What is Solana’s Fair Mining Project Ore? Why did the founder suddenly call it quits?
What is Ore, the mining project that emerged from the Solana Hackathon earlier this month? It gained a lot of attention after its launch two weeks ago, but why did founder Hardhat Chad suddenly announce yesterday that the project will be put on hold until the development of v2? What impact will this have on users?
Table of Contents
Background: Ore allows everyone to mine fairly
What problem does Ore aim to solve: High mining barriers
Design concept of Ore: Customized mining difficulty
Token distribution of Ore: Unlimited linear unlocking
Involvement of a large number of users in Ore: Impact on Solana network performance
Founder announces suspension of Ore mining
Ore mining has been suspended pending optimization for v2
Existing user rights will not be affected
Ore is an experimental project that utilizes a special proof-of-work mechanism, allowing anyone to mine on Solana and earn ORE tokens using any device (tablet, mobile phone, home computer). Currently, anyone who wants to participate in cryptocurrency or proof-of-work mining usually requires a significant upfront capital investment and advanced hardware configuration knowledge. This often excludes many potential miners and ultimately compromises network security and token distribution models.
Ore aims to address the aforementioned mining barriers through a novel proof-of-work algorithm. This algorithm allows users to mine on any device without the need to purchase expensive hardware or join mining pools, while guaranteeing a share of the rewards. Unlike Bitcoin mining, where all miners collectively guess the hash value of the next block, Ore assigns each miner a customized computational challenge to achieve the goal of “everyone can participate in mining”. As long as a miner provides an answer to their personal challenge, the Ore smart contract ensures that they will receive a portion of the Ore supply.
Ore ensures that everyone can participate in mining and receive rewards. It achieves this through a non-exclusive reward mining protocol, where one miner cracking their own computational challenge does not prevent another miner from winning. Ore does not create a winner-takes-all competition for every miner, but rather provides each miner with their own personalized computational challenge. And since it is not possible to scrutinize miners on the Ore network, it ensures that anyone can join.
The core idea of Ore is to ensure that “all participants can participate in mining and receive rewards.” However, the issue of the value of rewards is a separate feasibility question. While miners with better hardware tend to receive more rewards over time, Ore is ideally designed to allow everyone to successfully mine using devices such as laptops or mobile phones.
Regardless of the number of active miners on the Ore network, the network will maintain a linear supply rate of approximately 1 ORE token per minute, without any total supply limit. According to the official website, ORE tokens are launched fairly, with no team allocation or pre-mined supply. Everyone competes in mining from the same starting point, starting from April 2nd.
The launch of Ore attracted many users to join, but it also caused vicious competition among some miners, resulting in congestion and transaction failures on the Solana network. Recent congestion on the Solana network, in addition to design issues in the underlying technical architecture, is believed by the community to be caused by the meme coins and Ore at the application layer.
Recommended reading:
Why do transactions on Solana often fail and experience congestion recently?
Recommended reason: This article explains the recent congestion and frequent transaction failures on the Solana network from the technical perspective of the underlying network architecture, which corresponds to the meme coins and Ore at the application layer, giving readers a better understanding of the current ecosystem.
Since its launch two weeks ago, Ore has gained a lot of attention, but founder Hardhat Chad announced yesterday that the project will be temporarily suspended. The mining mechanism on the Ore network has now been halted. Chad stated that there are many issues with the current design that need to be addressed, and he hopes to spend a few weeks studying and assembling a team to relaunch with v2. The existing code design is flawed, giving some miners an unfair advantage. Currently, there is no structural incentive for holding ORE tokens, and ideally, miners holding ORE tokens should have an advantage in mining. Voting for mining difficulty may introduce biases, and the change in difficulty should be algorithmic or user-driven. Chad stated that once these issues are resolved, they will rebuild and release open-source client software for users, and the mining mechanism will be restored. It is expected to take a few weeks to complete this work. The ORE tokens already mined can be claimed at any time and can be upgraded to the token version of the v2 network in the future.
Ore
Solana
Proof-of-work
Mining
Further reading
Bitcoin Halving Countdown! CleanSpark CEO optimistic about post-halving development, mentions four winners
Internet mining scams: The second generation of black miners turns to cryptocurrency, attracting hundreds of millions of Taiwanese dollars.
