Overview

A superblock is a special block that stores information about how much work everyone in the network has done in BOINC. When a superblock happens, magnitude gets updated. Superblocks happen almost exactly every 24 hours.

Anyone can stake a superblock (if they are staking). If you end up doing this by chance, you will see this icon superblock icon. Note that it doesn’t really change anything for you as a staker other than just seeing a different icon

How Superblocks Get Made

  1. A previous superblock is made and a 24 hour clock starts for the next superblock to be due1
  2. Stats are independently gathered by the scrapers from the BOINC projects
  3. Those stats are sent out to each wallet which compare them and check that they match. If at least 60% (rounded up) of the scrapers exactly match,2 a superblock can be made (when it’s due)
  4. Someone stakes and they include the new data from the scrapers

Note that this is just a brief overview and there are many security mechanisms and other parts left out in the description

What Exactly Is In a Superblock

More precisely, a superblock stores the magnitudes of every Gridcoin cruncher, and it also stores the total credit, average credit, and recent average credit from all Gridcoin crunchers in each project.

If you want to see what exactly was in a superblock, you can use the superblocks or currentcontractaverage RPC commands to help. Running currentcontractaverage will show you what was in the latest superblock, and superblocks [NUMBER] true will show you what was in the last [NUMBER] superblocks. Make sure to replace [NUMBER] with an actual number when you run the command

Footnotes

  1. It’s not going to exactly be 24 hours, but it will usually be very close. If convergence isn’t achieved for whatever reason (scrapers don’t match), it could take longer than 24 hours ↩

  2. Of the active scrapers, but it also cannot be lower than 2 scrapers regardless of how many are active ↩