Mining secures the live Irium base layer: an independent SHA-256d Proof-of-Work chain being developed toward escrow, agreements, and proof-based commerce.
No premine
No ICO or presale
No VC control
No admin keys or override powers
Why mine Irium?
Settlement-first mission — miners secure the chain that future escrow and agreement flows depend on.
Independent chain — Irium is not a fork and runs its own Rust codebase and networking stack.
Mainnet-first philosophy — the live chain is the focus, not a placeholder network.
DNS-free resilience — bootstrap and peer recovery are designed around signed data and network survivability.
Transparent founder vesting — locked on-chain and auditable rather than policy-based.
Mining Overview
Algorithm: SHA-256d
Block time: 600 seconds
Block reward: 50 IRM
Halving: Every 210,000 blocks
Coinbase maturity: 100 blocks
Max supply: 100,000,000 IRM
Live chain status and miner-visible network conditions are available in the Irium Explorer.
Recommended miners: Irium CPU miner, ASIC SHA256 miners, and compatible SHA-256d software miners. Mining keeps the live settlement base layer objective, public, and miner-secured.
Use the official Irium miner for direct node mining. Use a compatible Stratum miner such as cpuminer-opt for pool mining.
CPU Mining with Official Irium Miner
Direct mining via your own node. You need the node fully synced before starting the miner. Mining on a node that is still syncing can cause stale blocks.
Irium uses SHA-256d, the same algorithm as Bitcoin. AuxPoW merged mining activates at block 26,347 (~12 June 2026). After that, any SHA-256d pool mining Bitcoin can simultaneously mine IRM at zero additional energy cost. The same work counts for both chains.
All SHA-256d hardware works
Antminer S19/S21, Whatsminer M50/M60, and all other Bitcoin ASICs are fully compatible. No firmware change. No hardware change. Point at the pool and mine.
Block reward: 50 IRM per block
Current block reward is 50 IRM. First halving at block 210,000 — the chain is at height ~20,299. Merge mining earns this reward on top of Bitcoin mining revenue.
Live network stats
Hashrate and difficulty are shown in the Network Snapshot above. Stats are pulled live from the API every page load.
1How it works
When your pool finds a share, it checks if the parent block hash meets the Irium difficulty target. If it does, it submits an AuxPoW block to the Irium network — no extra work from your ASIC.