Ethermine Polygon Payout: How-To Guide & Tips

From 1st June 2021, the Ethermine pool added a new payment method, benefiting smaller miners and those who want to take advantage of the Polygon / Matic network solution.

In this article, you will find everything you wanted to know and get every question answered when it comes to Ethermine Polygon payouts and the new payout policy.

If you want to understand the benefits of the switch and setup, read on.

What is Ethermine?

Ethermine is the largest US Ether mining pool with servers located in Europe, Asia, and North America.

Ethermine announced payouts to the Polygon network. This is their official tweet:

Over 10,000 miners have changed their payout method to the @0xPolygon network in the past week and are actively participating in the DeFi ecosystem! 🥳

Saving more than 210,000,000 gas & ensuring #Ethermine stays the most profitable mining pool.

— Ethpool.eth (@ethpool_staking) June 9, 2021

What is Polygon?

Polygon (old name: Matic network) is the layer solution on top of the Ethereum blockchain.

Think of it like a line that goes parallel to the Ethereum chain. This means that any ETH address also exists on the Polygon network.

You can transfer the funds between Ethereum mainnet and Polygon mainnet via Polygon bridge.

The popularity of Polygon comes from the very low gas fees you pay for the exchange/transfer of your assets - around 0.0001 MATIC.

What is Matic?

Matic / Matic token is a plasma - the main currency on the Polygon chain. You will be using it when you want to transfer/exchange your assets on the Polygon chain.

Why do Ethermine payouts to Polygon?

There are 3 major reasons why would you want to use Polygon (Matic) payment method for your Ethermine payouts.

• lower pay fees
• lower payout threshold
• new reward utilization opportunities (make additional gains while mining)

Lower pay fees

The first reason is cheaper fees or rather almost no fees at all compared to Ethereum.

Your mining profitability is always closely tied with the pay fees you need to cover when getting a payout or exchanging it for other coins.

Up to this point, when you get paid on the Ethereum chain, with manual payouts you would need to cover the payout fee.

Then, if let’s say you wanted to exchange your ETH for other coins, you would need to also cover the gas fee. Playing with the gas limit is no fun and often resulted in more ETH being deducted.

Now, with the Polygon network, you don’t need to worry about any gas fees at all - every time you do a transfer/exchange, it will cost around 0.0001 MATIC.

Lower payout threshold

Up to this point, the only way to receive the payout was a customizable payout of a minimum of 0.01 ETH to the Ethereum network.

This was no issue for bigger miners who would likely hit this threshold every day but a lot of smaller miners would need a minimum of 1-2 weeks and simply wanted to receive payouts faster.

Thanks to Polygon (Matic), small miners are able to receive their payouts promptly, making daily payouts very much possible.

The customizable payout threshold will be removed once the new payout policy is in effect.

New reward utilization opportunities

Because you are being paid to Polygon (Matic) network, you can use these funds for investments like deposits, staking or DeFi yield farming, making additional gains while mining.

For example, you could exchange WETH for Matic token and stake them for % APY.

Similarly, you could earn Matic on AAVE Polygon instead of just keeping your coins on an exchange wallet.

How do Polygon payouts work on Ethermine?

First of all, for Polygon payouts, you will need Metamask. Ethermine only supports Metamask for now and plans to add much more wallets in the future.

If you use a hardware wallet like Ledger, you can connect your Ledger wallet with MetaMask directly and Ethermine can interact with your Ledger wallet with the help of Metamask without any additional changes required.

What I am being paid out in?

Ethermine payout to Polygon in WETH (Wrapped Ether).

Ethermine will send you an additional free 0.001 MATIC to help you with the gas fees so that you can use them to transfer WETH. This is why you will only see 0.0001 MATIC transfer in your Matic wallet balance.

You can look up your WETH balance either by adding WETH indicator to your MetaMask wallet on the Polygon mainnet or by connecting your MetaMask with Polygon Web Wallet V2.

How often does Ethermine payout to Polygon? What’s the threshold?

The new Ethermine payout policy is simple: with the Polygon network, the payout threshold is as low as 0.005 ETH per day.

Does Ethermine charge for payout to Polygon?

No. Ethermine does not charge any payout fees on Polygon. The network tx fee is paid by the pool.

How to setup Ethermine Polygon payout: Step by step

Step 1: Switch to Polygon L2 payout in Ethermine settings

Step 2: Connect MetaMask

Step 3: Point the correct address on Polygon.

Final note

The existence of Polygon enables new opportunities. This is, without a doubt a great way for miners to benefit their own pockets even further.

I foresee that other pools soon also add this option to their services.

Ethermine Polygon Payouts FAQ:

Here I would like to address the most common questions many miners ask regarding Ethermine payouts to the Polygon network.

Do I need to change my ETH address to receive Polygon payouts?

You can use your current ETH mining address for 0xPolygon payouts if you have access to your private keys and can import it to MetaMask wallet.

Do I have to put a Polygon address in my bat file?

No. You can keep the same ETH address as long as you can connect your wallet with MetaMask.

Can I mine directly to an exchange wallet?

You can NOT receive Polygon payouts if you mine directly to an exchange wallet!

Can I receive the payout to my Ledger wallet?

Yes. In order to do so, you need to connect the Ledger wallet to MetaMask.

Is MetaMask mandatory to receive manual payouts to Polygon?

Metamask address is mandatory only for manual payouts via Polygon. However for automatic payouts, any wallet is supported, and you will be paid out automatically without any intervention.

If you are comfortable with payouts happening via the Ethereum chain, then you can use any address and the payouts should happen as usual.

Can I change the payout threshold?

No. The 0.005 ETH per day is fixed and can’t be adjusted.

Can I transfer my MATIC on Polygon mainnet back to Ethereum mainnet?

Yes. However, there will be a rather high gas fee involved since you will be utilizing the Ethereum chain. If you really need to transfer, I suggest waiting until gas fees on the Ethereum chain are low (low transaction volume).

How to get in touch with Ethermine support?

The best would be to get in touch with Ethermine through Bitfly support portal.