How was the first-day profit of Fractal mining? Can renting computing power make money?

Author: Golem, Odaily Planet Daily

At 8 AM today, the highly anticipated Fractal mainnet has finally launched. Fractal employs a unique mining mechanism called "Cadence Mining," where for every 3 blocks mined, two blocks will be mined without permission, and one block will be merged mined. This mechanism has given rise to many Fractal ecological mining projects and has also sparked users' enthusiasm for renting computing power to participate in the initial mining.

As a result, due to vested interests, the mainnet mining output and FB price have become the focus of community attention. Although the off-market price of FB has risen to around 19 USDT, many community members still express concerns that renting computing power to participate in initial mining may lead to losses.

Is this really the case? Is participating in Fractal's initial mining for ordinary users a prelude to "eating meat" or "cutting meat"? Odaily Planet Daily will briefly analyze the mining output and returns of Fractal in this article, hoping to provide readers with some reference.

Estimation of Mining Costs and Returns

According to data from the Fractal block explorer, the current combined mining power of Fractal is approximately 90 EH/s, while the permissionless mining power is 10,000 PH/s (1 EH/s = 1000 PH/s).

It is known that the rental price for 1 PH/s of computing power on the market is between 3000-5000 USDT per month. Even at the lowest rental cost, with FB priced at 19 USDT, a daily output of 5.26 FB would achieve break-even.

A widely used method for calculating mining output in the community is as follows:

Based on an average block time of 30 seconds and two-thirds of the output being mined without permission, approximately 72,000 FB are produced daily, with about 48,000 FB obtained from permissionless mining. Therefore, 1 PH/s of computing power can earn about 4.8 FB per day, resulting in a daily income of approximately 91.2 USDT for miners at an off-market price of 19 USDT.

If estimated using this method, renting computing power to mine FB initially would not be profitable, and as the total permissionless mining power increases, the FB rewards allocated per 1 PH/s will continue to decrease, leading to greater losses.

A relatively dynamic calculation method:

The above calculation method is primarily based on the assumption of continuously increasing computing power and constant daily output. However, the reality is that although Fractal's official average block time is set at 30 seconds, the current average block speed on the network is significantly faster than expected.

As shown in the figure below, within 10 hours of the Fractal mainnet launch, 2,500 blocks were mined, producing over 62,500 FB. This means that as computing power increases, the speed of block mining is also accelerating. The actual daily output will exceed the previously estimated 72,000 FB.

Therefore, the actual average block time during the initial mining period of the Fractal mainnet is about 10 to 15 seconds, which means that today's FB output could be between 140,000 and 210,000 FB. Even with the most conservative estimate of 140,000 FB output, with two-thirds being mined without permission, that would be 93,000 FB, and 1 PH/s of computing power could earn about 10.3 FB today. At an off-market price of 19 USDT, miners' daily income would be approximately 195.7 USDT.

If estimated using this method, as long as the FB price remains above 10 USDT, players renting computing power to mine FB can still be profitable.

However, this calculation method is still relatively dynamic; changes in the overall network power, daily output, and FB price will all affect mining output and returns. Ultimately, whether participating in Fractal mining is worthwhile in the long term will need to be reassessed once the network operates stably.

Fractal Still Faces Challenges

Surrounding the launch of the Fractal mainnet today, in addition to widespread discussions on mining returns, there are still some doubts about its network.

The founder of mempool stated on the X platform that Fractal Bitcoin seems to be a "clone" of Bitcoin Core v2 4.0.1, with its pre-mined tokens accounting for 50% of the fully diluted supply of Fractal Bitcoin. Miners will need a full two years (one Fractal Bitcoin halving period) to earn half of the rewards obtained by the founders on the first day. Additionally, Fractal Bitcoin contains many meaningless technical terms that only exist in the white paper, leading him to view it as just another (Bitcoin) garbage fork (shitfork).

There have also been issues with nodes and long periods without block production on the network, but the team's response speed has been relatively quick, promptly fixing node behavior and quickly providing a new node version.

Meanwhile, based on the off-market price of 19 USDT, the current market capitalization of FB is approaching 4 billion US dollars. Although FB can now be transferred through the Fractal mainnet, there are currently no exchanges (DEC/CEX) listing the FB token, and users' trading activities still rely on off-market OTC, which results in low trading efficiency and opacity, adding a layer of uncertainty to the future price trend of FB.