Qubic General Profitability Review

The story of Qubic’s Useful Proof of Work taking over 51% of Monero network has been blasted all over the top crypto publications for months. This narrative was unexpected, and it captured the mindshare of professionals and public alike, but that was just the part of the story.

Qubic mining Monero and consuming the majority of its Hashrate was not only a hands-on experiment of Qubic’s Outsourced Computations. 

The main and weirdly unnoticed goal of this exercise was to profit from this mining effort. See, when the dust settled and the market moved on to the next new shiny narrative, Qubic continued mining. As Monero price recovered the profits stabilized in USD terms and the burns of Qubic from mining kept growing.

The Real vs Reported Numbers

As the marketing lead during this initiative, I have been manually tracking the statistics of Monero mining since day one. Some may remember the first few weeks, when the industry was laughing at low numbers. Numbers grew, smiles disappeared, full-on panic within Monero Reddit and X communities took hold. After being able to run a “double spend” on Monero multiple times but not doing it, showing 18-block reorgs of the network, the show of force was over and Qubic settled into quietly mining Monero for profit.

It is important to remember that this takeover was done from a vector of incentivizing the miners to switch to mining on Qubic from Monero. For that purpose a lot of mined Monero would not be converted into QUBIC and burned but rather converted into Qubic and distributed to the miners as extra rewards.

This is where the misalignment comes in between the numbers we see on DeFiLlama and my reported numbers. DeFiLlama is set up to only see the physical burns on QUBIC coins, but it does not track the coins that go to miners as extra rewards. Below you can see the cumulative numbers of QUBIC that were given as rewards to miners and burned. Quite a difference there.

DeFiLlama Tracked Revenue: $2.65 Million

Real Revenue: $3.53 Million