Soource: Aethir.com
Today Aethir announced a 100 ATH guarantee until the summer of 2025. On top of that, anyone who is mining in October will mine +-150ATH tokens, thanks to the early adopter bonus. This was the final push I needed to pull the trigger and place my order.
In this article we will discuss what the ROI is of the device, how to set it up and why I bought 20.000 dollars worth of these miners, as well as go through all the risks.
What is Aethir
Source: Aethir.com
First things first: what is Aethir? Aethir offers GPU power through a decentralized cloud infrastructure, which in turns allows them to reduce costs and increase scalability compared to centralized counterparts. In a nutshell this is the promise of the entire DePin industry.
Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/aethir-decentralized-gpu-network-revenue-growth
And although big companies like AWS, Google and Microsoft are piling up resources to power those massive LLMs such as ChatGPT & MidJourney , there is actually a whole market out there for mid-sized companies who want to deploy and operate smaller models and other compute intensive applications. During the first half of 2024 Aethir had over 36M in revenue, which confirms there is at least some interest in the product. This potential also didn’t go unnoticed for investors, as they raised 9M in their seed rounds and a whopping 50M in their node sale.
When it comes to GPU compute, you’ll notice that Aethir isn’t focused on consumer hardware and that they only accept enterprise grade hardware such as the NVIDIA H100s.
But if they want enterprise grade infrastructure, where do you and I come in?
What is Aethir Edge
Source: Aethir.com
In comes the Aethir Edge: a device, meant to be in every household in order to bring computing to the edge.
The Aethir Edge network enhances the current GPU cloud with compute power at the edge. This is important because it reduces latency, enables real-time data processing and increases scalability by distributing the processing load.
In plain English this means: they hope to unlock the next step in personalised AI services, lag-free cloud gaming and the next generation of AR/VR applications.
If you are a bit sceptical: you should be. It’s a very big promise to fill and it’ll take a lot of time and effort to get there. But I do believe this is where the world is moving and probably a faster pace than you can imagine.
What is in the box
Source: https://myedge.io/
The Aethir Edge comes in a nice box and it looks a bit like a chubby baby PS5.
In the box you’ll find everything you need:
1 x Ether Edge device1 x Power adapter1 x Power cable1 x HQ Ethernet cableSource: https://docs.myedge.io/
When we take a closer look at the hardware, we see the following specs:
Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 ChipAndroid Operating SystemLPDDR5 Memory256GB UFS 3.1 StorageWIFI6 and Bluetooth 5.2
I can’t help but feel that we put a high-end smartphone in a box. The upside is that such hardware is that uses very little power, it super silent and can easily be leveraged for a wide range of applications.
If you compare it to a smartphone with similar specs, the price of +-1200EUR exc tax or 1400EUR inc tax, you’ll probably agree with me that it’s on the high side. But this is most likely due to the fact that it is a custom device, in time the production volume will go up and the price will come down. We saw the same thing with Helium miners.
One thing I like a lot, is Aethir’s confidence in their own product resulting in an impressive 3 year warranty.
Source: https://docs.myedge.io/
As mentioned before, when it comes to power consumption, we can be thankful they opted for mobile components as these are optimised for low power consumption.
If you live in the EU you can expect the device to consume +-7EUR per month. Which is negligible.
How to start
Setting the hardware up is much easier than Helium as you can put these device anywhere you want and stack up as many as you want in the same location. However once the hardware is installed, Aethir gets a little more complicated for non-crypto natives.
Source: https://docs.myedge.io/
When it comes to connecting the device to the internet, it is recommended that you use the wired connection over the wireless, so you can ensure the highest performance. I can imagine that at some point in the future, your response time and therefore the quality of your internet connection will determine if you’ll earn more or less tokens than your neighbour.
In order to configure the hardware we follow these steps:
Step 1: plug in the ethernet cableStep 2: plug in the power cableStep 3: power up the device by holding the power button for 3 secondsStep 4: install the app on your phone (or use your browser**) & create an accountStep 5: connect to the device over bluetooth
** if you are on the same network as the device, otherwise it wont work
You can find more details in the official docs: https://docs.myedge.io/aethir-edge-app/user-guides
Once the hardware is set up, you’ll notice we need to stake ATH tokens. Yes, unlike a Helium miner, these devices don’t come with any tokens. This means you’ll have to transfer some ETH to the device in order to pay for gas and to register the device in the network.
Source: https://docs.myedge.io/
The reason why they require to lock in some extra tokens is to increase the token utility of ATH and reduce the circulating supply, which in general is positive for the token price. However this is an additional cost for us miners. Luckily at current prices this is only +-$150 worth of tokens and you can always unstake these tokens and sell after 180 day unlock period. It’s clear that Aethir only wants people who are in it for the long run. I therefore treat these tokens as a startup cost.
