What were you doing in grade school? These Frisco kids are making $32,000 a month mining Ethereum

Ishaan Thakur, 14, and his little sister, Aanya, 9, typically ran a lemonade stand each summer that netted them about $100 for their college fund.

But in February, their dad told them a bedtime story about bitcoin prices spiking to over $50,000 and the Frisco duo dreamed up a new money-making idea: mining Ethereum.

“We wanted to invest in it, but we didn’t have the money to buy bitcoin,” Ishaan said. “So instead, we bought the equipment to mine for it instead.”

They started mining in March with an old gaming computer, making $1,000 in their first month. For the past month, they made more than $32,000. They use their earnings to buy more mining equipment for their company, Flifer Technologies, which they created on April 30.

“I thought I wouldn’t be able to do it because it’s too high level, but we watched YouTube videos and my dad and sister helped,” said Ishaan, a ninth-grader at Frisco High School.

Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency in the world with a value of around $44,455 per coin and a market value of $835 billion, according to Coindesk.com. Ethereum is the second largest with a value of around $3,055 and a $357 billion market value. They decided bitcoin had become too competitive so they chose to mine Ethereum.

Building a cryptomining rig came with one major COVID-era complication: a chip shortage.

Ishaan and Aanya, a fourth-grader at Spears Elementary, signed up for supply updates from Best Buy and Micro Center. When they got an evening email alerting them to parts, they’d line up hours before the store opened the next morning.

“There’s usually hundreds lined up but most are looking to resell the parts online for a higher price,” Ishaan said.

Other times, they’ve been able to find deals on eBay. Their dad, Manish Raj, a former Wall Street investment banker, took out a loan to help them purchase supplies to start.

The main equipment needed is graphics cards, which use software to guess the right code to get a bitcoin. They have 94 processors mining and mainly use Nvidia RTX 3090 graphics cards. When the computers guess the right code, they get a bitcoin.

It’s a guessing game, and their current setup makes about 9 billion guesses per second.

“Crypto mining is just like mining for gold or diamond,” Ishaan said. “Instead of using shovels, you mine with computers. Instead of finding a piece of gold or diamond in the mine, you find a piece of cryptocurrency.”

While YouTube videos showed them step-by-step directions, they estimate it takes about 10 hours per rig to set up. But once the rigs are set up, it becomes a passive income maker.

They have 14 rigs comprising 82 processors mining for Ethereum and five small rigs with 12 processors mining for Raven Coin (because those processors weren’t optimized for Ethereum). They’ve ordered four additional rigs from China with built-in processors.

“We want to grow this into a big thing,” Ishaan said.

A whirring sound is constant in their garage, where some of their rigs are kept for building and testing. Ishaan estimates they have about 30 cards in their garage setup, costing about $90,000 total, or $3,000 per card. Their main operations are now in an air-conditioned data center in downtown Dallas because the heat and noise were too great to keep confined to a garage.

Ishaan and Aanya said it was important for them to use renewable energy, which costs about 12 cents per kilowatt-hour versus traditional energy that costs about 10 cents.

The difference in cost is insignificant compared to what they make, especially because mining for Ethereum is more efficient than bitcoin. Last month’s electric bill, including their home and the data center, was $2,500. A typical home electric bill in the summer is $500 for them; with mining, it increased to $850. The downtown data center electric bill was $1,650.

This isn’t Ishaan’s first entrepreneurial pursuit. He also created a hat with a solar-powered mini fan on it to help keep people like construction workers cool in the heat. He and his dad applied for a U.S. patent for the product and plan to sell it. Outside of his business pursuits, he plays the saxophone.

The Thakurs are hoping their profits will help them pay for college. Ishaan hopes to go to the University of Pennsylvania and become a doctor. Aanya wants to go to New York and become a doctor as well. They’re equal partners in the company.

Some investors are wary of cryptocurrencies because of their volatility. But the brother-sister duo said they don’t have concerns about finding a buyer for their Ethereum when the time comes to pay for college because the market is very good. It has a larger market value than the largest companies, like Irving-based Exxon Mobil, which has a market value of $243 billion, they said.

So far, they’ve sold small amounts to pay for expenses such as the electric bill, graphic cards, software and the data center.

Cryptocurrency has grown in popularity this year, leading lawmakers to think more seriously about how to regulate it. Recently, Texas enacted HB 4474, the Virtual Currency Bill, which allows the 216 Texas state-chartered banks to provide safekeeping services for virtual currencies. This week, the U.S. Senate passed the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that requires more tax reporting for cryptocurrency transactions.

Ishaan said he tries to keep up with news on the cryptocurrency world. But neither he nor Aanya have told their friends about their latest venture.

“Most kids like to play games on their computer,” he said. “We like to build them, I guess.”