Step 1 — Get a XELIS Wallet address
Every miner needs a payout address. Install XELIS Wallet on Windows, macOS, or Linux, create a new wallet, and copy your XEL receiving address. This is where every block reward or pool payout will land.
Because XELIS uses confidential transactions, your mining income arrives as encrypted balance entries — visible to you in the wallet, invisible to anyone scanning the chain. Track the value of those rewards on the XEL price page.
Step 2 — Download the official XELIS miner
The official miner, xelis-miner, is open source and released alongside the rest of the XELIS stack on GitHub. Always download the latest signed release from the official xelis-inc organisation — never from a random fork or a stranger's DM.
Step 3 — Choose solo or pool mining
Solo mining
Run xelis-daemon to sync the chain, then run xelis-miner pointed at your local daemon. You keep the full block reward when you find a block, but rewards are unpredictable unless you control significant hashrate.
Pool mining
Point xelis-miner at a community pool's stratum URL with your XELIS Wallet address as the worker. You'll receive smaller, steadier payouts proportional to your share contribution.
Step 4 — Tune and monitor
Start with a thread count slightly below your CPU's logical cores so the machine stays responsive. Watch accepted vs rejected shares in the miner's log — a high rejection rate usually means latency to the pool or an outdated miner build.
Mining hardware reality check
XELIS is a young chain. Difficulty, price, and pool distribution all change quickly. Treat any "expected daily payout" calculator as a rough estimate, not a guarantee. Mine because you want to support the network and earn XEL with hardware you already own — not because a calculator promised a number.
FAQ
Can I mine XELIS with a laptop?
Technically yes, but sustained full-CPU load on a laptop is hard on thermals and battery. Better suited to desktops or dedicated rigs.
Is XELIS mining profitable?
Profitability depends on your electricity cost, XEL price, network difficulty, and hardware. We don't publish profit estimates because all four move daily.
Do I have to KYC to mine?
No. Mining is permissionless. You just need a XELIS Wallet address and the miner binary.
XelisHash v2 — what makes the algorithm ASIC-resistant
XELIS proof-of-work uses XelisHash v2, a memory-hard algorithm designed to keep CPUs and consumer GPUs competitive against custom hardware. The core idea is the same one that protects Monero's RandomX and a handful of other privacy chains: force every miner to do work that benefits dramatically from a large, low-latency cache and frequently-changing instruction mixes. ASICs are spectacular at narrow arithmetic; they are mediocre at being unpredictable. Making the algorithm unpredictable per-block neutralises most of the ASIC advantage.
Practically, that means a mid-range desktop CPU or a modern GPU is a real participant in the network. You will not out-mine a warehouse, but you do not need to be a warehouse to mine profitably during the early years of any given coin's emission curve. The wider point is decentralisation: the more ordinary hardware that can mine, the more geographically distributed the network is, and the more expensive it becomes to attack.
Pool mining vs solo mining — pick honestly
Solo mining means you accept blocks only when you personally find one. Pool mining means you join a group, contribute your hash rate, and receive a continuous fractional payout proportional to your contribution. The expected value over a long horizon is roughly the same minus the pool's fee. The variance is wildly different.
- Solo mining makes sense when your hash rate is a non-trivial fraction of total network hash rate (rarely, for most home miners) or when you specifically want the lottery-ticket payoff structure. With 0.001% of the network, your expected time-to-block is measured in months — that's not income, it's a hobby.
- Pool mining makes sense for almost everyone else. Payouts arrive daily, your rig pays for its electricity continuously, and you can plan around predictable cash flow rather than waiting for a block that might never come.
When picking a pool, look at three things: fee (typically 0.5%–2%), payout scheme (PPLNS smooths variance; PPS shifts variance to the pool operator at the cost of a higher fee), and decentralisation. Mining the same coin into the same dominant pool indefinitely is bad for the network's health; rotating between mid-sized pools or supporting newer ones helps keep no single operator anywhere near 51%.
Calculating realistic profitability
Mining-profitability calculators are useful but routinely overstate income because they assume current price, current difficulty, and current pool luck remain constant forever. None of the three do. A realistic profitability estimate folds in difficulty growth (as new hash rate arrives, your share shrinks), price volatility (rewards are in XEL, costs are in fiat), and equipment depreciation.
A reasonable model for a home miner is: take the calculator's "today's revenue" number, subtract your fully-loaded power cost (kWh × hours × full hash-rate-corrected wattage × your tariff), then multiply the net by 0.6 as a conservative haircut for the year ahead. If that number is meaningfully positive, mining is plausible. If it's flat or negative even before the haircut, your edge is too thin — wait for difficulty to fall, or use the rig for something else and just buy XEL.
Electricity, heat, and the hidden costs no calculator shows
The headline cost of mining is electricity. The hidden costs are heat, noise, and equipment wear. A GPU running at full tilt 24/7 in a small room raises the ambient temperature noticeably, accelerates the failure rate of the GPU itself, and produces fan noise that is fine in a basement and miserable in a living space. Before you commit, think about where the rig will physically live and whether you, your housemates, and your landlord will be happy with it there in six months.
Many home miners end up with a small dedicated space — a garage shelf, a basement corner, a ventilated cabinet — and a smart plug that lets them schedule mining around off-peak electricity tariffs. The energy savings from running only during cheap-power hours often exceed the foregone revenue from not mining during peak hours; it depends entirely on your local tariff structure.
Payouts to your XELIS Wallet — settings that matter
Configure your pool to pay out directly to a XELIS Wallet address that you control the seed phrase for. Do not pay out to an exchange address — you would lose self-custody of every block reward the moment it lands, and a frozen exchange account locks the rewards out of your reach.
- Use a dedicated wallet for mining rewards. Easier to track, easier to keep tax records, and keeps the rest of your XELIS activity separate.
- Set a sensible payout threshold. Tiny payouts create excessive fee overhead on the pool's side; oversized thresholds delay liquidity. Most pools default to something reasonable, but check.
- Sweep periodically to cold storage. Mining rewards accumulating in a hot wallet are exposed to whatever attacks your daily-use machine is exposed to. Move them to a cold wallet on a recurring schedule.
Tax considerations (very briefly, and read this carefully)
In most jurisdictions, block rewards are treated as income at the fiat value on the day they were received, and any subsequent gain or loss on those XEL is a capital event when you eventually sell or spend them. Recordkeeping matters — without per-payout records, you'll struggle to compute either number accurately when tax time comes.
This is not tax advice and the rules differ everywhere. If you mine more than incidentally, talk to an accountant who has handled crypto before you've accumulated a year of disorganised payouts.