UnminerMac: The First arm64-Native unMineable Client for Apple Silicon

Most "Mac mining" apps you'll find online are either re-skinned Intel binaries running through Rosetta 2 — bleeding 60% of your hashrate to emulation — or wrappers that quietly mine to someone else's wallet. Neither is what an Apple Silicon Mac actually deserves.

So we built UnminerMac — an open-source, native arm64 unMineable client for M1 through M5 Macs. It's the first public arm64-native VerusHash 2.2 miner for Apple Silicon (measured 7.3 MH/s on M5), it ships the latest xmrig 6.26, and it has zero hidden referrals, zero telemetry, and zero ad banners. It's the project we wanted to exist, so we made it.

This post explains what it does, why it exists, and what you can expect if you run it on your own Mac.

The Problem with Mining on a Mac in 2026

Three things broke "mining on a Mac" over the last few years:

1. Most miners are still Intel binaries. Run them on an M-series chip and macOS quietly drops them into Rosetta 2 — you lose 60–80% of your real hashrate to translation overhead. You'd be better off mining on a 2018 MacBook Pro. 2. Open-source mining apps got abandoned. The most popular Mac-native unMineable client (`macmineable`) hasn't shipped a release since 2022. It bundles a 2021 xmrig binary that no longer connects to the pool. It still has working CPU support code — but the binaries are dead. 3. The "Apple Silicon optimized" miners on the App Store have hidden monetization. Look at the GitHub history of any of them — referral codes baked into the source, telemetry phoning home, ad banners pulled from a CDN. You're effectively mining for two people, only one of whom is you.

Apple Silicon — particularly the M3, M4, and M5 with their 4–6 performance cores running at 4+ GHz — is genuinely competent at certain mining algorithms. RandomX (Monero, Ethereum Classic, etc. via unMineable) and especially VerusHash 2.2 actually like wide P-core silicon with fast L2 caches. They just need the software to be written for them, not Rosetta'd at them.

That's what UnminerMac is.

What UnminerMac Does

UnminerMac is a native macOS app (.dmg, ad-hoc signed, ~12 MB) that lets you mine to any unMineable-supported coin from your Apple Silicon Mac. You pick a coin, paste your payout address, and click Start. The app handles the rest:

- Auto P-core detection. It reads how many performance cores your specific chip has (4 on M-base, 6+ on M Pro/Max, etc.) and defaults the CPU slider to that number. E-cores hurt RandomX averages, so it keeps them out by default. - Live payout intelligence. It pulls the actual payment thresholds from unMineable's API every load and ranks coins by USD equivalent of the threshold, not by coin price. The coin with the lowest USD threshold pays you first — which is usually not the one beginners would guess. - Two miners in one app. RandomX coins route through xmrig 6.26 (the current March 2026 release, with the latest ARM64 assembly optimizations). VerusHash 2.2 coins route through our own arm64-native implementation — the first public one for Apple Silicon. - No hidden referrals. Every line of source is auditable on GitHub. The default referral code is the maintainer's, which gives you the 0.75% pool fee discount; you can swap in your own at any time. - Network-block aware. If your ISP DNS-filters crypto pools (Fortinet, certain mobile carriers), a red dot lights up and the tooltip tells you exactly how to fix it (Cloudflare WARP or any encrypted-DNS profile).

The First Native arm64 VerusHash 2.2 Miner

This is the part we're proudest of, so it gets its own section.

VerusHash 2.2 is the proof-of-work algorithm behind Verus Coin (VRSC). Verus has a CPU-friendly mining model, but every public VerusHash 2.2 miner was x86_64 — meaning on an Apple Silicon Mac, you were running it under Rosetta 2 emulation. Rosetta does roughly 1 MH/s on M5 for VerusHash 2.2 — usable, but a fraction of what the silicon can actually do.

We ported VerusHash 2.2 to native arm64 by re-implementing two critical primitives:

1. Hardware AES via the `sse2neon` shim — using ARMv8's built-in AES instructions instead of x86 AES-NI. 2. CL hash multiplication via the `vmull_p64` carry-less multiply intrinsic — replacing the x86 `pclmulqdq` instruction.

The result: 7.3 MH/s on an M5 with 4 P-cores active — roughly 7× the Rosetta baseline. We're working on Phase 4 (Metal GPU acceleration via bit-sliced AES) which preliminary tests show hitting 87.7G AES rounds/sec on the M5 GPU — but the CPU path alone is already a 7× speedup over the next-best option for Apple Silicon Verus miners.

The full research write-up — benchmarks, code paths, why bit-sliced AES on Metal is so fast — lives at helloworldxdwastaken.github.io/UnminerMac/research.html.

