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.
Hashflare is the second cloud mining service provider to start offering Ethereum. After a long period of pre-orders being accepted this Monday (March 21st) the first batch of Ethereum cloud mining hashrate went online and now the company is now taking pre-orders for the second batch that is expected to start mining sometime between April 4th and 11th, so if you purchase now you will have to wait some time before you start earning anything. Unlike the SHA-256 and SCrypt cloud mining hashrate that the service offers where it pays in Bitcoin only, with Ethereum cloud mining you are getting payments in Ethereum coins
Trust
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
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.
Sign up and referral 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!
Verdict
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.