Monero introduces feature that incentivizes users for running nodes

The leading fungible cryptocurrency – Monero – witnessed a major network upgrade in November 2019, with the network seeing a shift from the CryptoNight R algorithm to RandomX. The upgrade was a part of its constant effort to ward off application-specific integrated circuit mining [ASIC mining], thereby ensuring mining decentralizing by empowering CPU miners. Interestingly, the latest network upgrade also saw the introduction of RPC-Pay, “an innovative way to incentivize server operators to earn Monero as an alternative to ad revenue.”

binaryFate, a CS Researcher said on Twitter,

“RPC-Pay introduced in latest #Monero version is really cool! Rough #Bitcoin equivalent: think of subsidizing Electrum server by mining few seconds and sending it your shares to use it. A form of anonymous & off-chain micro-payments to create market for running public RPC nodes.”

Monero Outreach, one of the main Monero workgroups, released a blog post titled ‘RPC-Pay Up Close’ detailing the new feature. The post stated that this new feature has brought onboard several advantages, adding that it contributes to Monero’s decentralization considering that people would want to “run a server that pays for itself.”

The blog post read,

“A recurring concern has been how to incentivize more of these nodes. RPC-Pay offers this incentivization, and much more. It gives a way to use Monero mining hashes – just the hashes – to pay for Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) from any RPC-Pay-enabled server, such as a Monero node.”

Further on the advantages of RPC-Pay, the blog stated that the feature was private, adding that large credit balances did not have to be maintained “that require sharing information for backup or security.”

“Hashes received as payment are used by the server to earn income, and because of Monero’s RandomX the mining hashes can be calculated efficiently using most popular CPUs […] With RPC-Pay, mining hashes become a new stealthy smallest unit of payment in the Monero universe.”

While the advantages presented by RPC-Pay are several, it is not, however, disadvantage-proof. Monero Outreach stated that the current monerod/wallet implementation of RPC-Pay could “burden low-power clients” like mobile devices, “which must rely on other helper computers for their hashes.”

“Also, the income to the server is random. It comes only when a client provides a hash that can mine a block, while the server’s output must be continuous, matching the regular provision of hashes. Finally, the amount of income a server can make is limited by the Monero mining schedule and will tend to be small.”