Source: https://docs.myedge.io/
Another thing you’ll notice is that the device pays out per day and only if your device was operational for at least 20h in the 24h cycle. This means that if your cleaning lady unplugs the device, you might lose the rewards for that day.
Guaranteed earnings
As I mentioned in the introduction: today Aethir announced they are going to guarantee 100ATH per day for each miner up until next summer. Why is this important? Well, normally with DePin projects you have a fixed amount of rewards being released per block and those rewards are shared among all miners.
A simple example: if a project pays the network operators $1000 per block and you are the only miner, that means you get $1000, but if the next day there are 10 miners, then you all get $100 and if the next day there are 1000 miners then each miner only gets $1.
Source: Coingecko
Seeing that Aethir already has 35.000 miners online, you can see the challenge. However, even now, thanks to the “early adopter”-bonus you are mining +- 150 ATH per day until the end of this month. Which at current prices is +-7USD per miner per day.
However these guaranteed returns seem to come at a price, as your tokens are vested:
Source: https://docs.myedge.io/
This means it’s crucial you start mining before the bullrun starts so that you unlock before others do. It also means there is a “moving window”, meaning that after 180 days of mining you’ll be getting 100% of your tokens every day and if you stop mining you’ll be receiving tokens until 180 days after you stop. Not that bad if you look at it that way. And in general a higher amount of locked tokens is also beneficial for the price as it reduces the circulating supply.
If you can’t wait to buy one and you want to support me, please use my affiliate link (and for the US this link).
Source: https://synaps.io/
Another important note is that in order to unlock you need to wait +-7 days for the tokens to be released and you have to do KYC. When I say KYC my American friends are probably cursing, but don’t worry: the USA is not excluded! US customers are also free to mine. I’m certain that last part is a big “no no” for some of you, but it’s probably a good way to prevent people from “gaming” the system as we have seen with Helium. And it is good to see that the company wants to do everything by the book to avoid issues with the SEC.
When it comes to KYC they use SYNAPS, a provider that I used in the past on multiple launchpads. I’m therefore fine using them again as they have my info anyway.
Why did I invest 20K
So, why did I invest 20K to buy 15 of these miners? In the last cycle I did well with Helium, and although I rode most of my coins all the way to dumpy town, I still had a nice chunk left. That is why I have been looking for a good opportunity to redeploy this capital.
The reasons why I believe Aethir is the right project for this is:
Aethir is playing all the hot narratives: DePIN, Gaming and AIThey have enough funding & they already have more revenue than HeliumThey have proven they can create some hype, which is key in any bullrunWhen it comes to the hardware: the product I tested looks solid: it has low power consumption, no location restrictions, and a 3 year warrantyWe also know that Aethir is actively adding new projects to their ecosystem. If you read between the lines, this means that the Aethir Edge becomes a multi-token miner, which increases the lifespan and potential of the device dramatically.Last but not least: we have a long boosted rewards program with 100ATH guaranteed per day per device and the fact that we are still in a halving year
None of this is financial advice and everyone has their own risk tolerance, but this is enough for me to take the jump.
So my plan is simple: get in early and make sure that I can mine those 6 months before the big run. This will allow me to quickly secure my principle and everything else is passive income.
The risks
As with any crypto project there are risks:
The coin can go to zero and although we are guaranteed 100ATH per day -> 100 x 0 is still 01200EUR + tax or 1399EUR inc tax, is a big chunk of cash and at 100ATH per day at a price of 0.06$ per token, your ROI is over 7 months (depending on whether you can deduct the tax or not), if I am wrong and the price drops, then my ROI will be even longerVery high FDV and low supply means there will be a lot of coins coming on the market in the coming months. This means you have to be realistic in how high the price can go due to high inflation. The good thing is that we miners are the ones receiving this inflation.Token lock-up: 30% of the tokens you mine are available right away, 30% after 90 days and the remaining 40% after 180 days. So depending on when you start, your tokens might unlock during the new bear market
How to buy
Right now the official website is sold out, but you can always buy from official resellers. I have partnered up with https://mycryptominer.eu/ who will be shipping out their first batch at next week and if you use the code INVB, you’ll get a 100EUR discount.
For US & LATAM you get $50 off using BrenInvestor as the code: https://heliumdeploy.com/products/aethir-edge?sca_ref=2796820.ZvFvhf0TgE&sca_source=youtube
Also: if any of you is interested in joining a mining pool, let me know in a comment as I’m considering launching a pool in which you can buy a fraction of a miner so that you don’t have to worry about running the miners or buying a whole device.
If you made it all the way until the end, please give this article a clap so it moves up in the Medium algorithm.
Thanks
Investor Bren
Why I bought $20.000 worth of Aethir Edge Nodes was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.