How to mine Binance (BNB) coin
After being burnt in 2018 after the last crypto crash, I haven’t looked back, until quite recently.
In January 2018, I stepped out of the market too late and lost about 80% of my portfolio’s value in the process. Which doesn’t put me in the worst place, but it wasn’t fun either.
But in the current bull run, I went back to my Binance account to see if there was anything left. And to my surprise, because I still had a bunch of Binance coin (BNB) stored in my account (5 and some change :’)) my wallet on Binance was above $250 again.
The reason is, that BNB itself was experiencing a massive upwards move, and this gave my wallet a serious boost.
Can you get Binance Coin (BNB) for free?
After this surge, I was intrigued to try and find out if I could get additional Binance coin for “free”. Why free? Because of what happened in 2018. I still don’t feel like I trust the crypto space enough to put down extra cash, but I was intrigued enough to experiment a bit in this bull run, to see if I can maximize my crypto without depositing fiat money.
So one of the key components of this experiment is to see if I can get some BNB for free. One of the ways to do this on Binance is by staking your BNB coins to get parts of other coins. This in turns, allows you to convert the small tidbits of those altcoins, and roll them into BNB. Effectively increasing your amount of BNB.
One of my favourite ways to stake my BNB is by using the BNB vault. Which essentially gives you a small interest on your staked BNB coins, but also give you a bunch of launch pool rewards.
Now, this is only increasing my amount of available BNB quite slowly. The next question I had was: can I mine BNB? And if so, can I mine it with my GPU, or can I also use my spare servers and mine it with CPU power?
How to mine Binance Coin (BNB)
The first few pages and threads I read on Google, Quora and Reddit left me doubting if this would even be possible. But then, I stumbled upon what looked like the Holy Grail: unMineable.
unMineable
unMineable.com is a website that allows you to “Mine your favourite non-mineable crypto assets!”.
In short, that means that you can use their platform to mine Cryptocurrency using specific PoW (proof of work) algorithms.
They currently support 4 mining algorithms:
- Ethash (GPU mining,>4GB)
- Etchash (GPU mining, >3GB)
- RandomX (CPU mining)
- KawPow (GPU mining, >3GB)
Although they don’t specifically state how you mine the unmineable coins, from what I’m guessing you’re just mining the native Cryptocoin to that specific algorithm, and they exchange it for the coin that you want.
To use their platform, you pay 1% in mining fees. Or 0.75% is you use my referral code: lveg-ge2u .
Now, on to the mining!
Method 1: using unMineable Miner (beta)
The easiest way to start mining with unMineable is to use their own miner software. You can grab it here: https://unmineable.com/miner. They have 2 versions:
- Packed
- Unpacked
The packed version contains the .exe files of both Phoenixminer and xmrig. And this will sometimes cause it to get flagged by your antivirus solutions. You can either whitelist it in your antivirus or use the unpacked version. In which case you’ll need to manually install PhoenixMiner (see below) and/or xmrig.
Once you have it installed, running with unMineable’s miner is pretty straightforward.
1- Launch the tool, and select your mining hardware of choice (either GPU or CPU).
2- Next, select your coin. In this case Binance Coin BNB. And enter your address.
If you’re like me, and you’re mining directly to Binance, be sure to also enter your BEP2 MEMO. You can find this over at https://www.binance.com/en/my/wallet/account/main/deposit/crypto/BNB
The format of your address would then be formatted like this: address:memo (for example BNB111222333555444:7778899.
If you don’t fill in the memo, Binance will not be able to link it to your account. So you’ll lose your mined coins.
3- Now, save yourself 25% on the mining fees, and click on “I have a referral code”. Enter my referral code: lveg-ge2u
Once that’s done, click start.
As soon as the miner starts, you’ll see your current balance in unMineable, and the current Hashrate of your device. In this example below, I’m CPU mining it at ~2100h. This is fairly slow, and most likely not profitable. But CPU mining BNB probably isn’t your best bet.
Method 2: using PhoenixMiner
In case you don’t want to use the handy software from unMineable above, you can always revert to using PhoenixMiner.
The setup is also fairly simple.
1- Go to https://phoenixminer.org/ and download PhoenixMiner
2- Extract the folder to some location (e.g. c:\PhoenixMiner)
3- Open a cmd (command) window and navigate to the folder. Enter the following command:
PhoenixMiner.exe -pool ethash.unmineable.com:3333 -wal BNB:[walletaddress]:[memo].[minername]#lveg-ge2u -pass x
Replace the following fields with your own variables:
- [walletaddress]
- [memo] — optional, if you’re not mining to an exchange, you can leave this :[memo] part out of the command
- [minername] — gives your miner a name to identify it on unMineabe
Once you’ve modified the command above, run it by pressing enter.
Almost instantly, you’ll see that your GPU is starting to mine. You’ll also be able to follow this in your unMineable dashboard.
How much can I mine using unMineable?
It all depends on expenses and can be a tricky operation.
Assuming you have a similar set-up like I do (I have a 2070 Super GPU), and don’t account for electricity costs, you can earn roughly 0.75–0.80 BNB per month (it depends a bit on the market volatility and changes in hash rate during the day). Which comes down to (at its current price) ~100 USD per month.
It’s really up to you to calculate if that makes financial sense. It’s not a ‘get rich quick’ scenario, but it can definitely help if you’re pc is running 24/7 anyway. Might as well put it to work if you’re not always using the beefy GPU during the day.
Luckily, it’s quite easy to calculate using unMineable’s calculator.
You can take the hash rate shown in the miner, and calculate how long it will take for you to earn 1 BNB on this page: https://unmineable.com/coins/BNB
If we take the CPU example from above (2100 hash), that means this device can get me 0.00002277 BNB per month. Which is ridiculous at best :).
If we take my 2070 Super GPU with ~37MH/s, then we see it’s an acceptable 0.77BNB per month.
Save 25% on unMineable’s mining fee!
If you sign up for unMineable using my referral link, you can save yourself 0.25% on the mining fee! Use everything that can make this make more financial sense ;).