After more than a year of development and testing, Lithos Protocol is preparing to open its public testnet. The team confirmed that the goal for the rollout is for the week of November 2, 2025, following the recent Ergo 6.0 upgrade.
Lithos first appeared during _ErgoHack VI _and was introduced in the blog series Mining Pool Innovation Part I and Part II. Those posts described the vision of running mining pools entirely on-chain through smart contracts. The upcoming testnet moves that work from theory into practice.
At the Ergo Live Meetup 2025, project lead Kirat (@Cheese Enthusiast) explained the motivation behind:
“Mining pools today act as black boxes. They can censor transactions or adjust payments without anyone seeing it. Lithos makes every part of mining transparent and verifiable so power stays with miners.”
The testnet will let miners try the new client, check payouts, and help locate any remaining issues before the mainnet release.
Lithos introduces an open pool structure where each miner sets their own share difficulty and receives rewards directly from on-chain contracts. Payments and block construction no longer depend on a central operator. The approach removes the control that conventional pools hold over miner data and block selection.
For the Ergo ecosystem, the release continues the path laid out in the earlier Lithos posts on transparent governance, fair distribution, and accessible GPU mining. Community participation in the testnet will help strengthen this model before it expands to other PoW chains.
Testnet launch window: Week of November 2, 2025
Client: Lithos Client (CLI and HTML interface)
Follow @LithosProtocol and @ergoplatformorg on X for instructions and live updates once the testnet launches.
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