Latest news with #Slush
Business Wire
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Wire
Taste the Lore of the Unicorn! SONIC Unveils Whimsical New Unicorn Dreams Slush and Collectable Unicorn Horn Straws
ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- SONIC® Drive-In is ready to transport fans to a world of whimsical wonder with its newest, most wonderful creation yet – the Unicorn Dreams Slush. Prepare to be enchanted as the limited-time Slush arrives at SONIC locations nationwide on May 5, but those eager for a little extra sparkle can unlock early access through the SONIC App starting today, April 28. The vibrant pink cotton candy Slush is swirled with blue raspberry flavor bubbles, topped with a fluffy cloud of whipped topping and a sprinkle of shimmering pink cotton candy sugar crystals. With every sip, a little more enchantment fills the air. To celebrate this one-of-a-kind Slush, SONIC is introducing the Legendary Wish-Awakening Unicorn Horn Straws, free with every Unicorn Dreams Slush purchase starting May 5, while supplies last. Shaped just like a unicorn horn and designed to bring even more fun and fantasy to every sip, this must-have straw comes in four enchanting shades to collect: White-to-Pink Color-Changing Green-to-Blue Color-Changing Neon Green Glow-in-the-Dark Frost Blue Glitter Fans are invited to share their own wishes and whimsical moments inspired by the Legendary Wish-Awakening Unicorn Horn Straw by using #WishSipBelieve on social media. 'We developed the Unicorn Dreams Slush to be more than just a drink - it's an entire culinary experience that's bursting with fantastical fun and flavor in each sip,' said Mackenzie Gibson, Vice President of Culinary & Menu Innovation at SONIC. 'With its playful pink colors, blue raspberry flavor bubbles and the accompanying Unicorn Horn Straw, it is a treat for the senses and the imagination – and guaranteed to make every moment sparkle.' Available nationwide starting May 5, fans will receive one Legendary Wish-Awakening Unicorn Horn Straw FREE with the purchase of a Unicorn Dreams Slush at participating locations while supplies last. The Unicorn Dreams Slush starts at just $3.99 for a 20 oz. *Tax not included; the Unicorn Dreams Slush and Legendary Wish-Awakening Unicorn Horn Straw are not eligible for Happy Hour Anytime in the App, Happy Hour at drive-ins, Morning Drink Stop®, or other discounts.
Business Mayor
25-04-2025
- Business
- Business Mayor
SLICE: Making PPLNS Work for Demand Response
Bitcoin mining has come a long way since the days of GPUs and basement set ups. In that time, miners have advanced in countless ways. For example, ASICs are now the standard, not GPUs. Furthermore, enterprise grade players have entered the field, opening new frontiers and bringing with them the size and institutional recognition that opens the doors to otherwise unreachable places for smaller miners. Nowadays, the mining landscape is one where grid services, curtailment strategies, and energy market participation are no longer edge cases but core strategies. As the world around it has moved forward, there's one question we keep hearing from miners: can PPLNS adapt? Many miners, particularly those working closely with energy providers or integrating Demand Response mechanisms, have come to view PPLNS with suspicion. They worry that it penalizes downtime and rewards only uninterrupted hashrate—a bad deal for those who routinely curtail machines to support the grid or provide other services. This fear isn't baseless. It traces back to a pivotal moment in the mining industry's recent past, one that apparently sealed the deal for many on PPLNS style payouts: the fallout between RIOT and Braiins Pool. At the time, Braiins was using the Score payout system. Designed in 2011 by Slush himself, Score was engineered to solve the problem of pool hopping—when miners would jump between pools to exploit reward systems. There's also been a misconception that Score is a PPLNS style payment system, but as Rosenfeld's bible on pool payout systems describes, Score and PPLNS are distinctly different payout methods. The main difference is how they account for shares, specifically, Score implemented a rolling window with exponential decay function, this effectively made the lookback window very short. On the other hand, PPLNS is a family of payout systems with various types of fixed length lookback windows. As shown on this archived website of how Score worked, you can see that after 90 minutes your hashrate had no more presence on the pool. This means that the moment a miner starts mining, their share of rewards fairly quickly reaches the fair value of the hashrate. On the other