- Overview: nano can be used in mining to bring down the costs and energy consumption.
- Miners’ benefits: utilizing nano’s speed and feeless network, miners are able to have daily payouts while cutting huge overheads on fees.
- Miner pools: to solve the issue of Ethereum gas fees being bigger than the transaction amount, 2Miners — an Ethereum mining pool introduced nano payouts to their miners on October 12th.
Nano is feeless, instant and eco-friendly. These features are what makes it the perfect currency for miner payouts. It solves each of the main challenges miners face, all at once.
High fees eating away at earnings? Nano has no fees.
High minimum for payouts? Nano lets you withdraw the tiniest amounts: transactions can have up to 30 decimal places.
Low payout frequency? Nano offers the lowest possible minimum amounts for payouts, so pools can easily use daily payout systems.
Environmental impact? Nano uses only 0.000112 kWh per transaction. To put that into perspective, with the energy it takes to watch three hours of television, you could create 10K nano transactions!
So, with the benefits clear, let’s look at a real-world application of nano in use in Ethereum mining.
On October 12th 2021, 2Miners, the world’s 4th largest Ethereum mining pool, introduced free payouts in nano for its Ethereum miners.
Usually, miners face many issues when it comes to receiving payouts: fees, high minimum that must be reached, delays, low payout frequency.
For example, not all mining pools offer the possibility of daily payouts. However, even with such an option available, there can be large minimum quotas for daily payouts in Ethereum, which makes it impossible to have your payouts made daily. iners sometimes have to wait months to accumulate this minimum and become eligible for a payout.
Even if a mining pool has low minimums, the fee which accompanies the payout, is often so large it can consume most of the miners’ earnings.
When 2Miners introduced nano payouts, they tackled all the above-mentioned issues, rather spectacularly.
To show you exactly what they did, how it benefited the pool and its miners, I will break down some facts and figures below. The stats speak for themselves.
2Miners — Benefits to the Pool:
The table shows the total number of ETH miners, the number of ETH miners opting for nano payouts and their growth over time.
As you can see, between November and January, the number of pool miners who switched to nano payouts grew by 25% (from 7,5K to 17,5K). What is also interesting, the total number of miners grew steadily during the same period, from 56K to 80K. This could suggest increased uptake as miners became aware of the benefits nano brings.
The growth rate of the pool increased by 700% at a time where most mining pools saw a slowdown in growth, which might have been the result of miners preferring feeless payouts and migrating to 2Miners.
According to data collected by the block-explorer NanoLooker, and consolidated by nano Community Manager Vinicus Barbosa for Cointimes, a total of 239,885 individual payment transactions were carried out in a period of 42 days (October 12 to November 22).
These transactions amounted to Ӿ749,375.00 and $4,284,384.00 dollars, with an average of Ӿ18,006.50 and $110,817.50 per day respectively.
- Total nano payouts by 2Miners (since Oct, 12th till January, 11th)
- Total number of miners using nano (January): 17,5K out of 80K in total, and growing
Minimum Payouts in ETH, BTC and nano: Comparison
In short: miners receive exactly the amount they have earned — no gas fees.
Once the amount necessary for the payout process to start reaches the required minimum, the pool sends the ETH funds to an exchange, where they are converted to nano. Each miner gets an equivalent of what they have earned in nano. So, if, for example, they were to earn 0.0006 ETH ($2.1), $2.1 is what they would get in nano.
There are over 20 popular Ethereum mining pools out there. Will they follow in 2Miners footsteps upon seeing its success with the nano payouts move? I, personally, would love to see NanoPool launching nano payouts — it’s in the name.
In all seriousness, the 2Miners example shows that a significant number of miners are interested in a different payout method rather than BTC or ETH, as they need a way to avoid fees when withdrawing their earnings.
Ultimately, what are payouts? They are our salaries, they are what faucets use, they are what we earn from games, and so on. With its benefits to both pools and miners themselves so remarkable, it is surely only a matter of time before nano is adopted on a wider scale by a range of other forward-thinking industries.
With a currency this easy and convenient to use, the possibilities are endless.
