Original | Odaily Planet Daily ( @OdailyChina )

Author | Golem ( @web3_golem )

At 8 a.m. this morning, the much-anticipated Fractal mainnet finally went live. Fractal adopts a unique mining mechanism called "Cadence Mining," where two out of every three blocks mined will be permissionless, and the remaining block will be merged-mined. This mechanism has given rise to many Fractal ecosystem mining projects and has also sparked enthusiasm among users to rent computing power to participate in head mining.

As a result, due to vested interests, mainnet mining output and the price of FB have become the focus of the community's attention. Although the off-exchange price of FB has risen to around 19 USDT, many community members believe that renting computing power to participate in head mining may end up being a loss.

Is this really the case? Is the participation of ordinary users in Fractal head mining 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 a reference.

Mining Cost and Return Estimation

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

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

Widely used mining output calculation method in the community:

Based on the average block time of 30 seconds and two-thirds of the output being permissionless, the daily output is approximately 72,000 FB, with around 48,000 FB obtained from permissionless mining. Therefore, 1 PH/s of computing power can obtain approximately 4.8 FB per day. Based on the off-exchange price of FB at 19 USDT, miners' daily income is approximately 91.2 USDT.

If estimated using this method, renting computing power to mine FB head mining will not only fail to make a profit, but as the permissionless mining hash rate of the entire network increases, the rewards allocated to each 1 PH/s will continue to decrease, leading to even greater losses.

Relatively dynamic calculation method:

The above calculation method is based on the assumption of continuously increasing hash rate and unchanged daily output. However, in reality, although the Fractal mainnet's average block time is set at 30 seconds, the daily output is already significantly faster than expected.

As shown in the figure below, the Fractal mainnet mined over 2500 blocks and produced over 62,500 FB within 10 hours of launch, indicating that the block mining speed is actually increasing with the hash rate. The actual daily output will exceed the previously estimated 72,000 FB.

Therefore, the actual average block time during the head mining period of the Fractal mainnet is approximately 10 to 15 seconds, meaning that today's FB output may be between 140,000 to 210,000. Even with the most conservative estimate of 140,000 FB output, with two-thirds being permissionless, i.e., 93,000 FB, 1 PH/s of computing power can obtain approximately 10.3 FB today. Based on the off-exchange price of FB at 19 USDT, miners' daily income is 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 head mining can still make a profit.

However, this calculation method is only relatively dynamic. Changes in network hash rate, daily output, FB price, etc., will all affect mining output and returns. Ultimately, whether Fractal mining is worth long-term participation will need to be reassessed after the network stabilizes.

Fractal Still Faces Challenges

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

The founder of mempool posted on X platform, stating that Fractal Bitcoin seems to be a "clone" copy of Bitcoin Core v24.0.1, with the premined tokens accounting for 50% of the fully diluted supply of Fractal Bitcoin. Miners will need a full two years (one Fractal Bitcoin halving interval) to earn half of the rewards obtained by the founders on the first day. Additionally, Fractal Bitcoin has many meaningless technical terms that only exist in the white paper, so in his view, it is just another "shitfork" (forked from Bitcoin).

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

At the current off-exchange price of 19 USDT, the market value of FB has already approached nearly 4 billion US dollars. Although FB can be transferred through the Fractal mainnet, there are currently no DEC/CEX platforms listing FB tokens, and users' trading activities still rely on off-exchange OTC, resulting in low trading efficiency and opacity, casting a layer of uncertainty over the future price trend of FB.

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