that a staker's coins are subject to age. The further they hold coins without staking, the greater their staking multiplier becomes, allowing them to have a greater chance at staking the next block. Once they stake a block, their coin-age drops back to the minimum, resetting the multiplier and their chances to mint a block decrease in proportion to their peers. This essentially "spreads out" the minting a blocks, leading to a fairer distribution of mining rewards.

To generate a block, a masternode must generate hash that is below a certain target. This target is set by the consensus difficulty adjustment, which tries to keep block production at a certain time spacing. As a result, more blocks are assigned with increased difficulty to decrease block production, resulting in less blocks having a decreased difficulty to increase block production.

Coin-age is used to change the target, making it easier for a masternode to stake a block the longer it has not found a block. New masternodes also build coin-age from their creation transaction. The target multiplier starts at a value of one; every six hours from the last minted block or masternode creation transaction, the target multiplier is incrementally increased by one up to a maximum of 56 in two weeks. The target is multiplied by this value, the larger the multiplier the easier it becomes to mint a block.

With block generation becoming easier over time, more blocks are produced than before. To compensate for this, the difficulty rises to maintain block time spacing. This increase in difficulty will then make it much harder to stake a block with a base multiplier of one, significantly reducing the effectiveness of the “superminer” exploit.

Available with Dakota Crescent

Coin-age is available with Dakota Crescent upgrade – v1.6.0 of DeFiChain and takes effect on block 733,000 (ETA 25 March 2021).