InvestingMiningTechnology

Top 5 Cloud Mining Pool Companies

Cloud mining pool companies provide mining services through the cloud where, instead of buying and setting up your own expensive miners at home, you access the company's miners online via the cloud using only a computer at your home. This way, you not only avoid buying expensive hardware and software to mine but also the added electricity costs needed to run your own miners and maintenance costs.

Note: What's Better than Cloud Mining? Masternodes! If you're considering cloud mining, then also consider setting up a masternode. Then you've got two ways to earn: price gain and earning minted coins. The rates can be far higher than mining rewards too. And check out The Divi Project, which is building a one-click setup so anyone can have a masternode at home or in the cloud!

Cloud mining is the way to go if you do not want to wrestle with the assembly of mining rigs, and hot, noisy miners at home. You also save a lot of time, which you can use to earn profits or do important things.

With a good mining pool company, you get the necessary hashrate to mine the cryptocurrency you want and do not have to do all the math for hardware costs, hardware efficiency, and power costs on your part.

However, there are many factors to consider when looking for a cloud mining company to work with.

Transparency: Transparency of the company is one, meaning you should work with a real company with real people working for them. The second factor is the reliability of the company, meaning the company runs quality, state of the equipment to help you achieve your goals and maximize mining profit. Also, inspect the payment plans and other things in view of the contractual obligation, and ensure the company follows deadlines in that regard.

Profitability: Profitability is one of the most important factors when choosing a cloud mining service. It depends on the performance level. Every company has an earning formula that subtracts the overall expenses from the entire coins mined. You not only put into consideration the contract price and electricity and maintenance fees but also withdrawal and exchange fees.

Features: The other important thing to look at is the features; some of which include instant daily payouts, hack wallets, real-time statuses, public audit pages and internal exchanges that allow you to do in-house crypto exchanges.

Ease of Use: Some people also consider how easy the platform is to use, ease of following reports and comprehensiveness of the UI. It is also important to look at the popularity of the company (remembering that there are very many scammers out there), the security level (does the company have cold hack wallets and enough mechanisms to cover loses?) and the what contracts are available -- for instance being able to purchase a 24hrs contract.

Below is a list of top cloud mining companies starting with the best user-rated:

Genesis Mining

cloud-mining-genesis

Top on our list is Genesis Mining, a large-scale multi-algorithm cloud mining service -- possibly the largest out there -- that operates intentionally. Its contracts lets you mine Bitcoin, Dash, Litecoin, Zcash or Ethereum and you can also trade your payouts for other coins, meaning it has an internal exchange.

The hashpower provider now has more than a million clients from different countries around the world so it is really popular.

You simply pay for the contract and select a contract that is then added to your account, then you can start mining, which runs for 24 hours a day. You get the first payout in 48 hours, and the rate reduces to once per day after that. If you are ordering the contract with a credit or debit card, the payout is held (for security reasons) for 30+2 days before it is transferred to the wallet, then you can start receiving daily payouts.

For purposes of decentralization preservation, the company uses at least two different pools at a single time. Every pool that gets close to 50 percent share is only used as a backup.

The company has many mining farms in Europe, America, and Asia, but many cannot be viewed for purposes of security and protecting the customer. Three Iceland-based farms, Iceland, including Enigma Ethereum Mine, Bitcoin Mining Facility, and Dash Mining Facility can be viewed. It uses GM Advanced Autotrader that allows you to directly mine Bitcoin, Unobtanium and Zetacoin with the Sha 256; Startcoin and Dash directly using X11 ; Ethereum with Ethereum; Zcash with Zcash; and Litecoin and Dogecoin with Scrypt.

Hashflare

cloud-mining-hashflare

Hashflare is a cloud mining for HashCoins and owns a a web-based PoS crypto wallet for Raspberry P as well as in-house security technologies for crypto miners, in addition to the mining hardware.

With this company, you start mining once the payment is accepted -- it supports BTC, USD, HashFlare balance, credit cards (Visa and MasterCard), and wire transfer payment methods. The payout is daily from day one. Although it allows only one withdrawal per day per cryptocurrency, there is no withdrawal minimum.

Their hardware allows you to mine BTC, Ethereum, Dash and Zec coins. The company uses modern ISKE standard datacenters and performs 24/7 on-site surveillance. It works with 5 algorithms, including Scrypt, Ethash, SHA-256, X11, and Equinash and users can perform frequent switches to find the most profitable combination of the various pools.

You get lifetime contract for Scrypt and SHA-256 cloud mining, meaning the hashpower is yours forever until you use it. The account will remain active as long as you have enough hashrate. Mining stops when the revenue is less than the investment.

Eobot

cloud-mining-eobot

Eobot started in 2013 as a Bitcoin mining service but has since expanded to include about 24 cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Litecoin, STEEM, Dashm Zcash, Dogecoin, Ethereum, Monero and Bitcoin Cash. The company has more than 800,000 users from all over the world, who have bought more than 2 PHS of SHA-256 mining capacity sold to its users. It receives millions of API hits a day.

