When I started building GameGlass, the pitch was simple: CPU miners earn coins that have nowhere to spend. Games need payments that don't go through app stores. Connect the two.
Today I want to show you what that looks like in practice — because I just built it, end to end, in a single Sunday.
What is KOTO?
KOTO is a Japanese CPU privacy coin that launched in 2018. It's a Zcash fork — zero-knowledge proofs, shielded transactions, the real cryptographic privacy stack — but running on yescryptR8G, an algorithm specifically designed to resist ASICs and keep mining accessible to regular CPUs.
It's maintained by a single developer in Japan (wo01), has a community of a few thousand members, and until today had exactly two Western-facing mining pools. Neither had been updated in years.
KOTO is exactly the kind of coin GameGlass exists for: mined by individuals on hardware they already own, with almost nowhere to spend what they earn.
Day One: Building the Infrastructure
I run isekai-pool.com — a public RPC node hub for obscure CPU coins. The VPS already had KOTO, Yenten, and Tidecoin nodes running. What it didn't have was a proper mining pool.
This morning I installed zny-nomp (the pool software that powers mofumofu.me, the main Japanese KOTO pool), configured it for KOTO, set up nginx, got SSL, and launched koto.isekai-pool.com.
First miner connected: a Raspberry Pi 5 sitting on my desk. ~100 H/s. Nothing impressive.
Then I pointed my Alienware i9-14900F at it on Windows using the official KotoDevelopers minerd binary. 16 threads. ~12,000 H/s.
The KOTO network total hashrate is ~19,000 H/s.
Within an hour of launching, isekai-pool.com was finding 2 out of every 3 blocks on the entire KOTO network.
The Numbers
By end of day:
- 26 blocks found
- 111 KOTO earned and paid out
- 75% of KOTO network hashrate
- Listed on miningpoolstats.stream as #1 KOTO pool
This is what happens when you build for a small network. The barrier isn't technical difficulty — it's that nobody bothered to show up.
Why This Matters for GameGlass
Here's the loop I'm building:
Mine → Earn → Spend → Mine more
- Miners point hardware at koto.isekai-pool.com and earn KOTO
- A gamified faucet at koto.isekai-pool.com/earn lets anyone earn KOTO through daily shrine visits, kanji quizzes, and Japanese retro game trivia
- Isekai Adventure — a free top-down RPG being built in Godot 4 — rewards real miners with in-game items when they find blocks
- Players spend KOTO on cosmetics and extras via the GameGlass widget — direct coin to developer, no app store cut, no custody
The game is free. KOTO is optional. But if you mine KOTO and play the game, the two worlds connect in a way that feels genuinely novel.
That's the GameGlass thesis made concrete: CPU coins finally have somewhere to go.
The Technical Stack
For those who want to replicate this:
- Pool software: zny-nomp by ROZ (mofumofu.me) — Node.js, Redis, supports yescryptR8G natively
- Miner: cpuminer-yescrypt by KotoDevelopers — the only miner that works correctly for KOTO (cpuminer-opt has a difficulty bug on yescryptR8G)
- Infrastructure: Ubuntu VPS, nginx reverse proxy, Let's Encrypt SSL
- Pool: koto.isekai-pool.com — stratum ports 3301/3302/3303, 1% fee, no registration
The RPi5 compile flags that actually work:
git clone https://github.com/KotoDevelopers/cpuminer-yescrypt.git
cd cpuminer-yescrypt
./autogen.sh
./configure CFLAGS="-O3 -funroll-loops -fomit-frame-pointer"
make -j4No -a flag needed — the miner defaults to the correct algorithm automatically.
What's Next
The immediate roadmap:
- HP EliteDesk i5-8500T (~$88 used) as a permanent 24/7 dedicated KOTO rig
- koto.isekai-pool.com/earn — gamified faucet with daily activities earning KOTO
- Isekai Adventure — Godot 4 RPG where real mining triggers in-game rewards
- GameGlass integration — KOTO payments for cosmetics, direct to wallet
The faucet is funded by the pool itself. 111 KOTO on day one. At current rates the pool generates enough to run the faucet indefinitely while keeping a personal reserve.
An Invitation
If you mine KOTO, point your rig at koto.isekai-pool.com. 1% fee, no registration, English-language support.
If you're a game developer who wants to accept KOTO (or any other CPU-mined coin) — GameGlass is being built for exactly this. Join the waitlist and tell us your engine and your coin.
The CPU mining community earns coins with nowhere to spend them. The indie game dev community needs payments without app store cuts. These two problems solve each other.
That's what GameGlass is for.