What is Ore, a mining project from the Solana hackathon earlier this month? It gained a lot of attention within two weeks of its launch, but why did the founder, Hardhat Chad, suddenly announce yesterday that the project will be paused and waiting for the development of v2? What impact does this have on users?
Table of Contents:
Background: Ore enables fair mining for everyone
What problem does Ore aim to solve: High mining barriers
Design concept of Ore: Customized mining difficulty
Token distribution of Ore: Unlimited linear unlocking
Ore attracts a large number of user participation: Impact on Solana network performance
Founder announces suspension of Ore mining
Ore mining has been suspended pending v2 optimization
Existing user rights are not affected
Ore is an experimental project that allows anyone to mine and earn ORE tokens on Solana using any device (such as tablets, mobile phones, and home computers) through a special proof-of-work mechanism. 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, which ultimately harms network security and token distribution models.
Ore aims to solve the above 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 ensuring they receive a portion of the rewards. Unlike Bitcoin mining, where all miners collectively guess the next block’s hash value, Ore assigns customized computational challenges to each miner to achieve the goal of “everyone can participate in mining”. As long as miners provide answers to their personal challenges, the Ore smart contract guarantees that they will receive a portion of the Ore token supply.
Ore ensures that everyone can participate in mining and receive rewards. Ore uses a non-exclusive reward mining protocol, where cracking one’s own computational challenge as a miner does not prevent another miner from winning. Ore does not create a winner-takes-all competition for every miner, but provides each miner with their own personalized computational challenge. Furthermore, since it is not possible to censor miners on the Ore network, it ensures that everyone can join.
The core idea of Ore is to ensure that “all participants can participate in mining and receive rewards.” However, the value of the rewards is another feasibility issue. Although miners with better hardware tend to receive more rewards over time, Ore’s ideal design allows 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, with no total supply limit. According to the official website, ORE tokens are launched fairly, with no team allocation or pre-mined supply. Everyone competes to mine from the same starting point, and user participation in mining has been open since April 2.
The launch of Ore attracted many users to join, but it also caused a vicious competition where some miners did not receive more rewards, exacerbating the congestion and transaction failures on the Solana network. In addition to design issues with the underlying technology architecture of the Solana network, the community believes that meme coins and Ore at the application layer are key factors contributing to the current network congestion.
Recommended reading:
Why do transactions on Solana frequently fail and experience congestion recently?
Recommended reason: This article explains the reasons for recent network congestion and frequent transaction failures on the Solana network from a technical perspective of the underlying network architecture, which correlates with meme coins and Ore at the application layer. Readers can gain a better understanding of the ecosystem status.
Ore, which has attracted a lot of attention since its launch two weeks ago, was announced by founder Hardhat Chad yesterday to be temporarily suspended. The mining mechanism on the Ore network has been paused. 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 v2:
The current code design is imperfect, which has given some miners an asymmetric advantage.
There is currently no structural incentive for holding ORE tokens, and ideally, miners holding ORE tokens should have an advantage in mining.
Difficulty adjustments based on voting may introduce biases, and the difficulty change should be algorithmic or chosen by the users themselves.
Chad mentioned that once these issues are resolved, he will rebuild the open-source client software for users, and the mining mechanism will be restored. It is expected to take a few weeks to complete these tasks. The ORE tokens that have been mined can be claimed at any time and can be upgraded to the token version on the v2 network.
Ore
Solana
Proof-of-work
Mining