TON mining guide
How to mine TON coins: a step-by-step guide with a list of PoW Givers and hardware requirements (processor, memory size, etc).
How to mine TON coins: a step-by-step guide with a list of PoW Givers and hardware requirements (processor, memory size, etc).
The TON blockchain uses a Proof-of-Stake consensus and mining is not required to generate new blocks. However, at the moment, Toncoin tokens are distributed through smart contracts that use the Proof of Work (PoW) consensus.
So why does TON have Proof-of-Work ? The initial release of 5 billion TON tokens located in the testnet2 network was transferred to special Proof-of-Work Giver smart contracts after Telegram left the project. This was done to ensure that the network remains decentralized and in the future there will be no questions from regulators such as the SEC.
Mining is used to get TON coins from smart contracts. PoW Giver has a limited balance that gradually dries up, users will get all the available tokens. Unlike other blockchains, mining in TON is a solution to a synthetic problem in exchange for 100 TONcoins for each solution.
Mining has nothing to do with the Proof-of-Stake consensus, PoS ensures the operation of the network from the very beginning, including the work of the giver contracts. In order not to miss the moment when the funds on the givers run out and PoW stops, stay tuned to the TON News channel.
In simple terms, there is a computational puzzle in the PoW Giver contract at any given time. For resolving it you can get a fixed amount of TON coins. Then a new challenge is generated. The only way to resolve the challenge is to do the math work with a miner, which requires significant computing resources.
If the computation is too fast, the PoW Giver contract complicates the challenge, so it will take more energy to solve. If the computation is too slow, then the challenge is simplified. Thus, the PoW Giver contract maintains a stable number of coins issued per day.
Remark: the complexity parameter (complexity) is inversely proportional to the complexity of the solution, that is, high complexity for simple tasks, low for complex ones. Therefore, it is more correct to talk about the complication of the challenge, and not “complexity”, since this conflicts with the technical part in the terminology.
The more users participate in the process, the more complex the computation becomes. You must not only find a solution, but also do it faster than other participants.
Users run special software that goes through the numbers and sends proposed solutions to PoW Giver contracts. The higher the performance of the miner’s computer on which this software is installed, the higher the probability of receiving coins.
The more miners there are in the network, the higher the computational complexity of mining and the more computing power is required to mine Toncoins.
Anyone can mine PoW Givers and receive TON coins for it, but before a miner finds a Proof of Work (PoW) and receives a reward, he needs to iterate over a large number of hashes.
After the SEC prohibited Telegram from selling coins, it was decided to distribute the coins already issued in testnet2 under 20 giver contracts. Enthusiasts began to perform challenges on the CPU, while the majority stopped to follow the development of TON. When information about mining spread, the “big” givers have already been emptied and miners started to work on the small ones. Meanwhile, the community was actively working on TON. As soon as the results of this great work began to appear, information about the givers spread even more. There were so many participants that the use of CPUs has become unprofitable and most of the miners switched to GPUs. We give instructions for mining both on CPU and GPU below, which method to choose – the decision is yours.
1. Get a computer suitable for mining
2. Install Ubuntu 20.04 desktop or server distribution
3. Install a miner suitable for your hardware – pow-miner-cuda (for nvidia) and pow-miner-opencl (for amd / opencl)
4. Install mytonctrl in lite mode
5. Check your hardware and expected mining income by running emi command in mytonctrl
6. If you do not have an address yet, create wallet address using one of the wallets
7. Define your wallet address as mining target by executing set minerAddr "..." in mytonctrl
8. Chose a giver from the list and configure the miner to mine it by executing set powAddr "..." in mytonctrl
9. Start mining by executing mon in mytonctrl
10. Check the processor load on your computer, pow-miner process should use most of your CPU
11. Now you just have to wait when you are lucky enough to mine TON coins. The result of step 4 will help you roughly determine what your chances are.
First, determine the manufacturer of your video card. To do this, open the Device Manager, and then the Video adapters tab.
1. Install the latest drivers with CUDA support by this link.
2. Download the minertools-cuda-windows-x86-64.zip archive by this link.
3. Unpack the archive and add to its contents a file with the current network configuration global.config.json, which can be downloaded here.
4. Then you need to download run_config.ini and all the .bat files. To do this, follow this link and download the ZIP archive, as shown in the screenshot. After that, add the mentioned files from the archive to the main folder.