hand, when a miner stops mining, it drops equally fast, as shown on the gif below. This might have worked well in the era of cowboys and hackers, but it was never designed with today's complex mining environments in mind. Certainly not with Demand Response, where miners intentionally and profitably take machines offline to stabilize energy grids or bid into ancillary markets. To Score, that kind of behavior looks no different than a pool hopper—someone attempting to cheat the system. So when RIOT left Braiins, citing concerns about payout mechanics, it sent a shockwave through the mining world. Due to the aforementioned misconception, Score system's flaws got unfairly projected onto a broader category of payouts, PPLNS got caught in the fray, catching a stray bullet in the process, and the industry collectively threw the baby out with the bathwater. But the mining world has changed, and it's time for the phoenix to rise from his ashes. Enter SLICE, a modern, open-source Stratum-V2-ready payout system created by the DMND team. It's an improvement and evolution of PPLNS, that rethinks how miners get paid, rewards are calculated, and —most importantly— how downtime is treated respect to Score. All while preserving miner's right to build their own block templates with SV2. At its core, SLICE is about fairness and transparency. It preserves the foundational idea of PPLNS—paying miners in proportion to their actual contribution to solving blocks—while modernizing it for today's decentralized mining landscape. The key innovation lies in how SLICE structures reward calculation, and on how the lookback window works. Rather than treating the entire pool as a monolith, SLICE breaks time into smaller, dynamic 'slices' of work to properly distribute the fee component. These slices represent batches of shares submitted over a specific period, where we control for the amount of fees in the mempool, and compare and score different job templates for the financial value they represent. When a block is found, SLICE distributes the block subsidy and transaction fees separately. The subsidy is allocated proportionally by hashrate, while the fees are distributed based on hashrate and financial value. This is particularly relevant in a world where miners can choose their own transaction sets. Some miners may prioritize high-fee MEV-style bundles; others may exclude certain types of transactions for ideological, political or technical reasons. SLICE ensures that, within each slice, miners are rewarded according to both the quantity and quality of their work—without punishing them for downtime or strategic energy decisions. For those curious to learn more, this article can prove helpful. What makes SLICE especially attractive for miners participating in Demand Response or curtailment programs is that it doesn't penalize you for being offline. That's because SLICE doesn't decay your payout just because you took a break. Your shares remain in the PPLNS window—the rolling window of recent work that is eligible for payouts—as long as they're recent enough. In this way, each share is treated independently, and is expected to get 8 payouts, since SLICE uses an 8-block rolling window, each valid share remains eligible for payout across the next 8 blocks on average. This means that regardless of how big or small the pool is, you will never have the abysmal luck of eating up bad luck days without a block, disconnecting, having the pool find a block, and not get paid. That means miners can power down during peak demand hours, support their regional grid, and still collect their fair cut from blocks found after they resume operations, most importantly, even while they're offline, if their shares are still in the window. In other words, if the pool has a streak of bad luck, and then the miner is called to perform demand response and shuts off, even if the pool finds a block during their down time, that miner will get paid their fair share for all the time they were online. That's because each share generated during that time will be active and getting paid for 8 blocks on average. This is not a workaround. This is the feature. It makes SLICE fully compatible with modern energy strategies that require flexibility, whether you're participating in frequency regulation markets, ramping down during grid emergencies, or simply optimizing for off-peak pricing. For example, let's say that a miner is mining at a pool, and the pool hasn't found that day's block yet. This means that the pool hasn't found the block yet, and thus the miners hasn't gotten paid for that day yet. Now, the miner shuts off to provide ancillary services during peak summer load for a few hours, during