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Razer Offers Rewards to Gamers For Running Cryptocurrency Miner
The company's new SoftMiner app will harness your idle gaming PC to mine a cryptocurrency for Razer's third-party partner. In return, you'll get reward credits, which can be redeemed for gaming hardware. But you'll need a ton of credits to make the mining worth it.
Razer is raising some eyebrows with a new way you can earn reward points from the company: It wants you to install a cryptocurrency miner on your high-powered gaming PC.
On Wednesday, the vendor announced Razer SoftMiner, a desktop app that will let the company harness your idle machine for blockchain-building purposes. In return, you'll get Razer Silver credits, which you can redeem to obtain a keyboard, mouse or T-shirt from the company's digital store.
The SoftMiner app actually comes from a third-party called GammaNow, which has also been trying to monetize idle gaming PCs for cryptocurrency mining purposes. According to Motherboard, the mining will go toward generating ether, the token for the Ethereum blockchain.
"Once installed, SoftMiner runs silently in the background to solve complex computing challenges using idle GPU processing," wrote GammaNow's Gabriel Schillinger in a blog post. "Users are then rewarded with Razer Silver depending on the amount of time SoftMiner runs and the strength of the user's PC."
According to Razer, consumers can generate 500 Razer Silver credits or more in a day over the SoftMiner app. Unfortunately, 500 credits isn't enough to obtain any gaming hardware from Razer's rewards program.
You'll need 51,000 credits to get the vendor's DeathAdder gaming mouse. Razer's Huntsman Elite keyboard, on the other hand, goes for 280,000 credits. Assuming you generated 500 credits a day, that means you'd need to let the Softminer app run for 560 days to obtain the Huntsman Elite keyboard, which retails for $199.
That probably isn't worth it, especially since running a cryptocurrency miner on your PC can increase your electricity bill and hog internet bandwidth. When the app runs, your computer's performance will also drag.
Razer's SoftMiner is still in beta mode with support for up to 5,000 users per week. The company recommends it run on PCs with at least an Nvidia GTX 1050 or AMD RX460 graphics card. If you're still interested in downloading SoftMiner you can go here. Currently, the app is only available for Windows 7, 8 and 10 systems.
PCMag tried the app on a PC running an older Nvidia GTX 970 card. Unfortunately, we didn't receive any Razer Silver after running the app for 30 minutes.
UPDATE: Razer told PCMag that SoftMiner can actually choose to mine "several" different cryptocurrencies on a user's PC. "There is a pool of currencies the platform supports, including some of the leading alt coins of today. Razer is not involved in selecting nor managing the list of cyptocurrencies mined," a company spokesman said.
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"Razer SoftMiner is designed as a way for gamers to tap the power of their PCs to earn rewards that are easy to understand and easy to redeem, without having to deal with the complexity of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency," the spokesman added.