How Tari Lets You Mine Crypto in ‘Less Than a Minute’

Crypto mining is the foundation upon which the infrastructure of decentralized finance is built—but it has a high barrier to entry, requiring specialist equipment and technical expertise.

That runs counter to the whole ethos of crypto, according to DeFi project Tari—so for its own layer-1 blockchain, it’s developed a mining infrastructure that runs on any computer, and lets you start earning cryptocurrency in less than a minute using its Tari Universe software.

“We actually clock at around 45 seconds,” Tari contributor Naveen Jain told Decrypt. “So within 45 seconds after running the app, you are mining with both your CPU and your GPU.”

Tari Universe is “the world’s easiest to use mining app,” he said. The aim is for users to “download it for free from the internet on nearly any Mac or PC, install it and run it, and within no time, be up and running mining Tari, and then within a very small amount of time, start actually earning Tari rewards,” Jain explained. “No more configuration required, no more command line nonsense, no tuning required. It all happens magically behind the scenes within this beautiful graphical user interface that we’ve designed.”

A thing of beauty is a joy forever

Fire up Tari Universe and it’s clear that a lot of thought has gone into the user experience. The complexities of blockchain and crypto mining are abstracted away; in their place there’s a simple, streamlined visualisation of the blockchain as a tower being assembled before your very eyes.

Each time miners solve the complex equations that form Tari’s proof-of-work consensus mechanism, a new floor is added, creating an “infinitely growing tower for the rest of time,” Jain said. At the bottom of the screen, “block bubbles” show the block reward for the previous block. “You actually can see how much Tari was awarded in the last block, and how many transactions actually happened on the Tari network in that block,” Jain said. “So we’re really giving quite a lot of information within this very elegant interface,” he added. The goal is to depict the blockchain as a “living, breathing organism,” rather than a number-crunching mass of math.

The crypto space has historically built “crypto products for crypto people,” Jain said, adding that “a crypto person is someone who is really willing to kind of go through a very painful user experience to gamble in the casino.”

That means crypto diehards have become used to dealing with concepts that are mystifying to the mainstream users; multiple different flavors of ETH or USDC, chain swaps and bridges, coin mixers and liquidity pools. “There’s this whole set of like, genuinely terrible user experiences that we’ve built in this industry, where it requires a significant amount of knowledge and understanding in order to avoid pitfalls,” he said.

He likened Tari Universe to Amazon’s pioneering “1-Click” purchasing, which made online shopping accessible to a mainstream audience. “I think in the crypto space, there’s an opportunity to be a leader in terms of building the most convenient, genuinely easiest to use apps and products, and that gives you a leg up on the competition,” he said. “We want crypto native people to use Tari products, but we don’t want it to be exclusively for crypto native people.”

High street, confidential

Making an accessible product means nothing if there’s no underlying utility, of course, and Tari’s creators are keen to stress that while users can quickly get started mining, the crypto they’ll be earning isn’t some vaporware meme coin.

Tari is a proof-of-work blockchain, like Bitcoin, designed to underpin a “new financial system built to empower builders and creators.” It’s also designed with confidentiality baked in by default, unlike the majority of blockchains and cryptocurrencies, “to keep users safe.”

Cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Solana are “panopticons,” Jain said, exposing the user’s entire financial history and interactions with decentralized applications (dapps). As well as risking their safety in a world where “$5 wrench attacks” are increasingly common, it also renders cryptocurrency impractical for the average user.

“When you know you’re being watched, it changes your behavior,” Jain pointed out, adding that, “If you know someone’s wallet address, you can, on a granular, real time basis, track the ins and outs of their their financial decisions, what coins they’re buying, what things they’re gambling on, how much time they’re spending.”

Moreover, it’s “bad for business,” he said. “Anyone who’s outside of crypto takes one look at it and goes, ‘Wait, now everyone, all of my competitors are going to see every last detail of what’s happening in my business? I don’t want that.”

Tari is taking a more “pragmatic” stance than privacy-maximalist projects, Jain said—though it counts among its core contributors former Monero lead maintainer Riccardo “fluffypony” Spagni. The project supports “programmable confidentiality,” he explained. “It’s confidential on a peer-to-peer basis, so not everyone can just randomly spy on your stuff—but if a token issuer needs visibility into the TX graph for compliance, they can.”

Spagni pointed out that in the current crypto landscape, “a lot of the decisions around whether or not you’re going to transact privately fall on the user.” That, he said, runs counter to the way that most applications work. “We just don’t think that that’s where the decision matrix should sit,” he argued. “It should sit, as it does with traditional businesses, with the developer.”

Tari has sweeping ambitions—Jain envisages the platform evolving into “a fully programmable thing where people have instant access to Tari applications, all through this beautiful application called Tari Universe.” Ultimately, he suggested, the platform might do away with the idea of an app store altogether as AI agents become more prevalent. “Apps may cease to exist as we know them,” he said. “Is it really going to just be a grid of icons? What if apps just become capabilities for agents in the future?”

In the short term, with the latest updates to Tari Universe, Tari is committed to building the “easiest to use chain to get involved with,” Jain said. “And then the easiest chain where you can actually use apps that are built on top of the chain.”