How much can you earn on Gonka: realistic calculations

Pools are the simplest route for those who don't want to deal with the technical side. A pool operator rents GPU, sets up ML nodes, ensures uptime, and mines GNK on behalf of all participants. Revenue is distributed in proportion to each contribution, minus the operator's fee.

The main pools and their terms:

• Gonka.Top: minimum entry from $100. Pool fills in 2 weeks, payouts monthly over 180 days. Guaranteed no missed epochs (critically important — a missed epoch means a lost reward). Referral program: 25% of the income from referred L1 + 5% L2. Also offers dedicated servers (see below).
• Ancapex: the lowest entry threshold on the market — from $1, daily payouts. Great for testing the mechanics with a minimal amount.
• GonkaPool.ai: the classic "10% upfront + 10% of mining" scheme, entry from $500. 180-day vesting.
• CloudMine (Mingles): contracts by "weight" 50–10000, payment in USDC on Base.

The full up-to-date table with fees and terms for six pools is on the provider comparison page (there you'll also find a dedicated "Hashiro Alternatives" section for those who used it before).

The pool income formula: (your pool share * GNK rewards for the period * GNK price) - operator's fee. Say you put $500 into a $50,000 pool (1%). If the pool mines 100,000 GNK in a month, your share is 1,000 GNK. At $0.60 that's $600 before fees. At $0.30 — $300. At $1.50 — $1,500. The GNK price is the main multiplier.

Important: the exact operator fee depends on the pool. Check the terms before investing. The calculations above are illustrative, not guaranteed.

Gonka.Top offers not only pools but also dedicated fully managed servers — from $12,000/month. Here's what that sum includes:

• Rental and setup of server hardware (H100/H200 GPU)
• Installation and configuration of the inferenced CLI
• 24/7 monitoring and an uptime guarantee
• Maintenance and software updates
• Mining goes directly to your wallet — no sharing with other participants

Spheron provides bare-metal H100/H200 servers so you can connect to Gonka yourself through its TGE referral program. This is the option for those who want to set everything up themselves but rent the hardware.

The advantage of a dedicated server over a pool: 100% of the reward goes to you (minus the rental cost). No splitting with dozens of other participants. The downside: the entry threshold is an order of magnitude higher ($12,000/month vs $100 one-time). Profitability also depends on the GNK price and network load — when the GNK price is low, monthly costs can exceed the income.

This path suits those who are ready to invest a substantial sum and want maximum control over their income but don't want to deal with setting up servers themselves.

The most profitable, but also the most demanding path: connect your own GPU server directly to the Gonka network. No pool fees, no rental payments — the entire reward is yours. But so is all the responsibility.

Technical requirements:

• GPU: NVIDIA newer than Tesla, at least 320 GB of VRAM total per ML node — for example, 4× H100 or A100 80GB, 3× H200, 2× B200. Consumer cards (RTX 4090 = 24GB) won't work
• CPU: AVX support is mandatory — a set of instructions for accelerating computations. Without AVX, inferenced won't start
• Storage: hundreds of gigabytes for the weights of a large MoE model (total across all layers)
• Software: Docker, inferenced CLI, CUDA drivers
• Network: stable internet with low latency
• Uptime: 24/7 — missing an epoch = losing the reward for that period

Hardware cost: H100 — ~$25,000—35,000 to buy, or ~$2—3/hour to rent from cloud providers. A100 is cheaper (~$10,000—15,000), but less powerful. For a detailed setup guide, see our mining guide, and for GPU recommendations, see the best GPUs for Gonka section.

This path pays off under two conditions: 1) the GNK price is high enough to cover electricity and hardware costs; 2) the network is busy enough that your node regularly receives tasks. Currently there are 584 GPUs on the network: every new host intensifies competition for tasks, but demand for AI compute is growing too.

Income from participating in Gonka is determined by several key factors, each of which deserves understanding:

• GNK price: the main multiplier. All rewards are paid in GNK. If the price rises from $0.60 to $6.00, your dollar income grows 10x with the same number of tokens mined. The reverse is also true: a price drop cuts dollar income proportionally. Current price ~$0.22 (SafeTrade, HEX OTC).
• Network load: the more AI requests the Gonka network processes, the more GNK is distributed to hosts. Growing user numbers, third-party service integrations, government projects (Uzbekistan) — all of this increases load.
• Number of GPUs on the network: currently 584. The more hosts connect, the greater the competition for rewards. But network throughput grows at the same time, attracting more users.
• Hardware efficiency: more powerful GPUs process more requests per unit of time. H100 (80GB VRAM) is significantly more productive than A100 (80GB). H200 (141GB) is even faster. The efficiency difference can be 2—3x.
• Uptime: missing epochs = losing the reward for that period. Stable 24/7 uptime is a must for maximum income. Pools with guaranteed uptime (Gonka.Top) solve this problem for you.
• Market conditions: the crypto market is cyclical. Bull phases can multiply GNK's value, bear phases can wipe it out. TGE and listings on tier-1 CEXs (Binance, Coinbase) can be a growth catalyst — but they may also not happen within the expected timeframe.

Disclaimer: past performance does not guarantee future results. All calculations on this page are illustrative. Nothing on this site is financial advice. Only invest what you are prepared to lose.