5. Open run_config.ini and replace giver_address in the first line with Ef8JfFUEJhhpRW80_jqD7zzQteH6EBHOzxiOhygRhBdt44YH
You can choose the giver with the least difficulty from the list.
On the second line enter the address of your wallet, instead of my_address. As a result, the document should look like this:
GIVER_ADDR=giver_address
MY_ADDR=my_address
GPU_ID=0
GPU_PLATFORM_ID=0
BOOST_FACTOR=64
CONFIG_FILE=global.config.json
USE_LOG=N
LOG_FILE=gpu_0_miner_log.txt
TEST_TIME=10
6. Make sure that all the specified files are in the same folder, as in the screenshot:
7. Run the run_cuda file. If everything was done correctly, you will see a window as in the screenshot:
8. After the synchronization is completed, mining will begin, the rewards will be accrued to the address specified in step 5.
1. Install the latest drivers with OpenCL support by this link.
2. Download the minertools-opencl-windows-x86-64.zip archive by this link.
3. Unpack the archive and add to its contents a file with the current network configuration global.config.json, which can be downloaded here.
4. Then you need to download run_config.ini and all the .bat files. To do this, follow this link and download the ZIP archive, as shown in the screenshot. After that, add the mentioned files from the archive to the main folder.
5. Open run_config.ini and replace giver_address in the first line with Ef8JfFUEJhhpRW80_jqD7zzQteH6EBHOzxiOhygRhBdt44YH
You can choose the giver with the least difficulty from the list.
On the second line enter the address of your wallet, instead of my_address. As a result, the document should look like this:
GIVER_ADDR=giver_address
MY_ADDR=my_address
GPU_ID=0
GPU_PLATFORM_ID=0
BOOST_FACTOR=64
CONFIG_FILE=global.config.json
USE_LOG=N
LOG_FILE=gpu_0_miner_log.txt
TEST_TIME=10
6. Make sure that all the specified files are in the same folder, as in the screenshot:
7. Run run_opencl.bat, if everything was done correctly, you will see a window as in the screenshot below.
8. After the synchronization is completed, mining will begin, the rewards will be accrued to the address specified in step 5.
kf91o4NNTryJ-Cw3sDGt9OTiafmETdVFUMvylQdFPoOxIsLm
kf8JfFUEJhhpRW80_jqD7zzQteH6EBHOzxiOhygRhBdt4z2N
kf-P_TOdwcCh0AXHhBpICDMxStxHenWdLCDLNH5QcNpwMHJ8
kf-FV4QTxLl-7Ct3E6MqOtMt-RGXMxi27g4I645lw6MTWraV
kf-kkdY_B7p-77TLn2hUhM6QidWrrsl8FYWCIvBMpZKprBtN
kf8gf1PQy4u2kURl-Gz4LbS29eaN4sVdrVQkPO-JL80VhOe6
kf8SYc83pm5JkGt0p3TQRkuiM58O9Cr3waUtR9OoFq716lN-
kf9iWhwk9GwAXjtwKG-vN7rmXT3hLIT23RBY6KhVaynRrIK7
kf_NSzfDJI1A3rOM0GQm7xsoUXHTgmdhN5-OrGD8uwL2JMvQ
kf8kO6K6Qh6YM4ddjRYYlvVAK7IgyW8Zet-4ZvNrVsmQ4EOF
TON coins are distributed using PoW Givers smart contracts with certain amount of TONs assigned to them. There are 10 active PoW givers on the TON network. Givers hand out 100 TONcoins for each mathematical puzzle solving. To be rewarded, your computer needs to solve a difficult math problem issued by the giver, and do it as quickly as possible, as you compete with other miners. If someone succeeds in solving the problem before you, all the work done by your computer will be in vain and a new round will begin.
In TON, mining is the distribution of coins in exchange for solving a synthetic problem obtained from a giver contract. This process has nothing to do with network operation, block formation and validation. Therefore, in TON mining there is no concept of “blocks” – you receive a task from a giver and receive a reward for solving it.
It is important to understand: profits from mining does not “drip into the account” as your computer performs calculations: it comes in batches of 100 TON coins for each successful solution of the task. This means that if your machine has a 10% chance of solving a problem within 24 hours (see step 4 above), then you will probably have to wait about 10 days before you receive your reward.
The idea of the Givers was to a) provide the validators with capital and b) distribute coins to those who dived enough into TON to get the miner up and running.
