Zionodes.com Bitcoin mining hosting review. I came across this company recently and could not find any information online about them. So I decided to write this review to help other miners with their decision.
After I ordered 10 Avalon 1246 from Wattum, I kept searching for other companies where I could buy and host my miners and these miners to be online still in 2021. A lot my research was done on Reddit, specifically the r/BitcoinMining subreddit. I have been a heavy Reddit user for almost 10 years now. And I can’t believe that I didn’t consider mining BTC earlier than today.
While browsing Reddit I came across a company claiming to offer hosted mining services called Zionodes.com. The post I saw was clearly a marketing post made by someone working at Zionodes and didn’t think much about it. But since I had problems buying affordable equipment on time, I started to do a little bit of digging and research.
Zionodes.com BTC mining prices
Before I started to do research on these guys, I wanted to find out what they offer and whether it is even worth pursuing. The original post claimed that the company is launching a bitcoin mining hardware marketplace which is “designed to offer the easiest access to all the information such as mining operations, profits, dashboard, electricity consumption, etc.” In short, they are trying to connect people like me who want to invest in hosted BTC mining hardware with actual mining farms operators.
So I went ahead, created account needed to access the marketplace and checked the prices of the available hardware. And the prices just looked way too good to be true. The company was offering Bitmain S19 95TH for $9,100 to $10,000, which is around $100 per TH. Significantly lower than todays market value, and lower than the deal from Wattum I just did. (Screenshot below doesn’t have the cheapest ones for $9,100 available anymore, but you have to trust me they were there).
On top of that, the hosting price was only $0.066/KWh, which is again less than the Wattum deal I got. This was supposedly thanks to the farm being located in Moldava – an Eastern European country with very Bitcoin mining friendly government and rules. On top of everything, miners offered through Zionodes are already connected and mining. Buyer should be able to get access to them right after purchase and start mining right away. No deployments and no delays which are so common for this industry. It all just felt way too good to be true – cheap miners, cheap electricity and immediate connection.
And you know what they say (especially on Reddit) – if it is too good to be true, it’s a scam. Well I decided to do some research on the company anyways, to see what I can find out.
What is Zionodes – history, reviews and leadership
Well to start thing out, I am going to say one thing – there is just NOT too much information about Zionodes to be found online. There are no credible reviews. Whether from some website or blogger, not even on Reddit or other discussion blogs.
On their homepage they claim to be The World‘s Leading Marketplace for Bitcoin Mining. Which sounds very hard to believe, since nobody ever heard about them.
So I started researching ZNDS Global Technology Ltd, which owns Zionodes.com. I looked the company up and it is registered in Singapore. It was started in June 2020, and it is still live. That’s pretty much all I could find out about the Ltd company.
What I liked about the company were the founders. Specifically the Zionodes CEO Olga Kochmar. Olga has been the CEO of Zionodes since December 2019. She is also the founding member of The Bitcoin Association of Hong Kong. Googling her name brings up several cryptocurrency conferences which she attended as a speaker. And several zoom videos about Bitcoin and mining. She also has Zionodes on her LinkedIn profile. That was enough for me to think – there is actual person behind this company, publicly associating with it, and somewhat known in the cryptocurrency circles. It was a big confidence boost.
I checked Zionodes on Facebook and other social networks too. They are not too active there, but recently they announced that they hired a new Strategic Advisor – Stephen Robertson. I don’t know Stephen, but looking at his LinkedIn profile he seems to be a real person, with real career in different companies and plenty of references. And he is also publicly showing on his LinkedIn that he works for Zionodes. This all still could be a scam, but I was getting even more confident. At least confident enough to try the services they offer.
What was positive during my whole investigation was that not a single time I came across somebody claiming that Zionodes is a scam. If they were really scammers, there would be some kind of negative post or comment about it.
At the end I really did not find any information that the company is not a scam. At the same time I didn’t find anything that would make me be 100% sure that this is a scam. So I decided to sacrifice $10,000 for the good of the universe and the BTC mining community and buy 1 miner to test things out.
Buying a BTC miner from Zionodes
To buy a miner from Zionodes, you just need to add it to your cart and then top-up the account with funds. You also need to prepay 2 months of electricity. The company is using B2Broker to process payments. There are several cryptocurrencies that B2Broker supports as a form of payment, including BTC, USDT, USDC and others. I decided to use USDC because Coinbase doesn’t have any fee for converting USD to USDC.
B2Broker generated a one-time use USDC address where the customer should send the funds. So I sent money to the USDC address generated by B2Broker, and then I waited. And I was sweating…and waiting…and sweating…and refreshing my Zionodes billing page to see whether my balance is going to increase or not…and some more sweating.
Around 10 minutes later, after one of my many refreshes, my face produced a giant smile – my account balance actually increased. (screenshot below is my current balance, I did not thing about taking screenshot back then)
However my balance was about 2% lower than what I sent from Coinbase. I send $9438, because that was the price of 1 x S19 + 2 months of hosting. But my balance was only increased by $9240. That is almost exactly 2% lower than what I sent. This is a big red flag. But since I already sent over $9000, I decided to top up my account with another few hundred dollars so I have enough to buy 1 miner. I assume that B2Broker is charging Zionodes 2% processing fee. That is however not disclosed anywhere on the page.
After my additional funds appeared I had enough in my account to pay for 1 miner. I went ahead and paid for one S19 and 2 months of hosting. Right after that the miner immediately appeared in the My Hardware section of the Zionodes account. I was shaking a little bit, and super excited at the same time.
Adding mining pool details
Zionodes interface lets you enter pool details for your miners. So you can chose any pool you want. At this point I knew absolutely nothing about mining pools. And I don’t have time or the patience to do hours long research on which one to use.
So I jump on Reddit (where else) and search for some recommendations. Several people saying Slushpool is the way to go, I go ahead and open an account there. Interface is pretty simple and I find out how to add a worker to my account.
Zionodes interface is super simple as well and I add the Slushpool information to my miner there. Less than 2 minutes later, the magic is happening:
Less than 10 minutes after paying for my Zionodes miner, it is already successfully mining on Slashpool and I am excited. I risked $10,000 to find out whether this is real or just too good to be true. And it looks like it is real. It is only day one, anything can still go wrong. But the bottom line is that the miners they are offering them are real. They are connected. They are producing as much TH as advertised. And they are already live and connected, just waiting for you.
Hi Bitbizguy, did you notice a difference between order price and actual paid for the miner? I am seeing $564 USDT differences on each of my orders … suggest you take a closer look at yours.
Order: Items cost (website and in the order confirmed by email): 9964.00 USDT
Actual payment to MineBest for S19 Antminer (Billing tab): $10,528.00 USDT
Difference: $564.00 USDT