What is a mining index?
The PoW Mining Index is a simple way to track how much money (in USD) Proof-of-Work networks collectively pay to miners each day, compared to their own recent history.
Miners secure PoW chains by spending real resources (electricity, hardware, operations). The daily emission in USD can be understood as the daily payout that PoW networks distribute to miners. When this payout rises or falls, it changes the economics of mining and helps describe how “intense” PoW mining activity is across the market.
The core idea
First, take the daily emission in USD for each PoW coin and sum them to get a single number for the whole PoW sector:
$$ \text{EmissionSum}(d) ;=; \sum_{c \in \text{PoW}} \text{EmissionUSD}_c(d) $$That gives one value per day:
- EmissionSum(d) = total USD paid to miners (across tracked PoW coins) on day (d)
But raw USD values are hard to compare across time, so the Mining Index converts that into a 0–100 score.
How the Mining Index is calculated
Choose a trailing window length called cycle_days (for example 365 or 1460 days).
For each day (d), find the maximum total miner payout seen in the trailing window:
$$ M(d) ;=; \max\Big(\text{EmissionSum}(t)\Big) \quad \text{for } t \in [d-\text{cycle_days}+1,; d] $$Then compute the index:
$$ \text{MiningIndex}(d)= \begin{cases} 100\cdot\frac{\text{EmissionSum}(d)}{M(d)}, & M(d)>0\\ 0, & M(d)=0 \end{cases} $$How to read it
- 100 means: today’s total miner payout is at the highest level seen in the trailing window
- 50 means: today is half of that peak
- 10 means: today is only 10% of that peak
This is computed for every day (it’s not done in “blocks”). Each day has its own trailing window and its own maximum.
What happens at the beginning of the chart?
In the early part of the dataset, there isn’t enough history to fill the full trailing window yet.
So the maximum is taken over the available history so far. As more data becomes available, the trailing window gradually reaches its full size.
Why the Mining Index can “diverge” from EmissionSum
The two lines represent different things:
- EmissionSum is the raw total USD paid to miners each day
- MiningIndex is that number relative to the trailing maximum
So it’s normal to see them behave differently. For example:
- If a very high day occurs recently, the trailing maximum (M(d)) rises, and the index can drop even if EmissionSum stays flat.
- If EmissionSum rises, the index may rise only slightly if past peak days were still much higher.
That’s the point: the index answers “where are we compared to the strongest miner-payout period in the recent past?” rather than just showing the payout itself.
Why it matters
Because EmissionSum is essentially the daily payout PoW networks distribute to miners, it reflects how attractive PoW mining is at a sector level. The Mining Index makes that payout easy to compare across time by showing whether miner rewards are near recent highs or far below them—in a single 0–100 number.