What is the hashpower market?
Definition · Hashpower market
A marketplace where mining hashrate is bought and sold for a period of time. Buyers point it at their own pool account; sellers get paid for the hashes their machines deliver.
Owning a miner means buying hardware, finding cheap power and keeping it running. Renting skips all that for the buyer, and gives the owner a steady price for their machine’s output. For Bitcoin, the traded algorithm is SHA-256, and prices are usually quoted per PH/s (1,000 TH/s) per day.
How does renting hashpower work?
Where the hashes go when you rent
Seller
Machines
Someone with mining hardware lists it, or points it at the marketplace.
Marketplace
NiceHash, MRR
Matches buyers and sellers, holds the payment, checks what was delivered.
Buyer
Their pool account
The hashes land in the buyer’s pool, which pays the buyer for them as usual.
The hashes never become the marketplace’s. They go straight to the buyer’s pool, and the pool credits the buyer for the work, the same way it would for their own machines. The marketplace takes a fee, and both of the big ones have ways to check how much hashrate was actually delivered.
How do NiceHash and MiningRigRentals differ?
They’re the two best-known places to rent SHA-256 hashrate, and they work quite differently.
| NiceHash | MiningRigRentals | |
|---|---|---|
| What you buy | An amount of hashrate, filled from many sellers | A specific rig, for a set number of hours |
| Who sets the price | Buyers bid; the market fills the orders that pay enough | Each rig owner lists their own price |
| How it’s quoted | BTC per unit of hashrate per day | BTC per unit of hashrate per day, per rig |
| Quality signal | Pays for hashrate actually delivered | Rig ratings and an average hashrate graph |
| Price we track | NiceHash’s public price to get an order filled | The cheapest rig that passes our quality filter |
We track both because they publish prices anyone can check. That makes them useful reference points, not a ranking or an endorsement.
Why isn’t the rental price the same as hashprice?
It’s close, because anything far off gets arbitraged away. If renting were much cheaper than what the hashes earn, buyers would pile in. If it were much dearer, nobody would rent. What’s left is a small gap that moves every day. We call it the spread: the market price against hashprice, in percent.
Why it can sit above
Buyers pay for flexibility: hashrate for an hour, a test of a new pool, or a shot at a lucky block. Pool and marketplace fees add to the cost of the same hashes.
Why it can sit below
Sellers trade some revenue for a fixed, steady price and no pool account to manage. When hashprice jumps with a price rally, rental prices can lag behind for a while.
Who rents hashpower, and why?
Rig owners
Sell their machine’s output at a known price without running a pool account.
Pools and developers
Test a new pool or setup with real hashrate for a few hours.
Miners hedging
Top up or smooth their hashrate around outages and maintenance.
Some people also rent to try solo mining for a day. It’s a lottery ticket: most such rentals find nothing, and the rare hit pays a whole block. Our guide to mining pools covers why most miners share rewards instead.
What do these numbers mean, and what don’t they?
They’re prices. Hashprice is what one PH/s is expected to earn by mining for a day, before costs. The NiceHash and MiningRigRentals lines are what one PH/s costs to rent for a day. None of them is what a person earns.
New to the unit? Start with what hashprice is, then how hashrate is measured.
How do we collect the data?
Hashprice
From the chain. For each block, its reward (subsidy plus fees) divided by the work it needed, which comes from its difficulty, scaled to 1 PH/s for 24 hours. The daily figure is the mean over that UTC day’s blocks; today’s figure uses the last 144 blocks. Using difficulty keeps block luck out.
USD per TH/s
Hashprice in BTC per PH/s per day, times that day’s BTC/USD price, divided by 1,000.
NiceHash
NiceHash’s own public price to get an order filled on its SHA-256 market, sampled through the day, converted to BTC per PH/s per day. The daily figure is the plain mean of that day’s samples. It doesn’t depend on any order of ours.
MiningRigRentals
The cheapest listed SHA-256 rig that passes a quality filter: a reliability score of 90 or more, a hashrate history that checks out, not excluded for poor delivery, and a minimum rental of 100 hours or less. Daily mean of the samples.
Network data
Network hashrate is implied by difficulty (difficulty × 2³² ÷ 600 seconds). Fee share is total fees over total block rewards for the day.
Gaps
A feed that goes quiet for more than 30 minutes isn’t recorded. Missing days stay empty; we never fill them in.
This is methodology version 1. The version number ships with the data, so if we ever change a definition you can tell the two series apart. Full field list on the data page.
Can I download the data?
Open data · CC BY 4.0
Every day of hashprice and rental prices, free to reuse
JSON and CSV, updated through the day, 1 days of market prices so far. Use it in articles, research or your own charts. Just credit CloudMineCrypto.
Download the data →Frequently asked questions
What does renting hashpower mean?
You pay a marketplace to point someone else’s mining machines at your pool account for a while. The pool then pays you for those hashes as if they were your own. You pay per unit of hashrate per day, or per rig per hour.
Is renting hashpower profitable?
Not reliably. The rental price usually sits near hashprice, which is what that hashrate is expected to earn, and marketplace and pool fees come on top. Luck and price moves can put a rental either side of its cost.
What is the difference between NiceHash and MiningRigRentals?
On NiceHash you place an order at a price and the marketplace fills it with hashrate from many sellers. On MiningRigRentals you pick a specific rig and rent it for a set number of hours at its owner’s price.
Why is the rental price different from hashprice?
Buyers and sellers want different things. Sellers get steady pay without running a pool account, buyers get flexibility or a shot at luck, and both sides pay fees. That pushes the price a little above or below hashprice from day to day.
Are CloudMineCrypto plans hashpower rentals?
No. A CloudMineCrypto plan doesn’t give you ownership of, or a share in, any of this hashpower, any hardware or any pool. The prices on this page are public market data we track, not what anyone earns in the app.
Can I use this data?
Yes. The daily series is free under CC BY 4.0, as JSON or CSV. Credit CloudMineCrypto and link the data page.
Sources and further reading
- Hashpower marketplace · NiceHash
- SHA-256 (ASICBoost) algorithm page · NiceHash
- REST API documentation · NiceHash
- MiningRigRentals marketplace · MiningRigRentals
- Frequently asked questions · MiningRigRentals
- Mining pool reward FAQ · Bitcoin Wiki
- Difficulty · Bitcoin Wiki
Live figures on this page come from the CloudMineCrypto API or from the public blockchain data services named next to them, refresh on a schedule, and are labelled where they appear. This guide is educational and not financial advice. CloudMineCrypto is not an investment product; rewards in the app are estimates and aren’t guaranteed.
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