Why We Built This (and Open-Sourced It)

Verox Studio is a UX, product, and brand design studio. We build interfaces for SaaS, climate-tech, AI, gaming, and security companies. Crypto mining clients are not our day job.

We built UnminerMac for three reasons:

1. We needed something to point our M5 test machines at when they were idle. Render farms cost money. An idle laptop running a mining client at least warms the room and earns a few cents of XMR a day. But we couldn't find a Mac-native client we trusted, so we wrote one. 2. It's a real product, designed end-to-end. The Mac app, the GitHub Pages site, the live coin-ranking table, the research write-up, the install ritual — every layer is something we'd ship for a client. The fact that it's an open-source side project lets us experiment with UI patterns (live status dots, threshold-driven coin ranking, network-block-aware tooltips) without a six-week stakeholder review cycle. 3. The macOS mining ecosystem is genuinely underserved, and we wanted it to be better. Apple Silicon is a beautiful piece of hardware. It deserves software that's written for it, not translated to it.

The whole thing is licensed under Elastic License 2.0 — free for non-commercial use, no hidden cost, no advertising, no premium tier. If you want to ship it inside a commercial product, we sell a paid license; otherwise it's yours.

What You Can Actually Expect to Earn

We're going to be honest about this because every other mining post on the internet lies.

On an M5 with proper P-core tuning, you can expect 3–6 kH/s on RandomX coins. At current XMR price, that's roughly $0.04–$0.10 per day gross, before electricity. Per day. Don't quit your job.

What it's actually useful for:

- Learning crypto mining hands-on without burning $2,000 on a dedicated rig - Warming the room when your laptop is plugged in and idle overnight - Marginal monthly XMR/VRSC accumulation if you keep the laptop on a lot - Supporting unMineable / Verus pool decentralization by adding hash power from non-traditional hardware

What it's not useful for:

- Replacing a job, paying rent, or "getting rich" - Mining on battery (it will drain in 2 hours and the M-chip will throttle) - Mining on Intel Macs (the bundled xmrig binary is arm64-only)

We're putting these expectations up front because the entire crypto mining content ecosystem is built on inflated numbers. UnminerMac's job is to be honest about what your Mac can do.

Designed for the Native macOS Experience

The whole app is one window. We're allergic to multi-window mining clients with floating consoles and modal preference panes — they feel like Windows software ported to Mac.

The design language follows current macOS norms:

- Sticky glass nav with backdrop blur (the same `backdrop-filter` Apple uses in Finder sidebar / Safari toolbar) - System-font typography (SF Pro Text, with `-apple-system` fallback) - Coin ranking table that lets you compare 20 coins at a glance — sorted by time to your first payout given your specific hashrate, not by coin popularity - Live status dot (green = pool reachable, red = your ISP is filtering — fix it with WARP) - Single-click "Start" button that doesn't lock the UI; you can switch coins while mining

There's no dashboard tabs, no "premium analytics" upsell, no email signup wall. Drop in your address, hit Start, walk away.

Install in 30 Seconds

1. Grab the latest `.dmg` from the GitHub releases page 2. Drag UnminerMac to Applications 3. Launch from `/Applications`. If macOS Gatekeeper complains: System Settings → Privacy & Security → "Open Anyway" (it's ad-hoc signed, not notarized, because notarization costs $99/year and this is a free open-source app) 4. Paste your address, pick a coin from the ranking table, click Start

If the live-data dot is red, your network is DNS-filtering crypto pools. Cloudflare WARP fixes it in 90 seconds.

What's Coming Next

A few things on the roadmap that we'll ship over the next several months:

- Phase 4 Metal GPU acceleration — adding the M-series GPU to the VerusHash 2.2 pipeline (preliminary: 87.7G AES rounds/sec on M5 GPU) - Pool stats panel — a live view of your contribution to the pool round, your share count, and your estimated payout ETA - Solo VerusCoin mining — direct VRSC mining without going through unMineable, for users with enough hashrate to find blocks - An Intel Mac build — for the small population still on x86 Mac hardware

If there's a feature you want, open an issue on the repo and we'll consider it. We respond.

Try It Yourself

UnminerMac is at helloworldxdwastaken.github.io/UnminerMac. The latest `.dmg` is on the releases page. Source is on GitHub.

If you'd like to see more of what we ship at Verox Studio — including UX work for SaaS, climate tech, AI, gaming, and security companies — head to the Work page or start a project.

Open source side projects are how we keep the studio's craft sharp. UnminerMac is one of them. Run it, fork it, file issues — the only thing we ask is that you don't slap your own wallet address in someone else's binary and re-distribute it. That's the only thing the Elastic License really exists to prevent.

Happy mining.