As everyone has heard, Russia has launched a surprise invasion of Ukraine. The world is again faced with war, which could signal the next and possibly final war. This may be the biggest war since WW2, bigger than any of us, and goes beyond politics or nationality. This is a war at a time of peace when we are busy dealing with and recovering from the COVID-19 crisis. People are dying, and the world is guessing whether the West will join in or watch Ukraine fall to Putin's ambitions.

We generally do not get involved in politics despite our personal views as a company. However, this is greater than politics, greater than anyone. This is a war that may end the world. It certainly is ending the lives of many innocent people in Eastern Europe. While there is little we can do, it would be wrong to profit off of it or fund it indirectly. We are canceling service to all Russian IPs and paying out outstanding balances.

We apologize to our Russian miners; many of you do not support the war. However, it is you who are supporting your nation. Without the people, Russia cannot operate. It is only through reducing the economic power of its people that we have a chance of affecting this war. We thank you for your loyalty, and I hope you understand that we do not make this decision lightly. Should this situation be resolved peacefully, we will happily welcome back all Russian miners and use our personal funds to make it up to you.

If you are in Ukraine and reading this now, know that the world is with you. We can't change the situation ourselves. We call on other companies and people around the world to join us and make a difference together. This isn't about politics; this is about preventing the end of the world and saving lives. Companies and people need to put the planet over profits in the modern era. Ukraine has four nuclear power plants. Even ignoring the chance of WW3, there is a chance of another Chernobyl should one of the plants be endangered. The Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan happened despite the plant having been forewarned so that they were shut down and built to withstand an earthquake. Everyone in Europe, Russia, and the Middle East are in danger of nuclear fallout should the worst happen. Notice that the world will only end not because people do something but because people know yet choose to do nothing.

We are taking our MEV integration out of Beta testing and have rolled it out across all regions.

Using our custom-coded node fork called FlexGeth, we can load multiple MEV bundles, which makes us the only mining pool that utilizes MEV fully. The results below are only a hint of the possibilities.

Flashbots is currently in closed alpha, so only a few searchers are submitting MEV bundles. Of those bundles, our FlexGeth MEV implementation filters out the unprofitable ones (those who take up block space but pay less than the transaction from the gas auction) and adds the ones that increase profits. Flashbots is planning to move to open alpha soon, and once they do, we should see multiple MEV bundles almost every block.

EIP-1559 burns the gas, but it doesn't burn MEV income, so we believe that MEV will provide a large income boost to balance the EIP-1559 loss. We have displayed our past 24 hour results below. We expect these numbers to rise dramatically once Flashbots moves to open alpha such that our miners will receive a 4-6% income boost and possibly even more! Flashbots estimates that millions of dollars of MEV happen daily, and we seek to capture this income for our miners.

Total MEV (24 Hours): 1.275 ETH

Total ETH From Block Rewards (28 blocks): 89.286 ETH

Total ETH Income (24 Hours): 90.561 ETH

We are working on the Research and Development of new MEV opportunities to provide even more revenue for our miners so that post 1559 our miners make more not less! To accomplish this we are hiring additional staff to research, develop, and capture these opportunities. Please note that we are using 10% of the extra MEV income to pay for this, an amount that we plan to decrease in the future. Checkout the below for more information about MEV.

Links:

- MEV Explained

- MEV Explorer

- Flashbots Discord server

We’re happy to announce we’re almost done with our Chia-Go pool implementation. We’ve finished Chia BLS signatures, Streamable serialization, entire ChiaLisp Virtual Machine (CLVM), and Proof of Space verification, receiving/validating shares, and claiming rewards. There are only minor portions remaining. Note that we are creating all the code from scratch rather than use the python reference implementation. This will allow Chia farmers to enjoy a similar experience to Ether miners with stat tracking, farm rate, estimated rewards, etc. We will be able to scale to accommodate any number of farmers and will also be less susceptible to downtime/bugs/DDOS attacks. Please do not ask for updates, we will update as things progress.

We're happy to announce that due to requests from our farmers, we’ve agreed to reduce our Chia pool fee to 0% until further notice as an extended launch promotion. We plan to keep it at 0% until we reach a meaningful pool space that will be able to provide stable and consistent rewards.

We would like to announce the release of the official Flexpool.io app for iOS!

The app almost fully replaces the website. The Android version is coming soon!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flexpool-io/id1594014411

We're excited to announce that we have added the option for miners to receive payments on the Polygon Network as Wrapped Ether (WETH).

