Research date: 2 October 2026. New to mining? Start with how to mine ORE. All amounts in US dollars. This is a worked example with stated inputs, not a backtest, a forecast or investment advice.
What's verified
An earlier draft of this study had to guess how $ARMORED's rewards work. It no longer does: the contract and its reward settings were read directly from Solana, and both tokens' prices and trading costs were measured on 2 October.[1–6]
$ARMORED
- Contract
Bq4iwaa2hGWweyCeM9ZNyWnZSj6pCMeUDKZgmtb5pump, 1,000,000,000 supply, launched on pump.fun on 1 October 2026, paired with ORE. - Mint and freeze authority both revoked: nobody can print more or freeze wallets.
- A pump.fun Holder Rewards coin: 3% of every buy and sell goes to holders, paid in ORE, several times an hour, with nothing to claim.
- The 3% can't be changed (
can_edit_creator_fee = falseon the bonding curve). - No token transfer fee: sending $ARMORED between wallets costs nothing extra.
- Market cap about $24,500, pool liquidity about $12,000, roughly $46,700 traded in its first 24 hours.
ORE mining
- ORE at about $116, market cap about $58M, supply capped at 3,000,000.
- Rounds last a little over a minute; one of 25 tiles wins each round.
- Winning tile: 99% of the SOL comes back. Every other tile: 1% admin fee, then 10% of the rest, so 89.1% comes back.
- Mined ORE has to be claimed, and a 10% refining fee applies.
- Unsettled rewards can be forfeited after the round expires.
- The SOL-sharing payout from losing tiles was removed on 12 August 2026; older guides describe the old rules.
The entry ticket costs the same
Most comparisons skip this step. Both routes lose money on day one, and by almost exactly the same amount:
| Mining ORE | Holding $ARMORED | |
|---|---|---|
| What you pay | 1% + (24 ÷ 25 × 99% × 10%) of everything you deploy | 3% holder fee on the way in and out, plus pump.fun's fee and price impact on a small pool |
| Cost on $200 | 10.5% per full turnover | 10.8% round trip (6.3% in, 4.8% out) |
| How it was measured | From the ORE program's source code[2] | Live Jupiter quotes: $200 USDC bought 7.64M $ARMORED, which sold straight back for $178.46[6] |
| When you pay it again | Every time the returned SOL is deployed again | Never, for as long as you hold |
So the real question isn't which route is cheaper to enter. It's what pays the ticket back.
Route A: mining ORE with $200
Allow $2 for network costs and deploy the other $198 evenly over all 25 tiles. At unchanged SOL prices you get back:
$198 × (1 − 10.504%) = $177.20 in SOL
The ORE you win has to make up the other $22.80. After the 10% refining fee, at $116 per ORE, that takes 0.218 ORE before the fee.
How much ORE does $198 actually win? Each round mints 1.2 ORE (1 to the winning tile, 0.2 to the Motherlode), shared in proportion to the SOL on the grid. We read the last 60 rounds on chain on 2 October: the median round had 10.2 SOL deployed. $198 is about 1.67 SOL, so spread over many rounds it can expect about 0.20 ORE. That's close to break-even, and not by accident: when mining pays more than it costs, more SOL piles in until it doesn't. Our ORE mining guide has a calculator for any round.
0.20 × 90% × $116 = $20.88 of ORE → $177.20 + $20.88 = $198.08
| ORE won (before fee) | ORE kept | SOL back + ORE | Profit / loss |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.00 | 0.000 | $177.20 | −$22.80 |
| 0.10 | 0.090 | $187.64 | −$12.36 |
| 0.20 | 0.180 | $198.08 | −$1.92 |
| 0.40 | 0.360 | $218.96 | +$18.96 |
A Motherlode jackpot (roughly 1 round in 500) can lift a lucky month far above these rows. It's a lottery ticket inside the fee, not something to plan around, so it isn't added.
