History of HashFlare
After initially offering hosted mining contracts toward the end of 2014, HashCoins officially launched HashFlare – their cloud mining service – on April 23, 2015. HashFlare offers cloud mining for both Bitcoin and altcoins. For SHA-256 Bitcoin mining, they use a non-stock version of their Apollo miner. For Scrypt mining, HashFlare utilizes their Ares miner. All hardware used in their 2 Megawatt data center is provided by parent company HashCoins. HashCoins is based in Talinn, Estonia, and was founded in 2013 by Sergei Potapenko.
As of June 30, 2015, HashFlare boasts over 10,000 customers using their cloud mining services, generating a hash rate over 1 PH/S.
Trust Rating
HashFlare is the newest cloud mining company in the industry, and as mentioned above, they offer both SHA-256 and Scrypt mining services. Since they are so new, they don’t have a long track record for payouts, but after one month of using their service, I have not had any issues. They do provide a physical address for their company, and they list their team members – with photos – on their website, which is reassuring. Another nice feature they offer is the ability to switch mining pools, although as with most cloud mining services, there is no evidence that a contract is mining at a specific pool.
Although they have shared photos of their Scrypt mining operation, as well as their data center, to date they have not been able to provide photos of their Bitcoin mining operation. A representative explained that “racks with Apollo looked not so nice as racks with Ares,” but in my opinion, they should ask one of their techs to snap a few shots of the miners, no matter how bad they look. 1 PH/S represents over 900 Apollo V3s, which means they should have about 90 racks of 10. I’ll increase their trust rating once I have concrete evidence of their mining capacity. So please take this into account when viewing their overall review and score.
Price Rating
HashFlare‘s cloud Bitcoin mining contracts are approximately 0.00178 BTC/GHS, which is one of the most expensive contracts reviewed to date. There is only one company I have reviewed that charges more than HashFlare at this time, and they are more expensive by only 1%. So essentially, HashFlare is tied for having the highest Bitcoin cloud mining contracts in the industry.
That being said, HashFlare DOES offer discounts. For example, their current (summer 2015) discount is 10% off purchases of 100GH/S or more, and 20% off purchases of 5 TH/S or more. So once these are taken into account, it does mitigate their high prices to an extent. On another positive note, their incredibly low maintenance fees help to make their cloud mining contracts more affordable as well.
Maintenance Fee Rating
HashFlare.io might have the second most expensive cloud mining contracts available, but they also offer the lowest maintenance fees of any compeny reviewed so far – aside from those contracts that mysteriously don’t charge a maintenance fee. Their remarkably low maintenance fee of $0.03/GH/month could be due to the low electricity costs in Estonia, but either way, it’s the next best thing to zero maintenance fees. Considering that HashFlare continues to mine with their aging Apollo technology, I would expect maintenance fees to drop even further once they upgrade to Uranus miners (assuming they materialize in the near future). You can see how much impact their low maintenance fees have on mining earnings and ROI in these screenshots.
Dashboard Rating
HashFlare also has a pretty solid mining interface, as you can see from screenshots from my HashFlare account. They don’t offer as many features as some cloud mining services, but I would rank them in the top 1/3rd of companies in terms of usability. Withdrawing payments went flawlessly, with a 2 factor authentication email sent before payment was sent. The dashboard contains a series of graphs showing balance, earnings over time, revenue per day per terahash, as well as mining pool allocation. Everything is nicely laid out and graphically intuitive. HashFlare’s addition of a mining pool allocation section is much appreciated, as most cloud mining companies don’t offer a selectable mining pool and/or force you to choose a singe pool.
Payment Reliability Rating
HashFlare made all payments to my account on time, and revenue was exactly as expected after deducting maintenance fees. Granted, I only used their service for 1 month, but during that time the service ran flawlessly. When I withdrew funds from my HashFlare account to my Bitcoin wallet, funds showed up within 15 minutes, meaning their withdrawal service immediately sends the transaction to the block chain upon withdrawal request.
HashFlare Referral and Signup Bonus
HashFlare offers a referral bonus of 10%, which is on par with the highest referral rates from any cloud mining company! The don’t offer any kind of signup bonus, but they do offer specials from time to time, as mentioned above. Overall they HashFlare receives a solid grade for their generous referral bonus!
Conclusion
HashFlare may not be the most trustworthy cloud mining company, and their prices may not be as competitive as others, but they do offer some of the lowest maintenance fees out there, and a solid referral bonus.
Ref. http://www.cloudminingdirectory.com
Feel Free to use my referral link to sign up for HashFlare’s Cloud Mining Service!
