Problems with Aleo ASIC miners (March 2026): what happened and what next
In mid-March 2026, owners of Aleo ASIC miners began reporting that their machines had stopped submitting work and their hashrate had dropped to zero. Reports multiplied on Discord and mining forums from Friday 13 March, and some pools temporarily switched to maintenance mode. According to miners, the cause was not a hardware fault but a change on the network and pool side. However, we have not been able to find an official statement from the Aleo developers describing a specific algorithm change.
What happened
Aleo is a network built on zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs. Miners – “provers” in Aleo terminology – solve a computational task (a puzzle) and are rewarded for valid solutions. Aleo ASIC miners are very narrowly optimised for the specific form of this task. As soon as the task parameters or the consensus rules change, the existing firmware is no longer compatible and the machine has to wait for an update.
Public sources document two changes from the period before the outage:
- V13 consensus upgrade – the mainnet hard fork took place on 20 February 2026 (snarkOS v4.5). Among other things, it introduced a total supply cap of 5 billion ALEO under proposal ARC-0047.
- Staking for miners (ARC-0046) – since 31 July 2025, every prover must keep ALEO locked for each solution in an epoch. From 31 January 2026 this was 500,000 ALEO, and the requirement rises every quarter until July 2027. This mainly affects pools.
Public sources do not make it clear whether the March outage was related to either of these changes or was a different problem on the pool side.
Status at manufacturers and pools according to forum reports
- ASIC manufacturers: owners reported zero hashrate, and manufacturers were preparing new firmware versions. The first beta versions appeared for IceRiver, but their stability was not yet one hundred per cent.
- Mining pools: the problem did not affect the machines alone. Some pools had to switch to maintenance mode on Friday to adapt to the changes.
How long it will take
Based on experience with earlier network upgrades, the community estimated that stabilisation and the release of final firmware versions would take 2 to 4 weeks. This is an estimate, not a date announced by the manufacturers.
What ASIC owners should do
- Switch off machines that are running idle. A miner that mines nothing just consumes electricity. You can work out how much that costs for your machine using our article on ASIC power consumption.
- Don't download unofficial “fixes”. Firmware from unverified sources may contain malware or secretly redirect part of your hashrate to someone else's account. We describe how to handle firmware and machine management safely in our article on ASIC management software.
- Follow the official channels. Manufacturers' websites, your pool's pages and the official Aleo project Discord.
What next
- What is Aleo (ALEO) – how the network works and what it is mined with.
- ASIC miner management software – firmware, monitoring and updates.
Sources
Frequently asked questions
Why does my Aleo ASIC show zero hashrate?
Should I leave the miner switched on during an outage?
This text was prepared with the help of AI. Facts, figures and procedures were checked by Yegor.