It runs high-level GH 4.0 Antminer S9 mining farms thus the company brings all the benefits of the miners (high hashrate and efficiency in Joules per GH/s) to the users. You also get to avoid high price and additional funds for power supply associated with buying these miners.

You can rent for 24 hours to five years and can own cloud instant fractions if you want. For instance, you get a 1.0GHS per 1.0 cloud instance owned if you choose and 1.0 MHS for the Scypt algorithm (which follows Litecoin difficulty). Other features include a hack wallet, mining map to help you connect with other miners, SSL technology on servers, public auditing and free public and private API with POST/GET support and JSON.

ViaBTC

cloud-mining-viaBTC

Chinese-based ViaBTC combines cloud mining and cryptocurrency exchange services and provides its own BTC and LTC mining pools. You benefit from using s9 mining rig and all its benefits, and the PPS and PPLNS payment methods.

The company was founded in 2016 as a Bitcoin mining pool but extended to other cryptocurrencies in November 2016. It operates in Sichuan, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongol and offers site tours to anyone interested.

January this year, the company launched the Litecoin mining pool. They launched S9 mining contracts on April this year and have provided 3900 TH/s mining contracts. You can also purchase hashing power with Bitcoin balance.

You get both PPS+ and PPLNS with the Bitcoin pool and PPS payment method with Litecoin pool. Bitcoin pool payment method, which can be changed every 24 hours. With the internal exchange service, you get many trading pairs including BTC/CNY, ETH/BTC, LTC/CNY, ZEC/CNY, and ETH/CNY.

You can withdraw BTC and Ethereum daily, though there are withdrawal limits, but there is no fees for withdrawal for cryptocurrencuies. You pay 3% CNY withdrawal fee and the transaction fees are 0.1% for the maker and 0.2% for the taker.

It works with HTTPS protocol to encrypt your data and 2-step authentication to protect data and accounts, although PPS+ and PPLNS makes the fees a bit higher than usual (since both have pool fees). They charge electricity fee of 0.12 USD daily and 6 percent management fee deducted from the mining income.

The second batch of S9 mining contracts is charged 159$ per TH/s and a 0.12$ per TH/s/day as electricity cost.

Hashnest

cloud-mining-hashnest

The major highlights for Hashnest is that you can withdraw mined blocks on the same day, offers three excellent payout methods (Bitcoin, AdvCash, and OKPay), and it offers a built-in BTC/LTC exchange and low-price classic contracts and PACMiC.

It offers four standard contracts: Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Diamond, all of which last for a lifetime.

Hashnest is owned by BitMain -- the China-based company that provides Antiminer S9 bitcoin miners. They also own an ASIC chip based on the 16nm process node, which delivers 0.098 J/GHs. You can also mine Litecoin with AntL3 in addition to the Bitcoin. Therefore, you can choose between the AntL3, AntS7, and the Antminer S9 ASIC for Bitcoin.

You can cloud mine BTC, ETH, LTC, and ZEC for now although they hope to introduce new cryptocurrencies later.

Once you register, you get a Hashnest wallet address. You then choose a suitable contract between the standard and PACMiC contracts, depending on what suits your budget and needs. Once you earn some blocks, you can withdraw daily or opt for the Profit Accumulation or the Reinvest option.

Other features include a well-designed dashboard, mobile apps to manage the account, in-built calculator to help calculate profits for the amount you invest, and ability to view detailed information about every block mined.

Hashnest also offers fun perks whee you can buy a ticket for the LuckyHash raffle and get a chance to win the 12500GHS AntminerS9 HashPower.

OXBTC

cloud-mining-oxbtc

OXBTC works like a cloud mining company and a deposit investment platform. The Chinese company was founded in 2016 and has three mining farms in Ordos, Mongolia, and Sichuan, as well as a global mining network. However, the company lists ZeusHash as their partner: the company that shut down their cloud mining service at some point and its users lost money.

The company offers two major services, namely investment products and hash power trading. It means you can earn interest on your deposit and get to mine. For the later case, you buy hashing power, which is allocated from their mining farms (they locate the network node nearest to you), and then the mining starts. They offer BTC and LTC payment methods or your standing deposits with OXBTC (the investment can be withdrawn).

Other cloud mining pool companies to consider include the Coinomia which offers Bitcoin mining, Ethereum mining and X11 for all other cryptocurrencies, as well as binary matching bonus and repurchase income; Bitminer.eu which is registered in England and Wales; and NiceHash, which supports supports 23 different algorithms, including SHA-256, X11, X13, Scrypt and Equihash to mine the corresponding cryptocurrencies.

David Kariuki

David Kariuki likes to regard himself as a freelance tech journalist who has written and writes widely about a variety of tech issues that affect our society daily, including cryptocurrencies (see cryptomorrow.com and coinpedia.org); climate change (cleanleap.com), OpenSim and virtual reality (see hypergridbusiness.com). He is currently pursuing a MSc in Environmental Management at Open University. He does write here not to offer any investment advise but with the intention of informing audience, and articles in here are of his own opinion. Anyone willing to use any opinion here as advise to invest in crypto should obviously take own responsibility and accountability of their losses (or benefits) thereof. You can reach me at [email protected] or [email protected]

Cryptomorrow - Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Ethereum