Bitcoin-like mining is taking off on Solana with Ore

Bitcoin-like mining has come to the Solana SOL -7.29% blockchain with a project called Ore, and its success is increasing strain on the network 

Ore takes the core idea behind mining, where a miner solves cryptographic puzzles to secure the network while earning crypto, and applies it to its own token’s launch on the Solana blockchain. 

Miners can take home a share of 1 ORE per minute, distributed by the number of puzzles they each solve. The supply of ORE is set to reach 21 million tokens after 42 years but it has no maximum supply limit.

So far, over 4,100 ORE has been mined, and nearly 3,000 of those tokens have been claimed. The Ore treasury holds 1,145 ORE and other top accounts have as much as 150 ORE.

Pressure on Solana

Ore has captured the attention of the Solana community, which has started mining it en masse. It’s widely available to everyone to mine and isn’t currently limited to large miners. As a result, this has increased the number of transactions being processed on the blockchain — which has put pressure on the network.

“The Solana network is, once again, being battle tested with a huge influx of traffic” Austin Federa, head of strategy at the Solana Foundation, posted on X . “Bug fixes are rolling out over the next week, and things will start to improve. But there is no silver bullet and no "finished" – we expect demand will continue to increase, which will require more work to scale up systems to meet this demand.”

Ore started trading on April 2 and reached a peak price of $3,786 on April 5, according to DEX Screener . It’s currently trading at just shy of $2,000.