Mining Hardware vs DeFi Yield: Where the Return Comes From
Both of these turn capital into a yield, and they are not the same
kind of yield. A miner earns because it produces something — hashes that win a
share of newly issued bitcoin and fees. A DeFi position earns because somebody
is paying you for the use of your money, for the risk you are absorbing, or out
of a token the protocol prints. Knowing which of those is paying you is most of
the decision.
We sell mining hardware, so read the rest with that in mind. It is also why
this page states plainly where DeFi is the better answer — there are several
such cases, and pretending otherwise would not survive first contact with a
spreadsheet.
What DeFi actually is
Decentralised finance is a set of financial applications that run as smart
contracts on a blockchain rather than inside a company. Lending, borrowing,
trading and derivatives, with the rules enforced by code and the assets held in
contracts you interact with directly from a wallet. There is no account opening,
no approval, and no counterparty who can be called.
The absence of an intermediary is the whole product and also the whole risk.
Nobody can freeze your position; equally, nobody can reverse a mistake, refund
an exploit or restore a protocol that has been drained. Most activity sits on
Ethereum and a handful of other smart-contract chains.
One point of confusion worth clearing up on a mining site: Ethereum
is not mineable. It moved to proof-of-stake in September 2022. There is
no such thing as an Ethereum miner or an Ethereum ASIC, and any offer of one is
either badly out of date or a scam. The hardware we sell mines SHA-256 chains —
Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash — or, on other machines, Scrypt, kHeavyHash and similar
algorithms.
A mining return is paid by machines that exist, sit somewhere and draw power. That is the whole difference. ElphaPex DG1+ 14G – 14 GH/s Scrypt Miner, in stock now.
Where a mining return comes from
A miner’s revenue is arithmetic with two inputs: how fast it hashes, and what
the network is currently paying per unit of hashing. That second number is
hashprice. On 28 July 2026 it was approximately $31.7 per PH per
day, against network difficulty of 126.23 T and roughly 859 EH/s of
total hashrate. It moves every day and you should re-derive it on the day you
buy.
Against that sits electricity, which is the only large cost and the one you
control by choosing where the machine lives. The line where the two meet is:
break-even $/kWh = hashprice ÷ (24 × J/TH)
At $31.7/PH/day, a 20 J/TH machine breaks even at about 6.6¢/kWh, a 15 J/TH
machine at about 8.8¢, and an older 34 J/TH S19 at about 3.9¢. Against the US
residential average of 18.44¢/kWh (EIA, May 2026), no machine on the
market breaks even. Mining is a business built on cheap power, and if
you do not have cheap power the arithmetic does not care how good the hardware
is.
What you get in exchange for that constraint is a return that comes from
production. Nobody has to keep paying you; the network issues the subsidy —
3.125 BTC per block since the April 2024 halving — plus fees, and your share is
proportional to your hashrate. You also end up holding a physical asset with a
resale value, which behaves very differently from a token position when things
go wrong.
Where a DeFi return comes from
Ask what is funding the yield. There are only a few honest answers:
Borrower interest. Someone is paying to borrow your asset,
usually to lever a position. This is a real cash flow and it is the most
durable source. It is also cyclical — it collapses when nobody wants leverage.
Trading fees. You supply liquidity to a pool and take a cut
of the volume. Real revenue, but it comes with impermanent loss: if the two
assets diverge in price, you can end up with less value than simply holding
them.
Token emissions. The protocol prints its own token and
gives it to you. This is not revenue. It is dilution, paid in an asset whose
price depends on continued demand for the token, and it is the mechanism behind
most headline percentages that look too good.
Staking rewards. On a proof-of-stake chain, issuance paid
for securing the network. Closest in spirit to mining, but the capital is the
stake rather than a machine, and the risk is slashing and lock-up rather than
hardware failure.
We are not quoting rates here, deliberately. DeFi yields move faster than
hashprice does and any number published on this page would be wrong within a
week.
The risks are not the same shape
Mining risk is mostly gradual and mostly visible. Difficulty rises, hashprice
falls, your margin narrows, and you can watch it happen and decide when to stop.
Power prices change with notice. Hardware fails in known ways — hashboards and
power supplies account for nearly everything — and a dead machine still has
parts value. The bad outcome is that you slowly lose money and sell the machine
for less than you paid.
