Following the demo, we have put together most of the system. The largest part missing is the receiving code that the Raspberry Pi runs to accept nonces from the FPGA. Lulu is responsible for this, but we will try to assist her in finishing this part as much as we can while we work on our own parts. We now have access to information about the trading volume so we can make our decision on that as well.
While SHA-256 is a well known hashing algorithm with plenty of documentation online on how to implement it in SystemVerilog, our other cryptocurrency choice, Ethereum, uses Keccak-256 which is less well-documented. There is a risk that we will have to pivot to using another cryptocurrency or devote more time into implementing Keccak-256 which takes time away from other aspects of the project. The Bitcoin miner which uses SHA-256 is close to completion but the Ethereum one is still being tested and debugged. If we cannot get it to work, we will try to find existing publicly available hardware implementations of Keccak-256 or choose a different cryptocurrency with a different hash algorithm.