A deep dive into Kale, a proof-of-teamwork mining token on Stellar that uses hash mining, staking, and time gaps to distribute rewards. The speaker demonstrates how invocation counts have grown dramatically post-launch, discusses technical challenges like failed transactions and surge pricing, and shows how to set up a Kale farmer on a Raspberry Pi.
This presentation covers Kale, a novel mining token built on Stellar's Soroban smart contracts that implements proof-of-teamwork instead of winner-take-all mining. The speaker shares metrics showing explosive growth in network activity, with daily invocations reaching 100,000 after web mining was introduced. Key technical challenges are explored, including 12,000 daily failed transactions caused by state changes and surge pricing when multiple users compete for the same block. The speaker demonstrates setting up a Kale farmer on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2, walking through installation of Rust, Bun, and the mining software. Kale farming involves three variables: hash work (finding prefix zeros), stake (risking Kale for higher rewards), and gap (time between planting and work submission). The speaker emphasizes this is about driving network activity and learning smart contract development, not necessarily profit, and discusses future utility plans including an AI service that requires Kale to use.