Cryptocurrency

Ergo

What Is Ergo (ERG)?

From the article The Best Graphics Cards for Mining ERGO (ERG) in 2022¹:

Ergo in particular seems to be one of the shining stars of a new generation of cryptocurrencies. There are several reasons for that. Ergo was founded by Alex Chepurnoy, the same man who contributed to the development of Cardano and who founded smartcontact.com (now known as Chainlink). The Ergo platform aims to build advanced cryptocurrency features and radically new DeFi functionality on the robust and stable foundations in order to provide financial contracts in an efficient and secure way.

In a way, Ergo is very much akin to the early Bitcoin, but in many ways it brings improvements to the areas in which Bitcoin lacked. First of all, Ergo is based on Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism, and is ASIC-resistant just like Ethereum due to memory requirements. This makes Ergo extremely suitable for mining with GPUs. Secondly, Ergo’s contracts are built on Sigma protocols which introduce privacy functionalities to the script at a much deeper level then Ethereum or Cardano. Thirdly, Ergo incorporates NIPoPoW (Non-Interactive Proofs of Proof of Work) mechanism which frees its clients from downloading the whole chain to interact with the network, thus bringing a huge step forward in terms of security and decentralization.

However, probably the most important feature of Ergo is that it’s fully compatible with Cardano’s ecosystem, and is bringing all the advantages of its Proof of Work system to users of Cardano network. Unlike Cardano, which can’t be mined (since it’s based on Proof of Stake mechanism), Ergo can be mined, and is fully interoperable with Cardano through its Extended UTXO (eUTxO) accounting model. This means that Ergo will provide oracle pools for Cardano, and will post information from its own pools onto the Cardano blockchain. Overall, Ergo aims to revolutionize and upgrade existing blockchain technologies, and as such has the potential to find real-world applications in finance, personal identity security, supply chain logistics monitoring, real-time IoT operating systems, etc.

Since its market cap is still quite low (compared to other major cryptocurrencies), mining Ergo is still quite easy, and minimum payouts can be reached fairly quickly, which is perfect if you are a casual miner with a single graphics card. The Autolykos algorithm for mining Ergo is also much more energy efficient than the Ethereum’s Daggerhashimoto algorithm, so you can expect much less wear and tear on your GPU if you plan to start mining Ergo. Lastly, Ergo is best mined with NVIDIA RTX 30 series graphics cards, since Autolykos V2 algorithm features certain optimizations for the latest generation of CUDA graphics processing cores.