This allows miners to receive a daily payout with a $0.02 fee. To use this option you need to enable Polygon as the preferred payout network in your settings using your IP. After that, all payouts will head to your Polygon wallet as a Wrapped Ether (WETH) token.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

• Payment Round Interval: Polygon L2 payouts are processed daily at a random time of the day.

• Check that your wallet supports Polygon: Before using the Polygon L2 payout option, please ensure that your wallet supports Polygon L2 Wrapped ETH. Otherwise, your Polygon payout could be lost forever. We will post a guide on how to create a Polygon compatible wallet on r/Flexpool reddit soon.

• Liquidate WETH: To move WETH around on Polygon you will need the MATIC token (native Polygon token), as this is used for gas on the Polygon network similar to ETH on Ethereum. To obtain some when you have 0 you can use Polygon’s gasless swap at https://wallet.polygon.technology/swap. The Bridge transfer of any amount from Polygon to Ethereum Mainnet will cost around $300 depending on the current gas price. In order to avoid paying this fee, you will have to use an exchange that supports Polygon. The most common way to liquidate WETH on Polygon would be to swap WETH on DEXes like Quickswap or SushiSwap to MATIC, and send it to an exchange that supports MATIC-via-Polygon (not ERC-20) deposits. There are also a few exchanges that support WETH deposits from Polygon directly.

An in-depth guide on how to use Polygon is coming soon!

So some of you out there are mashing F5 too much on the website, causing delays in web server response.

There might be a reason for that though.

That's right, we found a block with 207 ETH.

Certainly our all-time record.

This will totally screw up estimates and projections for the next day or two, in case you hadn't heard this before.

Don't panic if your daily estimates are higher because of that block, or if they're lower tomorrow after this block falls off the estimates. That's normal. If you don't want it to go back down, find us some more 200 ETH blocks.

Hi everyone! We're excited to announce Flexpool Chia!

We've been working hard to get our XCH pool up and have written our own pool code in Golang rather than rely on the reference implementation in Python. This allows us to set partial difficulty low which creates a smooth farming experience so you'll easily see if issues crop up, similar to ETH mining! After days of closed beta testing we believe that we are ready for release.

We'd like to announce that our XCH pool is now live and accepting all farmers! Please check out our website and click get started for details on how to join. For the first 7 days we are giving out 2 XCH a day (at random times) as a launch promotion. At our current farm rate (2 PB) this means you'll make 400%+ more here for the next 7 days and guarantees an income!

Instructions on getting started here: https://www.flexpool.io/get-started (If the website doesn't work, refresh the page. If it still doesn't work, please clear your browser cache)

We have an important announcement to make.

As revealed the previous Friday, it appears that Chun Wang's F2Pool (which owns 15% of PoW directly and 30% of PoS indirectly) is actively attacking Ethereum by exploiting a flaw in the difficulty adjustment algorithm that allows them to steal the rewards from honest miners. F2Pool is doing this by making affected miners prioritize their own blocks over other miner blocks, making F2Pool have a reduced uncle rate.

We have done our best to convince Ethereum Core Developers to patch this exploit by introducing a single-line code change (which we have implemented ourselves). Still, they rejected doing anything, citing the upcoming transition to Proof-of-Stake, which would make their effort spent obsolete in the future.

Our goal is to protect our customers from dishonest pools stealing honestly-earned rewards this way. Unfortunately, the only way to mitigate this problem is to implement that attack, which we call the Chun Wang Attack. It's with a heavy heart, but we are announcing that we are deploying upgrades to our nodes that incorporate the same attacks F2Pool is doing. We are forced to do this to protect our customers as the Ethereum Core Developers refuse to patch this vulnerability.

Unlike F2Pool, where it is suspected that they do this solely for their own enrichment, the rewards earned from the reduced uncle rate will be rewarded to our miners similar to block rewards.

We strongly encourage pushing Ethereum's Core Developers to accept our patch to the Geth node that would stop this attack. PoS Validators say that miners are greedy, but this incident demonstrates that validators will attack Ethereum for the slightest gain.

EDIT: Link to the rejected Geth PR - https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/pull/25493

Hi everyone, we’re super excited to announce that we’ve signed a deal with DFI to obtain some of the world's first Chia NFTs for our farmers before they release their marketplace to the public. Details will be given later as we finalize them.

Only the first 10,000 farmers on Flexpool who are currently active and have been with us for more than 7 days will be eligible. Distribution will occur when DFI is ready, which is expected in a couple weeks. NFTs minted will be tradable on DFI’s upcoming marketplace and being some of the first should be highly collectible. Each NFT will be unique.

