Today, the highly anticipated Fractal mainnet officially launched. Fractal introduces a unique mining mechanism called “Cadence Mining,” where two out of every three blocks are mined through permissionless mining, while the remaining one is merged mined. This approach has sparked numerous mining projects within the Fractal ecosystem and fueled enthusiasm among users to rent hash power to participate in early mining.
Given this excitement, the mining output and the price of FB tokens have become the focal point for the community. While the over-the-counter (OTC) price of FB has risen to around 19 USDT, many community members still worry that renting hash power for early mining might lead to significant losses.
Is this true? Can regular users profit from early mining on Fractal, or is it just a prelude to losses? This article by Coindarwin will provide a brief analysis of Fractal’s mining output and profitability to offer readers some insight.
Estimating Mining Costs and Profitability
According to Fractal’s block explorer, the current merged mining hash rate is approximately 90 EH/s, while the permissionless mining hash rate is around 10,000 PH/s (1 EH/s = 1,000 PH/s).
It is known that the monthly rental price for 1 PH/s of hash power ranges from 3,000 to 5,000 USDT. Even at the lowest rental cost, with FB priced at 19 USDT, a daily production of 5.26 FB tokens is required to break even.
The widely accepted formula for calculating mining output in the community is as follows:
With an average block time of 30 seconds and two-thirds of the total supply mined through permissionless mining, approximately 72,000 FB tokens are produced daily. Of these, permissionless miners receive about 48,000 FB tokens. Therefore, 1 PH/s of hash power would yield around 4.8 FB tokens per day, equating to approximately 91.2 USDT in daily income at the current OTC price of 19 USDT per token.
Based on this calculation, renting hash power to mine FB tokens early would not be profitable. As the total hash rate increases, the FB rewards allocated to each PH/s will continue to decrease, exacerbating losses.
A More Dynamic Calculation
The above calculation assumes a constant increase in hash power and stable daily output. However, in reality, while Fractal’s official average block time is set at 30 seconds, current block times are significantly faster than expected.
In the first 10 hours of Fractal’s mainnet launch, over 2,500 blocks were mined, producing more than 62,500 FB tokens. This indicates that as the hash rate increases, the block production speed accelerates. The actual daily output may exceed the estimated 72,000 FB tokens.
Therefore, during the early mining phase, Fractal’s true average block time is around 10 to 15 seconds, meaning that the daily FB output could range between 140,000 and 210,000 tokens. Even with the most conservative estimate of 140,000 FB tokens, permissionless miners would receive around 93,000 tokens. In this case, 1 PH/s of hash power would yield approximately 10.3 FB tokens daily. At 19 USDT per FB, miners would earn around 195.7 USDT per day.
According to this more dynamic calculation, as long as FB remains above 10 USDT, renting hash power to mine FB tokens can still be profitable.
However, this method is only relatively dynamic. Changes in the total network hash rate, daily output, and FB price will all affect mining profitability. Whether Fractal mining is a worthwhile long-term endeavor will require further evaluation once the network stabilizes.
Challenges Ahead for Fractal
Despite the excitement around Fractal’s mainnet launch, the project still faces some challenges and skepticism.
Mempool’s founder posted on X (formerly Twitter), suggesting that Fractal Bitcoin is essentially a clone of Bitcoin Core v2 4.0.1, with a pre-mined allocation of 50% of Fractal Bitcoin’s fully diluted supply. Miners will need two full years (one halving cycle) to earn half of the rewards given to the founders on day one. Additionally, the project uses technical jargon that the founder claims is meaningless, labeling Fractal Bitcoin as just another “shitfork” of Bitcoin.
There have also been technical issues with the network, including node problems and long periods without block production. However, the team has been quick to respond, fixing node behavior and releasing an updated version.
Moreover, with an OTC price of 19 USDT, FB’s market capitalization is approaching $4 billion. Although FB can now be transferred on the Fractal mainnet, it is not yet listed on any decentralized exchanges (DEX) or centralized exchanges (CEX), making it reliant on OTC markets. The inefficiency and lack of transparency in OTC trading introduce uncertainty into FB’s future price trajectory.
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