MinerGate Alternatives for CPU and GPU Mining

MinerGate was a mining pool with a Windows desktop app that mined Monero, Ethereum Classic, Zcash and other coins on a CPU or GPU. Its Smart Mining mode picked the coin for you. Its status comes first: minergate.com was unreachable in early November 2026, and there is no public shutdown notice. Part of the service closed years ago, since the Bitcoin pool shut on April 3, 2019, according to CaptainAltcoin's review.

The public record is poor. MinerGate's Trustpilot page shows 1.1 out of 5 from 171 reviews, and a February 2026 reviewer says years of mining paid out under $2. The profile was claimed in September 2018, yet the company has not replied to negative reviews. 99Bitcoins added a note in October 2023 about "numerous accusations of fraud" against MinerGate and its wallet partner Freewallet. If you came here looking for the MinerGate sign up page, do not create an account or send coins to any site claiming to be MinerGate until you can confirm it is genuine.

The eight picks below run on hardware you own and pay into a wallet you control, or at least publish their fees. None of them promises a profit. Mining income moves with coin prices, network difficulty and your power bill. Avoid cloud mining offers with fixed returns: HashFlare's founders pleaded guilty in February 2025 after selling more than $577 million in contracts backed by mining capacity they mostly did not have, per the US Justice Department.

Prices below are as of November 6, 2026. Our method is on How we review tools.

Quick comparison

Kryptex

MinerGate's selling point was a desktop client that chose the coin itself. Kryptex keeps that model alive on Windows: the app detects your CPU and GPU, switches algorithms on its own and can convert what it mines into bitcoin. Behind it sits Kryptex Pool, with PPS+, PROP and SOLO modes.

Cashing out is where it differs most from MinerGate's Freewallet setup. Withdrawals start at 0.00025 BTC and go to BTC, USDT, ETH, USDC, LTC, BNB or TRX wallets, or to Volet and Amazon gift cards. There is an Android miner and a phone app for watching your hardware. Our Kryptex alternatives page covers the options around it.

Best for: Former MinerGate users on one Windows PC who want the same install-and-run setup.

Pricing:

• Desktop app: free
• Pool fee: 1%, listed on the About Pool page; the homepage says only "a small pool fee"
• Minimum payout: 0.00025 BTC

Watch out for:

• The desktop app is Windows only, per the Kryptex homepage; Mac and Linux users need another pick.
• The homepage earnings examples, such as about $22 a month for an RTX 5090, leave out electricity.

Official site: Kryptex. Our listing: Kryptex.

XMRig

Most people who ran MinerGate on a laptop were mining Monero with the CPU. XMRig is the open source RandomX miner that now does that job for most of the Monero network's home miners. It is licensed under GPL-3.0 and ships binaries for Windows, Linux, macOS and FreeBSD.

Version 6.26.0, dated March 28, 2026, is the newest on the releases page. It runs on x86, ARM and RISC-V chips, so Apple Silicon Macs and small ARM boards work too. AMD GPUs are supported through OpenCL and NVIDIA cards through a CUDA plugin, though Monero mining is a CPU job first.

Best for: CPU miners who want Monero paid to their own wallet through a pool they pick.

Pricing:

• Free and open source (GPL-3.0)
• 1% default donation to the developers, which you can change

Watch out for:

• There is no graphical app. You edit a JSON config or pass command-line options, per the XMRig README.
• Antivirus tools often flag miners like XMRig, so download only from the official GitHub releases.

Official site: XMRig.

P2Pool

The biggest complaint about MinerGate was a balance stuck on its side. P2Pool removes that risk for Monero. It is a decentralized pool with no operator wallet: its project page says there is no pending balance, and you are paid when P2Pool finds a Monero block while you hold shares in its PPLNS window.

The fee is listed as 0%, and the smallest payout is 0.00027 XMR. Small miners get their own sidechains: if one share would take you more than a day, the page tells you to add --mini or --nano to the command. You point XMRig at your local P2Pool instance instead of a pool website.

Best for: Monero CPU miners who never want a third party to hold their coins again.

Pricing:

• Pool fee: 0%
• Minimum payout: 0.00027 XMR
• Free and open source

Watch out for:

• Setup is heavier than any pool site. P2Pool needs about 2.6 GB of RAM (0.6 GB in light mode) plus a Monero node, ideally your own.
• Payouts arrive only when the pool finds a block, so a laptop on the main chain can go days without one.

Official site: P2Pool.

NiceHash

NiceHash is a hashpower marketplace. You sell your GPU's or CPU's power, a buyer decides what it mines, and you are paid in bitcoin. It replaces MinerGate's coin picking with a single currency at the end.