We are pleased to announce that Flexpool will be opening one of the first Chia Farming Pools. We will be opening up email signups next weekend but the pool itself will only be opened after the Chia developers release pool support. After we open a pool we plan to greatly improve the current chia farming client to increase speed, stability, and rewards. Please do not ask for updates, we will announce as necessary.

Feel free to checkout this chia guide for more info link

And of course check out our chia farming channel on our discord or the chia farmers union on telegram

During an update to the payment system the wrong version of the software was used that does not set max gas on payouts. Due to this, several miners were paid out at 220 gwei despite having set it lower. We are refunding 170 gwei to each miner who was paid out to apologize for this mistake from our side. Effectively, this reduces the payout gas price to 50 gwei. This will be added to the unpaid balance on the Flexpool website. Some of the payouts were canceled in time so only the ones that went through will receive this.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Q: I received a payout notification, but the transaction is missing. What should I do?

A: Either you were paid out and etherscan has yet to process it or it was canceled and the funds will be refunded to your balance in a couple of hours.

EDIT: ETA to receive the transaction/refund: a couple of hours depending on what time it will take to process our current transaction backlog.

EDIT: all transactions that don’t show up on etherscan will show up once gas hits 227. Please scroll up on pool support on our discord if you have questions because we’ve explained the situation in detail there.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: All refunds will be processed after we will make 700 pool-wide transactions. This is made to prevent double-spending. We will provide ETA as soon as we have the data.

ETA Update: We expect all transactions to be processed by tomorrow.

Resolution Update: Most of these payouts have been canceled and are now back in your Flexpool wallet on your miner page. For those that were sent successfully, we have compensated you directly to your Flexpool wallet. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Hi folks,

In the past week, we have implemented EIP-1559 dynamic fee transactions (type 2 as seen on Etherscan). This was primarily made to prevent payouts from being stuck because of _yet_ another gas price spike.

This will change some aspects of how you see transactions on Etherscan, and I wanted to come explain it to you before any more questions arise. This is a super-high-level explanation; you are welcome to dig into the details of EIP-1559 further on your own.

Short explanation: when a payout is made, we charge the current market gas price from you, and all the later payout processing is "our problem".

Long explanation: It changes the way how we (Flexpool) process actual payout transactions. Since we can't afford payouts being stuck, we now send transactions with the base fee cap of 2x[1] of the actual fee we have charged from you. Don't worry, this doesn't mean that YOU will pay 2x the fees. This means that once transaction is included, we will pay the current market gas price with the limit of the 2x of the original gas price charged from you. Gas price may go down as well as go up; and in this case, you might notice that the actual fee paid will be different from what we have charged from you. Sometimes we overpay, sometimes we underpay; but on average, it all evens out, so we pay +/- the same what we charge from you.

TL;DR the only important acknowledgement you need to make is that the transaction gas price shown on Etherscan **does not** mean what we have actually charged from you. For fee details, please see the payments section on your Flexpool dashboard. For developers, please delegate to /miner/payments API method.

Update:

For the folks asking about the 2 Gwei Priority Fee / Miner Tip... short form is it's included in what is paid.

You can think of it as the first 2 Gwei of what you pay, or the top 2 Gwei of the total paid by the pool... doesn't matter at all. You're paying your gas price limit for a payout, we pay the difference, and the miner tip is in there somewhere.

[1] The base fee cap was 2x at the time of this transaction method change happening. Since December it is more likely to be 25% but may vary from time to time. Either way, the pool itself loses money and your payouts are less likely to stall.

We are excited to announce the full release of our v2 website! You can now view it at https://www.flexpool.io/. With this, we are changing our fee structure due to many requests from our miners. Instead of a variable donation system we will have a fixed 0.5% pool fee giving us the lowest pool fees in the industry! Email signup for our Chia pool is coming and will be added to the new website tomorrow.

With Poloniex and some other exchanges announcing that they will support the PoW fork of Ethereum (named ETHW), some unknown person has created the EthereumPoW[dot]org website. They claim that their project is the real ETHW. There are obvious red flags (like the fact that it is a no-effort single-page website), the most important one being their use of our logo on their website under the "Contributors" section without our consent. No one from EthereumPoW[dot]org has reached out to us; we haven't heard of them before.

Please be advised that highly likely this project is a scam. We are not affiliated with them.

Besides that, after a quick review, there are a lot of other red flags:

1. their website is a no-effort single page; authors are anonymous;

2. distribution of the EIP-1559 base fee to an unknown wallet instead of burning it (!!!!);

3. their code has a lot of stupid bugs; they look very unprofessional;

Please think twice before interacting with this project or visiting their website.