Plug in your RPC.
The Equium desktop miner needs a Solana RPC endpoint to read on-chain state and submit mining transactions. The default public endpoint is heavily rate-limited; a free Helius key gives you 100,000 requests per day, which is more than enough for a single miner running around the clock.
Setup
- Sign up at helius.dev using the free tier. No credit card is required.
- In the Helius dashboard, open
Endpointsand either use the default project key or clickCreate new. Select Mainnet and copy the full URL. - Open the Equium Miner desktop app, click
Settingsin the top-right, paste the URL into Custom RPC URL, and save. The URL is stored locally in the app's data folder and is never transmitted anywhere other than Helius.
The URL will look like:
https://mainnet.helius-rpc.com/?api-key=YOUR-KEY-HERE
Why doesn't the website need this?
equium.xyz fronts a server-side RPC proxy with per-IP rate limits. That's affordable for the relatively small amount of traffic a casual browser miner generates. The desktop miner mines harder and more consistently, and that level of sustained throughput would saturate the free public endpoints. Bring-your-own-RPC keeps the cost attribution clean: heavy miners pay for their own infrastructure.
Alternatives to Helius
Any Solana RPC endpoint that accepts JSON-RPC over HTTPS works. Common alternatives include Triton, QuickNode, and Alchemy's Solana offering. Self-hosting a validator node also works, though the operational cost is well above the mining reward.