Fees are published through a public fee API: 2% of sales, and 0.00003 BTC to withdraw to your own wallet from 0.001 BTC. It also offers NiceHash OS, ASIC firmware and mobile apps. We compare rival markets on our NiceHash alternatives page.

Best for: Gaming PC owners who want bitcoin, not a pile of small altcoins.

Pricing:

• Seller fee: 2%
• BTC withdrawal: 0.00003 BTC, from 0.001 BTC
• BTC deposits of 0.00005 BTC or more: free

Watch out for:

• Earnings sit in a custodial wallet until you withdraw. NiceHash was hacked in December 2017 and finished refunding 4,640 BTC only in December 2020, as CoinDesk reported.

Official site: NiceHash. Our listing: NiceHash.

2Miners

MinerGate's fees were hard to pin down. 2Miners prints them on its homepage: 1.0% for pool mining and 1.5% for solo, with automatic payouts every 2 hours.

GPU coins on the list include Kaspa, Ergo, Ravencoin, Ethereum Classic, Zcash and Nexa. Several are marked "Paid in BTC", so you can mine Ravencoin or Kaspa and still receive bitcoin. Minimum payouts vary by coin, for example 10 RVN or 0.1 ETC.

Best for: GPU miners who want to see the fee and the payout schedule before connecting.

Pricing:

• Pool (PPLNS): 1.0%
• Solo: 1.5%
• Minimum payouts by coin, such as 10 RVN or 0.1 ETC

Watch out for:

• Its statistics can go offline during maintenance, though the 2Miners homepage says mining is not affected when that happens.
• There is no app. You install a miner such as lolMiner and enter the pool address yourself.

Official site: 2Miners.

Salad

Some MinerGate users never cared which coin they mined; they wanted an idle PC to earn something. Salad pays for that without crypto. Its homepage says users run the desktop app while the PC is idle, and the jobs are AI and container workloads such as image generation, transcription and LLM inference.

Rewards build up as Salad Balance, which you redeem for PayPal, games or gift cards. Every GPU is benchmarked before it is accepted and given a trust rating afterwards.

Best for: Gamers with a recent NVIDIA RTX card who would rather earn gift cards or PayPal than coins.

Pricing:

• App: free
• Salad's cut and payout thresholds: not stated on the homepage

Watch out for:

• Hardware is the gate: the page lists NVIDIA cards from the RTX 3060 to the RTX 5090 plus some AMD classes, so CPU-only laptops that ran MinerGate do not qualify.
• Earnings depend on how much work customers send.

Official site: Salad.

lolMiner

For a GPU, the step up from MinerGate's built-in engine is a dedicated miner. lolMiner 1.98a is the current build on its releases page, with Etchash for Ethereum Classic, Autolykos V2 for Ergo, KarlsenhashV2, FishHash and Tari's Sha3x and Cuckaroo-29.

It supports NVIDIA cards from the GTX 1000 series to the RTX 5000 and AMD from the RX 400 to the RX 9000. You choose the algorithm and the pool, so it pairs naturally with 2Miners.

Best for: GPU owners ready to pick their own coin and pool.

Pricing:

• Free download
• Built-in dev fee: 2% on Cuckaroo-29 and Octopus, 1% on Sha3x

Watch out for:

• Builds are for 64-bit Windows and Linux only, and setup is a batch file or command line.

Official site: lolMiner.

Hive OS

Hive OS is for the MinerGate user who now owns a dedicated rig or two. It is a Linux-based system you install on each machine and run from a web dashboard, with flight sheets that save the coin, wallet, pool and miner version together.

Overclock profiles, remote reboots and monitoring sit on the same dashboard, and ASICs are supported as well as GPUs.

Best for: Owners of dedicated GPU rigs who want remote control instead of a desktop app.

Pricing:

• Free for 2 workers, 3 days of stats
• GPU rig: $0.50 per card per month, up to $3.00 for 6 or more cards
• CPU rig: $0.50 per month; ASIC: $2 per month, free with Hiveon firmware

Watch out for:

• It replaces Windows on the machine, so it does not suit a PC you also use for games.
• Paid plans are billed in crypto only, through CoinPayments, per the Hive OS pricing page.

Official site: Hive OS.

How to choose

When to stay with MinerGate

There is little reason to stay. The site was unreachable in early November 2026, and recent reviews describe balances that never arrived. If a version of minergate.com loads for you and still shows a balance, try to withdraw it to a wallet you control, and do not deposit or buy cloud hashrate there. Be wary of anyone who contacts you offering to recover MinerGate coins for an upfront fee.

Frequently asked questions