DeFi risk is mostly sudden and mostly invisible until it fires. A contract
bug, an oracle manipulation, a stablecoin losing its peg, a bridge exploit, or a
governance attack can take a position to zero in one block, with no recourse and
nobody to call. There is no equivalent in mining of waking up to find the
machine has been deleted.
That asymmetry, not the headline yield, is the thing to weigh.
When DeFi is the better answer
Your electricity is expensive. Above roughly 9¢/kWh, no
current machine clears break-even, and no amount of tuning fixes that. This is
the single most common case.
You have nowhere to put it. A full-size ASIC is 3.0–3.5 kW
continuous on a dedicated 240 V circuit and about 75 dB at a metre. Apartments,
shared walls and most home offices are out.
The capital is small or needs to stay liquid. A DeFi
position can be exited in a transaction. A machine takes weeks to sell and sells
into a market that moves with hashprice.
You do not want to operate anything. Mining is a small
business with maintenance, failures and a power bill. If that is not appealing,
it will not become appealing after the hardware arrives.
When owning the machine is the better answer
You have cheap power — under about 5¢/kWh delivered, and
genuinely delivered, not the headline energy rate before delivery charges.
You want exposure to bitcoin production rather than to a token.
A miner accumulates BTC at a cost basis you set, without a protocol in the
middle.
You want a depreciating physical asset for tax reasons.
US treatment of mining hardware is covered in ASIC
depreciation and US tax treatment — general information, not tax advice.
You can buy used well. The cheapest terahash on the market
is second-hand, and the risk is manageable if you know what to check. That is how to buy a used
ASIC miner.
Doing both is also reasonable, and for most people the honest split is
decided by the power bill rather than by conviction. If your rate rules mining
out, it rules it out — that is useful information, not a disappointment.
If you are getting started with DeFi
Use a self-custody wallet, start with an amount you can afford to lose
entirely, and read the protocol’s audit history before the marketing. Prefer
protocols that have held significant value for a long time over new ones paying
more; in this sector, age is a meaningful safety signal. Assume anything paying
far above the rest is paying you in its own token.
If you are getting started with mining
Work out your delivered electricity rate first — total bill divided by total
kWh, not the headline energy charge — then use the break-even formula above to
see which machines can earn at that rate. Only then look at hardware. The
spec-by-spec version, with a break-even table, is in the ASIC
miner buying guide, and what a machine actually earns is worked through in hashprice
explained.
Current front-runners we stock
When you are ready to buy, these are the current front-runners we stock:
Mining Hardware vs DeFi Yield: Where the Return Comes From
Both of these turn capital into a yield, and they are not the same
kind of yield. A miner earns because it produces something — hashes that win a
share of newly issued bitcoin and fees. A DeFi position earns because somebody
is paying you for the use of your money, for the risk you are absorbing, or out
of a token the protocol prints. Knowing which of those is paying you is most of
the decision.
We sell mining hardware, so read the rest with that in mind. It is also why
this page states plainly where DeFi is the better answer — there are several
such cases, and pretending otherwise would not survive first contact with a
spreadsheet.
What DeFi actually is
Decentralised finance is a set of financial applications that run as smart
contracts on a blockchain rather than inside a company. Lending, borrowing,
trading and derivatives, with the rules enforced by code and the assets held in
contracts you interact with directly from a wallet. There is no account opening,
no approval, and no counterparty who can be called.
The absence of an intermediary is the whole product and also the whole risk.
Nobody can freeze your position; equally, nobody can reverse a mistake, refund
an exploit or restore a protocol that has been drained. Most activity sits on
Ethereum and a handful of other smart-contract chains.
One point of confusion worth clearing up on a mining site: Ethereum
is not mineable. It moved to proof-of-stake in September 2022. There is
no such thing as an Ethereum miner or an Ethereum ASIC, and any offer of one is
either badly out of date or a scam. The hardware we sell mines SHA-256 chains —
Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash — or, on other machines, Scrypt, kHeavyHash and similar
algorithms.
Where a mining return comes from
A miner’s revenue is arithmetic with two inputs: how fast it hashes, and what
the network is currently paying per unit of hashing. That second number is
hashprice. On 28 July 2026 it was approximately $31.7 per PH per
day, against network difficulty of 126.23 T and roughly 859 EH/s of
total hashrate. It moves every day and you should re-derive it on the day you
buy.
