Why Miners Need Farm Proxies

Every miner knows that plugging in their first machine is where the fun only begins. But as a mining farm grows, the value of maximum efficiency and optimal monitoring tools grows with it. With every additional machine placed on a rack comes an exponentially larger amount of operational monitoring, maintenance requirements, bandwidth considerations, and potential latency problems.

One essential tool for almost any miner operating more than one machine is a hashrate aggregation proxy that enables data load reduction, stable connections, easy primary and backup pool configurations, and more. Braiins is excited to launch this exact product, called the Braiins Farm Proxy.

What is Braiins Farm Proxy?

In short, the Braiins Farm Proxy is a single app that allows miners to configure parallel usage of multiple pools, reduce data loads, designate backup pools, control aggregated operational management dashboards, and more. For miners using the Braiins Pool, as their destination pool, the Farm Proxy also offers encrypted messaging that prevents hashrate hijacking and secures all data communication between the pool and miner.

Braiins is releasing a public beta version of Braiins Farm Proxy for miners to use and share feedback with the Braiins development team. The Farm Proxy beta is available as a free, standalone application that runs locally onsite. Miners can use the Farm Proxy together with other Braiins products (e.g., Braiins OS or Braiins Pool) or completely independent of them.

Why use a hashrate aggregation proxy?

Operational security and reduced data loads are just a few of the biggest advantages from using the Braiins Farm Proxy. Here’s a short list with brief explanations of these and other benefits.

• Reduced Data Consumption: Using Braiins Farm Proxy can save approximately 95% of data consumption by aggregating hashrate. The real data savings can vary between different mining farms based on their configurations and number of machines, which could put data load reduction above the estimated 95%. Even the Braiins OS dev fee hashrate is aggregated with the Farm Proxy.
• Easy Pool Configuration: Miners can use Braiins Farm Proxy to configure multiple pools. Using more than one pool diversifies income streams and can mitigate potential operational risks from point an entire farm’s hashrate at a single pool. For miners using multiple pools, the Farm Proxy automatically balances hashrate for each pool based on a miner’s pre-configured ratio.

• Low Latency Pool Connections: With Braiins Farm Proxy, miners can collect various useful metrics about a pool’s endpoints. Each pool address can have multiple physical endpoints in different geographic locations. Braiins Farm Proxy uses these metrics to decide which endpoint gives the best results for network quality. If the chosen endpoint becomes faulty or inaccessible at any time, hashrate is immediately sent to another endpoint for the same pool or directed to a backup pool if all endpoints for the primary are down.
• Hashrate Security: Miners who use Braiins Pool as their primary destination pool also benefit from encryption enabled by Braiins Farm Proxy that prevents hashrate hijacking and secures data communication between the pool and the miner.
• Advanced Monitoring: Braiins Farm Proxy offers miners the ability to monitor their entire operation with an aggregated Grafana dashboard built into the application. Miners can also use the advanced monitoring API with their own tooling.

Can small miners benefit using the proxy?

Even though Braiins Farm Proxy is ideal for hosting providers and large mining operators, a miner of any size can easily configure the Braiins Farm Proxy to separate hashrate according to their unique needs (e.g., hashrate per rack, per container, or per hosting client). Almost any miner with any size operation larger than one machine can benefit from the optimizations, management toolings, and security of the proxy. Even with only one machine, a miner can easily configure pool backups and reduce their data consumption.

Where to get the Farm Proxy?

To get started using Braiins Farm Proxy beta, miners can visit braiins.com/farm-proxy. Miners interested can review this documentation with information on how to install and configure the app. As always, feel free to reach out to our support team - submit a request via the Help Center.

Final Thought: the bigger a mining farm is, the more beneficial Braiins Farm Proxy will be for its operations. But the product is useful for every miner at any scale, even a home miner who runs a few Antminer S19s.