On September 26, the Lumerin Hashpower Marketplace debuts on Arbitrum after an extensive testnet period.
The future of digital services is financialization, “whether it be AI compute, high-availability compute, or hashpower,” said Lumerin founder Ryan Condron.
Lumerin uniquely addresses that last item: hashpower. The moment users purchase a hashpower contract via Lumerin, they’re effectively mining. It is mining made truly global, decentralized, and delivered on-demand through smart contracts.
Essential Plumbing
Lumerin’s core functions — including validation, fulfillment, and time slicing — provide the plumbing needed to start trading hashpower peer-to-peer.
“Purchasing hashpower on Lumerin is more than just merely asserting a claim on hashpower,” Condron clarified. “Rather, you are buying and receiving the actual hashpower itself. This is an important distinction that uniquely makes Lumerin the foundational piping for such a system.”
He muses that DeFi speculators will be among the very first to try out Lumerin, given their familiarity with the process of price discovery. As Bitcoin miners and energy traders find Lumerin and its frictionless sorting of hash buyers and sellers, he expects the market to smooth out.
He also knows that Lumerin opens up Bitcoin to miners and non-miners alike, using smart contracts through the Arbitrum network, which delivers fast, low-cost transactions. Participants can sell their hashrate, specifying amount, duration, and price. Such functionality could aid in business predictability and ease wild price swings.
Aging Toasters
Freeing miners from their hardware is another bonus of a hashpower marketplace. Tech is almost by definitions a depreciating asset, and managing hardware obsolescence can be a full-time job all by itself.
No doubt miners will use Lumerin to purchase hashpower to earn Bitcoin rewards without the bother of having to load up on ever-aging toasters. Instead, they’ll browse and select contracts that suit their needs.
Miners in low-electricity-cost regions will be able to pass along savings, further increasing market efficiency.
Democratizing Mining
Lumerin aims to be a place where anyone can virtually mine bitcoin. Just download a wallet, and begin buying hashpower contracts, route hash to a pool, and earn mining rewards.
For his part, Condron doesn’t view Lumerin as a new way of doing Bitcoin, but rather as a restoration. He calls it re-democratizing mining. “With the Lumerin Hashpower Marketplace now live, we are starting to restore the decentralization of the Bitcoin mining landscape by providing a direct, accessible path for everyone to be part of the mining ecosystem.”
Further reference: Decentralizing Bitcoin Mining via Tokenization – Sync, by Bloq