Hence, there are two main paths:
In anticipation of the growth of Toncoin rate, you can keep mined coins in TON Wallet , or transfer them to other blockchain networks. Currently, TON-ETH and TON-BSC bridges have been implemented. On Binance Smart Chain developed by Binance crypto exchange, wrapped TONCOINs can be invested in a liquidity pool. If you decide to sell mined tokens, you can do this through a special Crypto bot in Telegram – it works in p2p format.
TON is developing rapidly – for example, both cross-chain bridges were launched literally within one month. You can find up-to-date information about the development of the project in the channel Give me TON! In the channel we are publishing a lot of news, analytical articles and insides from the blockchain team. In addition, the channel has a community where you can ask your questions and communicate with other people interested in the project.
If you want to follow updates and events around the blockchain in a short news format, then subscribe to the TON News channel.
If you are serious about mining and want to manage more than one machine / mining farm, so you need to take a closer look at TON and how mining works. Here are some general tips:
get_pow_params queries – if you have custom scripts that poll Giver status frequently, you should use your own liteServer. Clients who violate this rule run the risk of blacklisting their IP addresses on public liteServers.TON mining also has its own pool. It is called Ton Mining Pool. Due to the increased complexity of the network, solo mining is almost meaningless unless you have a big farm. Therefore, ordinary miners join the pool in order to receive a guaranteed profitability proportional to the capacity of their equipment. The actual yield of the pool can be found on this website. At the time of writing this article, it is 2 Toncoins per gigache per day.
To join the pool, you need:
1. Set up GPU miner according to the instructions described above;
2. Install any TON wallet and get your wallet address;
3. Register this wallet using Telegram Bot @WhalesPoolBot. This is a mandatory action;
4. Start mining.
The pool’s fee for providing its services is 10%.
You can check your balance or withdraw mined Toncoins via Telegram Bot @WhalesPoolBot. At the moment you can withdraw only to the wallet you specified during registration.
Total network hashrate of TON mining is very high: miners need high-performance machines if they want to be successful. Mining on home computers and laptops is practically useless and we do not recommend such attempts.
A modern processor that supports Intel SHA Extension is a must. Most miners use AMD EPYC or Threadripper based machines with at least 32 cores / 64 threads.
You can mine TON with GPU, there is a pow-miner version capable of using both Nvidia and AMD GPUs. You can find the code as well as instructions on how to use it in the POW Miner GPU repository.
Almost the entire mining process takes place in the processor’s L2 cache. This means that speed and memory size do not affect mining performance. A dual AMD EPYC system with one DIMM on one memory channel will mine as fast as a system with 16 dimms taking up all channels.
This only applies to the normal mining process, and does not apply to a full node.
A regular miner, launched in light mode, takes up a minimum of space and does not store any data on storage.
A regular miner needs the ability to open outgoing connections to Internet.
TON uses the SHA256 hashing method, which is different from BTC, ETH and other cryptocurrencies. ASICS or FPGA will not work.
Many people mine using AWS or Google computing machines. As stated in the specs above, CPU does matter, so we recommend AWS c5a.24xlarge or Google n2d-highcpu-224 instances.
The formula for calculating income is pretty simple: ($total_bleed / $total_hashrate) * $your_hashrate. This will give you current estimate. You can use the estimated mining income calculator (emi command) in mytonctrl.
Here is an example of output taken on Aug 7, 2021 using an i5-11400F processor:
Mining income estimations
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Total network 24h earnings: 171635.79 TON
Average network 24h hashrate: 805276100000 HPS
Your machine hashrate: 68465900 HPS
Est. 24h chance to mine a block: 15%
Est. monthly income: 437.7 TONImportant: Please note that the information provided is based on the network hash at the time of execution. Your actual income over time will depend on many factors, such as changes in the network hashrate, the chosen giver, and luck.
TON Blockchain uses Proof-of-Stake consensus and mining is not required to generate new blocks.
Then why does TON have Proof-of-Work?
The reason is that initial emission of 5 billion TON coins was transferred to special Proof-of-Work Giver smart contracts. Mining is used to obtain TON coins from these smart contracts. We will announce the completion of mining and the end of PoW in the Give me TON! channel.
How many coins are left for mining?
The most actual information is available at tonmine.xyz, see bleed graphs. PoW Giver contracts have their limits, and they will dry out when users have mined all available TON coins. TON tokens will not be burned. When the mining is over, the blockchain will have an inflation rate of 0.6% per year (approximately).
Why haven’t I heard anything about TONcoin mining?
It was known about mining from the very beginning, no one hid it. But when TON was going through hard times few people took mining Toncoins seriously. Now most of the coins have already been mined.