Against that sits electricity, which is the only large cost and the one you
control by choosing where the machine lives. The line where the two meet is:
break-even $/kWh = hashprice ÷ (24 × J/TH)
At $31.7/PH/day, a 20 J/TH machine breaks even at about 6.6¢/kWh, a 15 J/TH
machine at about 8.8¢, and an older 34 J/TH S19 at about 3.9¢. Against the US
residential average of 18.44¢/kWh (EIA, May 2026), no machine on the
market breaks even. Mining is a business built on cheap power, and if
you do not have cheap power the arithmetic does not care how good the hardware
is.
What you get in exchange for that constraint is a return that comes from
production. Nobody has to keep paying you; the network issues the subsidy —
3.125 BTC per block since the April 2024 halving — plus fees, and your share is
proportional to your hashrate. You also end up holding a physical asset with a
resale value, which behaves very differently from a token position when things
go wrong.
Where a DeFi return comes from
Ask what is funding the yield. There are only a few honest answers:
usually to lever a position. This is a real cash flow and it is the most
durable source. It is also cyclical — it collapses when nobody wants leverage.
of the volume. Real revenue, but it comes with impermanent loss: if the two
assets diverge in price, you can end up with less value than simply holding
them.
gives it to you. This is not revenue. It is dilution, paid in an asset whose
price depends on continued demand for the token, and it is the mechanism behind
most headline percentages that look too good.
for securing the network. Closest in spirit to mining, but the capital is the
stake rather than a machine, and the risk is slashing and lock-up rather than
hardware failure.
We are not quoting rates here, deliberately. DeFi yields move faster than
hashprice does and any number published on this page would be wrong within a
week.
The risks are not the same shape
Mining risk is mostly gradual and mostly visible. Difficulty rises, hashprice
falls, your margin narrows, and you can watch it happen and decide when to stop.
Power prices change with notice. Hardware fails in known ways — hashboards and
power supplies account for nearly everything — and a dead machine still has
parts value. The bad outcome is that you slowly lose money and sell the machine
for less than you paid.
DeFi risk is mostly sudden and mostly invisible until it fires. A contract
bug, an oracle manipulation, a stablecoin losing its peg, a bridge exploit, or a
governance attack can take a position to zero in one block, with no recourse and
nobody to call. There is no equivalent in mining of waking up to find the
machine has been deleted.
That asymmetry, not the headline yield, is the thing to weigh.
When DeFi is the better answer
current machine clears break-even, and no amount of tuning fixes that. This is
the single most common case.
continuous on a dedicated 240 V circuit and about 75 dB at a metre. Apartments,
shared walls and most home offices are out.
position can be exited in a transaction. A machine takes weeks to sell and sells
into a market that moves with hashprice.
business with maintenance, failures and a power bill. If that is not appealing,
it will not become appealing after the hardware arrives.
When owning the machine is the better answer
genuinely delivered, not the headline energy rate before delivery charges.
A miner accumulates BTC at a cost basis you set, without a protocol in the
middle.
US treatment of mining hardware is covered in
ASIC
depreciation and US tax treatment — general information, not tax advice.
is second-hand, and the risk is manageable if you know what to check. That is
how to buy a used
ASIC miner.
Doing both is also reasonable, and for most people the honest split is
decided by the power bill rather than by conviction. If your rate rules mining
out, it rules it out — that is useful information, not a disappointment.
If you are getting started with DeFi
Use a self-custody wallet, start with an amount you can afford to lose
entirely, and read the protocol’s audit history before the marketing. Prefer
protocols that have held significant value for a long time over new ones paying
more; in this sector, age is a meaningful safety signal. Assume anything paying
far above the rest is paying you in its own token.
If you are getting started with mining
Work out your delivered electricity rate first — total bill divided by total
kWh, not the headline energy charge — then use the break-even formula above to
see which machines can earn at that rate. Only then look at hardware. The
spec-by-spec version, with a break-even table, is in the
ASIC
miner buying guide, and what a machine actually earns is worked through in
hashprice
explained.
Current front-runners we stock
When you are ready to buy, these are the current front-runners we stock:
More in New ASIC miners, or the full ASIC miner inventory. For the spec-by-spec version with a break-even table, see the ASIC miner buying guide.