Grin Mining Pool Profitability

Depending on the price of the cryptocurrency you’re mining, margins can be razor thin or highly lucrative. Earnings can vary dramatically depending on your luck (layman’s term for variance), which is why mining pools are often used to amortize luck; they are an effective way to pool resources with a consortium of miners and split rewards according to the amount of work contributed in order to receive a share of the rewards on a consistent basis.

Because of our interest in Grin, BlockCypher built Grinmint: the first mining pool for Grin. The following are some benchmarks Grinmint tracks. We thought we’d share.

Grinmint’s Theoretical Maximum and Profitability

Comparing against the theoretical maximum a pool can earn is a good way to benchmark whether your payouts are aligned with pool’s.

The following chart shows the number of grins one would earn per day with 1000 GPS on C29 on Grinmint (C31 numbers are similar), calculated using 3 different sources:

1. Using network data only
2. As a miner using Grinmint
3. Grinmint as a single miner, against the network

1. The Red line is the pool’s maximum payout, calculated using only network data. This line compares the network estimated C29 GPS to 1kGPS, taking the total reward amounts available. This is the average maximum a pool can pay theoretically.
2. The Blue line is the payouts from actual miners on Grinmint. The shares sent by the miners on the client side, compared to the immature balance over a 12h period.
3. The Yellow line models the Grinmint pool as a single miner. The C29-equivalent graph rate (adjusting C31 according to scaling) is calculated counting all pool shares and the number of blocks the pool finds.

If you are a miner using Grinmint, what you want to see is that your average payouts matches the theoretical maximum the pool can make. As shown on the graph above, your average revenue (in blue) is very close to the maximum possible (in red).

Additionally, below is a comparison of the top Grin pools — averaged over the last month — of the daily Grins you would have made for every 1000 GPS you contributed to the pool:

A third-party not affiliated with Grinmint (poolwatch.io), who is also tracking various Grin pools gave us permission to publish the following 7-day chart on mining income. Grinmint is in orange:

Conclusion

Grinmint’s goal is to be the most profitable, transparent, and useful Grin pool. We’ve worked very hard over the past few months to improve against those goals. Mining profitability begins with pool transparency. We check many benchmarks and data points to ensure that our miners know their profitability compared to other pools as well as against theoretical maximums. As we continue to iterate on Grinmint, we will be publishing those numbers more regularly and adding all sorts of useful tools for miners to manage their operations.