How many coins have already been mined?
As of August 2021, about 4.9 billion TONcoins had been mined. There are a couple of tens of millions tokens left for mining.
TON coins have been mined to more than 70,000 wallets, the owners of these wallets are unknown.
Is it difficult to start mining Toncoin?
No, all you need is the right hardware and to follow the steps in the quick start section.
Developers from the TON community have launched a miner application for Windows. If you have a PC with a powerful graphics card, you will be able to mine Toncoin with this application. You have to understand that a home computer is far from a server, and it will not find solutions too often. Step-by-step instructions for Windows users are here . Read about other alternative mining methods in the TON News channel.
How to make money on TON coin?
You can keep mined coins in TON Wallet or transfer them to other networks. Currently TON-ETH and TON-BSC bridges have been implemented. On Binance Smart Chain developed by Binance crypto exchange wrapped TONCOINs can be invested in a liquidity pool and earn a percentage of each TONCOIN exchange from this pool.
How to sell mined coins?
This can be done through a special Crypto bot in Telegram – it works in p2p format.
How many miners are there in TON network?
We cannot calculate this, since only the total hash rate of all miners on the network is known. However, there are graphs on tonmine.xyz that try to estimate the number of machines of a certan type needed to provide an overall hashrate.
Do I need TON coins to start mining?
No, anyone can start mining without a single TON coin. In addition to mining, you can always top up your Toncoin balance by purchasing them at one of the connected platforms.
I have been mining for many hours, why my wallet total does not increase even by 1 TON?
TON coins are mined in batches of 100 – you either solve the giver puzzle faster than others and get 100 TONcoins, or you get nothing.
I’ve been mining TON for several days and I don’t see any results, why?
Check your current income estimate . If the field Est. 24h chance to mine a block less than 100%, you need to be patient. Also note that 50% chance of solving a giver’s puzzle within 24 hours does not automatically mean that you will mine a block within 2 days, 50% is applied to each day separately.
Are there mining pools for TON?
There are no pools in TON. Users with mining experience in other networks come to TON mining with the terminology and baggage of previous knowledge. There are mentions of “blocks” in relation to mining in the TON, as well as suggestions to make “pools”. Neither one nor the other can be used, since TON givers have a fundamental difference from the miners of other networks.
Each task of each PoW Giver is different in complexity and an obvious recommendation is to check each giver for the complexity of the solution and solve the problem of the simplest giver. This is both the right and wrong approach.
Let’s imagine that all miners adhere to this strategy. Then all the computing power of all CPUs and GPUs is directed towards “digging one hole”. Yes, they will excavate quickly, but there are many participants and the likelihood that it is you who will take a reward is reduced.
When the miner has limited resources, for example, only one processor or only one video card, then this is probably the best approach. “Probably” due to the fact that probabilistic mechanisms work when you mine TON tokens.
Another strategy is to take tasks from all the givers at once, regardless of the difficulty. When there are ten processors / cards, and most of other miners are sticking to the “simplest mining” strategy, then this may give the best results.
Or you can mine from the three simplest givers at the same time. Or the three most difficult ones. Or choose a giver randomly, but devote all your resources to it.
Here you need to include imagination and regularly conduct strategy tests. According to reviews, the most effective approach is to do NOT like everyone else. But you never know how most people do, so we return to imagination and testing our hypotheses.
Will the faster machine always win?
No, all miners take different paths to find a solution, a faster machine has a higher probability of success, but this does not guarantee victory!
How much income will my machine generate?
Check your income estimate.
Can BTC | ETH rigs be used for TON mining?
No, as TON uses the SHA256 hashing method, which is different from BTC, ETH and other cryptocurrencies.
Which is better: one fast machine or several slow ones?
In real world hovewer CPUs with lower core count are usually clocked higher, so you will probably have better success with mutiple machines.
If I run several machines, will they cooperate?
No. Each machine works on its own, the process of finding a solution is random. No machine will take the same path, so their hashrates add up to your advantage without direct cooperation.
Can TON coins be mined on ARM processor?
Technically yes, but it was decided not to release the ARM version of the miner due to the low actual result.
Can I mine using Windows / xBSD / some other OS?
Yes, there are Windows miners for Nvidia and AMD graphics cards. The instructions are described above.
Will I mine TON coin faster by running mytonctrl in full node mode?
Calculation process by itself will not be faster but you will gain some stability and most importantly flexibility if you operate your own full node / liteServer.