Route B: holding the kitten
Step 1: what $200 buys
The live quote turned $200 into $ARMORED worth $187.40 at the market price. That 6.3% covers the 3% holder fee, pump.fun's own fee and the price impact of buying into a $12,000 pool.
Step 2: your share of the rewards
Rewards are split by how much you hold. The reference case divides by the whole market cap, which understates your share a little, because tokens sitting in the pool don't earn:
$187.40 ÷ $24,500 = 0.765% of the rewards
Step 3: what trading pays you
The first day traded about $46,700. The reference case assumes volume settles at $5,000 a day, about a ninth of that, for 30 days:
$5,000 × 30 days × 3% = $4,500 paid to holders in ORE
$4,500 × 0.765% = $34.42 to you, about 0.30 ORE
That arrives in your wallet on its own. There's no round to pick, no claim and no refining fee, and because the coin trades against ORE, the fee is already in ORE when it's collected, so nothing is lost converting it.
Step 4: sell, and add it up
Selling at an unchanged price returns $178.40 after the 4.8% exit cost. Add the rewards:
$178.40 + $34.42 = $212.83, a gain of $12.83
Against mining's $198.08, the kitten finishes $14.74 ahead, with the same budget, a similar entry cost and no luck involved in the rewards.
| $ARMORED price change | Sale value | ORE rewards | Ending value | Profit / loss |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| −50% | $89.20 | $34.42 | $123.62 | −$76.38 |
| −25% | $133.80 | $34.42 | $168.22 | −$31.78 |
| 0% | $178.40 | $34.42 | $212.83 | +$12.83 |
| +25% | $223.01 | $34.42 | $257.43 | +$57.43 |
| +50% | $267.61 | $34.42 | $302.03 | +$102.03 |
The kitten stays ahead of mining unless its price falls more than about 8.3% over the month, or daily volume drops below about $2,900. Those are the two things to watch.
ORE paid to you over 30 days, by daily trading volume
Your inputs above, flat $ARMORED price. The dashed line is the volume where holding pulls ahead of mining.
Paid once vs paid every round
A single 30-day month flatters mining, because the study only lets its $198 go round once. Real miners redeploy what comes back, and every turnover pays the 10.5% fee again. Leaving out any ORE won, the SOL left looks like this:
SOL left from $198 after each full turnover
Horizontal axis: full turnovers of the bankroll. Mining fees only, before adding back any ORE won. Turnovers, not days: an active miner can turn the bankroll over many times a day.
Each of those turnovers has to win back its own fee in ORE. A holder pays the ticket once, on the way in and the way out, and every trade anyone makes in between pays them. Keep mining another month and you pay the fee again on every turnover; keep holding another month and you pay nothing more.
Mining makes you a player in every round. Holding the kitten makes you the house's partner: you collect a slice of everyone else's trading.
The bull case
The base case assumes nothing good happens: flat price, volume down to a ninth of launch day. Here's what the month looks like if the kitten simply keeps some of its launch momentum: $20,000 a day of trading (less than half of day one) and the price up 150%, which is a market cap of about $61,000.
| 30 days | $ARMORED price | Daily volume | ORE paid to you | Ending value | vs mining ($198.08) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bull | +150% | $20,000 | $137.68 | $583.69 | +$385.61 |
| Base | flat | $5,000 | $34.42 | $212.83 | +$14.74 |
| Bear | −50% | $1,500 | $10.33 | $99.53 | −$98.55 |
Load any of the three into the calculator with the buttons at the top.
Why early holders get the most out of a bull run
Your share of the rewards is set by how many tokens you hold, not by what you paid for them. Buy at a $24,500 market cap and you hold 0.765% of the supply whether the coin later trades at $50,000 or $1,000,000. If the coin grows, trading usually grows with it, and the same 0.765% slice is cut from a much bigger pie.