that time, the pool finds the block. In a Score based pool, the miner would not see a single Sat of that after 90 minutes, when the decay has had full effect. But even if the pool found a block 30 minutes later, due to the exponential decay, the miner would barely see anything. On the other hand, the miner would have all of the shares they mined over the day receive a payment, since each share receives on average 8 payments. Thus, the miner would benefit in the good times, and not be penalized in the bad times. Read More Stacks releases two whitepapers: STX price shoots up 31% Furthermore, SLICE doesn't just modernize payout fairness—it does so in a way that minimizes trust in the pool operator. Every slice is fully auditable. Each share is tracked, indexed, and publicly verifiable by any miner, so miners can independently verify their share of the block reward. There's no black box, no 'trust me bro.' And if the pool operator attempts to cheat—say, by injecting fake shares to dilute payouts—miners can challenge the integrity of the slice. The Job Declaration extension to Stratum V2, which SLICE relies on, includes mechanisms for publishing share data, verifying Merkle roots, and ensuring that each share corresponds to real computational work. For miners who care about decentralization, SLICE isn't just a payment scheme—it's an accountability tool. The shift from Score to SLICE represents more than a technical upgrade. It's a mental shift. Mining pools no longer need to defend against bad actors by penalizing everyone. Instead, they can structure payouts in a way that reflects reality: that miners are sophisticated participants working not only in the Bitcoin blockchain, but also the energy ecosystem. With SLICE, PPLNS stops being a liability and becomes a strategic advantage. It enables better revenue capture, more transparency and auditability, and smoother integration with grid services. And in a world where uptime is optional, but fairness is non-negotiable, that's exactly what enterprise-grade miners need, a strategic pool partner that pushes forward and innovates, bringing the future today and enabling miners to make more money with the same hardware.
Zawya
10-03-2025
- Business
- Zawya
NYU Abu Dhabi hosts MENA edition of the world's largest student-driven startup conference
Abu Dhabi, UAE: Violet Ventures, the UAE's largest student startup community based at NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), hosted the third edition of NYUAD Slush'D. The event serves as the MENA spin-off of Slush, the world's largest founder-focused gathering. Held in collaboration with Nokia, the NYUAD Career Development Center, Business Finland, the Jackie Jacob Award, and startAD – the startup accelerator powered by Tamkeen – the conference's theme focused on 'The Future of AI in MENA'. Distinguished guests included H.E. Alia Bint Abdulla Al Mazrouei, Minister of State for Entrepreneurship; H.E. Omar Saif Ghobash, Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation for Cultural Affairs; Tuula Yrjölä, Finnish Ambassador to the UAE; and Fabio Piano, Vice Chancellor of NYUAD, and more than 500 attendees, including startup founders, professors, and students from 20 universities across the UAE, Hungary, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Japan. In her speech during the event, H.E. Alia Bint Abdulla Al Mazrouei outlined the UAE's efforts to support SMEs and the UAE's plans for the next generation of startups. This commitment is reflected through the development of innovative policies and the launch of impactful initiatives that empower young entrepreneurs to achieve their ambitions and transform their ideas into successful projects with tangible economic impact. She highlighted the launch of the 'RIYADA' ecosystem, a collaborative initiative with 16 government entities aimed at supporting and advancing entrepreneurship in the UAE. The initiative seeks to increase the success rate of young entrepreneurs from 30% to 50% by 2031, reinforcing the UAE's position as a global hub for startups and entrepreneurs from around the world, in line with the nation's vision to build a competitive, sustainable, and innovation-driven economy. H.E. said: 'The NYUAD Slush'D event represents an exceptional model of effective partnerships between the academic and private sectors in supporting entrepreneurship, particularly in the field of artificial intelligence, which is one of the key drivers of future growth.' She further highlighted the diversity of participants—including entrepreneurs, researchers, and students—as a testament to the UAE's position as a global hub for talent and innovation in the startup and entrepreneurship