ErgoStratumProxyStratum Proxy for Ergo Miners

What Is a Stratum Proxy in Ergo Mining?

Stratum is the protocol most mining pools use to hand out work to miners and receive results back. A miner connected through stratum keeps a long-lived connection to the pool instead of making separate requests for each job. The pool sends work, and the miner returns shares over that same channel.

A proxy is a program that stands in the middle. The miner talks to the proxy, and the proxy talks to the stratum server on the miner's behalf. In the Ergo ecosystem this role matters because not every open-source miner speaks stratum natively. ErgoStratumProxy takes traffic from a miner that works with HTTP request and response and passes it along to the stratum side.

Keeping that translation in a separate program has a practical benefit. You can adjust connection settings, such as the listening port or the reconnection timeout, without rebuilding your miner or changing its code.

Who Is ErgoStratumProxy For?

This tool suits a fairly narrow group: people who already mine Ergo with an open-source miner and need a stratum connection the miner cannot provide on its own. A typical case is a home rig with one or two GPUs. The owner points the miner at the proxy, lets the proxy handle the stratum connection, and keeps the whole setup in one PowerShell window.

Hobbyists who want to learn how stratum works can also benefit. Running a proxy and watching the connection in a terminal makes the flow of work and results easier to understand. The default port and timeout let a beginner start without tuning anything, and they can adjust the values once they know what they want.

People who want a graphical, point-and-click experience should look elsewhere. This program is built for the command line, and that is both its appeal and its limit.

How Traffic Moves Through the Proxy

The path has three links. First, your miner connects to the proxy on the port you chose with -l, or on port 3000 by default. Second, the proxy forwards the mining traffic to the stratum server. Third, results from the pool travel back the same way, through the proxy, to the miner.

Connections can drop for many ordinary reasons, including a brief network outage or a server restart. When the link to the stratum server is lost, the proxy waits for the interval set with -t before trying again. With the default of 300 seconds, a dropped connection stays down for up to five minutes before the reconnection attempt. Shortening the interval shortens that gap, but very frequent attempts can add noise to an already unstable connection.

Because the proxy sits in the middle, a problem can come from any of the three links. Check the miner's connection target, the proxy's listening port, and the pool address when you troubleshoot.

Mining Terms to Know Before You Start

Several terms come up again and again on mining pages, and they make the settings easier to understand. A stratum pool is a service that splits mining work among many participants and credits each one for valid shares. A share is a proof that a miner did a portion of the work. Hashrate measures how many calculations a device performs per second, and it is the usual yardstick for comparing rigs.

A listening port is a numbered entry point on your computer. Your miner connects to that number, so the port must match the one the proxy opens. A reconnection timeout is the pause a program observes before trying again after a lost connection.

When you read about mining, be careful with promises about earnings. Income depends on hardware, electricity, network difficulty and pool fees, and none of those are controlled by a proxy. Learning the terms helps you configure the software correctly, but it does not predict results.

Supported coins

The documentation names Ergo (ERG) as the supported network, so this proxy is built around Ergo mining rather than a broad range of coins. If you plan to mine another network, confirm that your miner and pool both use stratum before assuming this tool fits.