The table below assumes daily trading of 10% of market cap, a common level for established memecoins (on its first day $ARMORED traded almost twice its market cap). Same $200 bought today:
| If the market cap reached | Daily volume (10%) | Your $ARMORED worth | ORE paid to you per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| $50,000 | $5,000 | $382 | $34 |
| $100,000 | $10,000 | $765 | $69 |
| $250,000 | $25,000 | $1,912 | $172 |
| $1,000,000 | $100,000 | $7,649 | $688 |
These are "if" rows, not targets, and most memecoins never reach them. Token values are before selling costs. The point is the shape: a miner's ORE income never grows with the price of anything they hold, while an early holder's does. And because $ARMORED trades against ORE, an ORE rally lifts both the coin and the rewards it pays.
What has to go right
The kitten wins on structure. It can still lose on price, and a fair study says how:
| Risk | Mining ORE | Holding $ARMORED |
|---|---|---|
| Price | SOL and ORE | $ARMORED and ORE. It's priced in ORE, so if both fall 50%, $ARMORED's dollar price falls 75% |
| Where the payout comes from | Winning rounds against other miners | Trading volume. A new coin's volume usually fades after launch, and Jupiter labels most of today's volume as bots and routers (the 3% is charged on it all the same) |
| Concentration | 34,000+ holders | A young coin: on 2 October the deployer's wallet held about 48% of supply. It earns its share of rewards too, and a large sale from it would move the price hard |
| Liquidity | About $1M of ORE liquidity | About $12,000. Bigger buys and sells move the price more than $200 does |
| Who runs the payouts | The ORE program; you claim | pump.fun pays holder rewards automatically; the 3% is fixed on chain |
| Principal protected? | No | No; ORE rewards are income, not a price floor |
That's the honest trade: mining's outcome is mostly about luck and competition, while the kitten's is mostly about whether people keep trading it. Only one of those is something a community can actually build.
Why not just buy ORE?
If all you want is ORE's price, buy ORE: the same $200 bought 1.714 ORE for about 0.5% in costs. But that ORE balance never grows. Mining and the kitten are both ways to end up with more ORE than you started with, and only the kitten does it without spending the fee again every round.
The verdict
Same $200, same 30 days, live prices and measured costs: mining finishes at $198.08 and holding $ARMORED at $212.83. Both routes paid about 11% to get in. Mining has to win that back every round; the kitten won it back from other people's trading while its holders did nothing.
The kitten's result depends on two things you can check any day: its price and its trading volume. Plug in your own view above.
Sources
- $ARMORED bonding curve on Solana, read 1 October 2026 and decoded with pump.fun's public IDL:
is_holder_reward = true,creator_fee_bps = 300,can_edit_creator_fee = false, quote mint ORE. Mint: Token-2022 with metadata extensions only (no transfer fee), mint and freeze authority revoked. Token · Bonding curve - ORE program source,
program/src/checkpoint.rs: one winning tile per round, 1% admin fee on every tile, 10% protocol fee on the rest of non-winning tiles, expiry and forfeiture. GitHub - ORE source,
api/src/state/miner.rs: 10% refining fee on claims. GitHub - ORE changelog: SOL-sharing payouts from losing tiles removed 12 August 2026. ore.com/changelog
- pump.fun Holder Rewards documentation. GitHub
- Jupiter token and quote APIs, 2 October 2026: $ARMORED price $0.0000245, market cap ~$24,500, liquidity ~$12,000, first-24-hour volume ~$46,700, deployer balance ~47.8% of supply; ORE price $116.09, market cap ~$58M, 34,206 holders. Quotes: 200 USDC → 7,637,853 $ARMORED (6.29% price impact) → 178.46 USDC; 200 USDC → 1.714 ORE (0.50%). Prices move; re-quote before acting.
A worked example, not investment advice. Crypto prices and trading volume change quickly, and both routes can lose money. Calculations keep full precision; displayed values are rounded.