ecosystem. The event featured 18 sessions with 33 speakers across two stages, covering AI's impact on healthcare, fintech, and aerospace. Experts from Amazon Web Services, Nokia, Careem, e& Capital, BECO Capital, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), and Technology Innovation Institute (TII) shared insights on AI startup funding and applications. A key highlight was the AI for Good Hackathon, powered by Nokia. From 344 initial participants, 12 finalist teams pitched live at the NYUAD Slush'D stage. The first prize went to ContosoAE (Khalifa University and UAE University) for 'Socia', an AI-powered social and professional training app. Team Unbreakable 3310 (NYUAD) placed second with 'How To', a digital assistant for seniors, while OptiMinds (NYUAD) secured third place with 'TrueSight', an AI tool combating deepfakes and misinformation. The Student Startup Exhibition showcased 10 promising student-led ventures, while the Career Expo, in partnership with NYUAD's Career Development Center, facilitated over 270 student interviews with 18 employers, including Careem, DarDoc, and Al Maryah Community Bank. Reflecting on the event, the Head of Government and Policy Affairs for Africa and the Middle East at Nokia, said: 'Slush'D, organized by NYUAD and Violet Ventures, brought together top talent to tackle real-world challenges, fostering collaboration between academia and industry. The creativity and problem-solving skills displayed in the AI for Good Hackathon were truly inspiring.' Ashwin Joshi, Director at startAD, added: 'With nearly 40% of global employment exposed to AI, the potential – and risks – are immense. Our goal at startAD is to nurture groundbreaking ideas and create lasting impact. NYUAD Slush'D empowers young entrepreneurs to harness AI for positive change.' Slush is the world's largest founder-focused startup conference, attracting over 13,000 attendees annually. As the sole Slush'D organizer in MENA, Violet Ventures continues to drive networking, knowledge-sharing, and impactful collaborations between students, startups, and investors, reinforcing the UAE's role in the global startup ecosystem. About startAD startAD is an Abu Dhabi-based accelerator, steering local and global startups to scale in the UAE and beyond. Powered by Tamkeen and anchored at NYU Abu Dhabi, startAD is a new model for innovation that creates customized and impact-driven programs in partnership with stakeholders including governments, corporations, investors, and innovation entities, furthering UAE's transition into a knowledge-based economy. startAD's unique sprint accelerator model enables corporations to further innovation by partnering with startups disrupting their core businesses, while equipping startups with the training and opportunity to pilot their solutions with industry leaders. startAD offers unparalleled business advancement opportunities to local and global tech startups, SMEs, researchers, investors, and youth through an extensive range of programs, state-of-the-art facilities, and a strong global network. Driving innovation in construction, retail, finance, and other priority industries in the UAE, startAD alumni startups have raised USD 270 million in investment, generated USD 220 million in revenue, secured over 80 global pilot projects with corporations, and created over 2500 jobs worldwide. About Tamkeen Tamkeen LLC is a company that partners with leading local and international institutions to deliver projects that enrich the social, cultural and educational landscape of the UAE. About NYU Abu Dhabi NYU Abu Dhabi is the first comprehensive liberal arts and research campus in the Middle East to be operated abroad by a major American research university. Times Higher Education ranks NYU among the top 30 universities in the world, making NYU Abu Dhabi the highest-ranked university in the UAE and MENA region. NYU Abu Dhabi has integrated a highly selective undergraduate curriculum across the disciplines with a world center for advanced research and scholarship. The university enables its students in the sciences, engineering, social sciences, humanities, and arts to succeed in an increasingly interdependent world and advance cooperation and progress on humanity's shared challenges. NYU Abu Dhabi's high-achieving students have come from over 120 countries and speak over 100 languages. Together, NYU's campuses in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai form the backbone of a unique global university, giving faculty and students opportunities to experience varied learning environments and immersion in other cultures at one or more of the numerous study-abroad sites NYU maintains on six continents.
