The Bitcoin (BTC) mining business is a live ‘winner-takes-all’ race, with mining companies and pools competing against each other for the discovery of the next valid block that guarantees the right to collect the mining reward of 6.25 BTC plus transaction fees. Recent changes in the hashrate spectrum towards AntPool could further impact Bitcoin network decentralization.
Notably, the Digital Currency Group (DCG) subsidiary and American mining pool, Foundry USA, has led this race in the last three years. Foundry dominated the block discovery by 17.78%, for a total of 28,331 Bitcoin blocks mined since October 2020. This data is from mempool.space, collected by Finbold on October 6, 2023.
However, AntPool has suddenly increased its hashrate power in the last few days, surpassing Foundry USA in the block discovery to become the new leading pool in the Bitcoin mining race. AntPool has kept its second place, closely following the leader for all this time, mining 26,436 blocks (16.59%) in three years.
Interestingly, the new dominating pool is owned by the leading ASIC manufacturer BitMain, both located in China. ASICs are the special machines used to efficiently mine Bitcoin — and the more efficient ASICs connected to the network a miner has, the higher their chances of finding a valid block and collecting the reward.
Bitcoin mining pool: AntPool closely mined 1 out of every 3 blocks in the day
At the time of publication, the BitMain-owned mining pool has discovered 46 blocks (30.07%) in the last 24 hours. Excluding the paid transaction fees, this amount has accrued AntPool a total of 287.5 BTC as part of its mining rewards — which is worth close to $8 million, with BTC trading at around $27,700.
Additionally, these most recent results have also impacted the Bitcoin mining pool industry state in the last three days, as AntPool slightly overcame Foundry USA by a two-block difference. The Chinese mining pool has mined a total of 121 blocks (27.75%), while Foundry was responsible for 119 blocks (27.29%), according to the 3-day pools ranking.
Therefore, AntPool was able to collect over $20 million in block subsidy, highly rewarding the Bitcoin miners contributing to its generated Proof-of-Work (PoW), to the loss of their competitors allocating hashrate to other pools.
Just like Foundry USA, AntPool demands proper identification (KYC) of all Bitcoin miners plugging their machines in this mining cooperative. In this context, more registered mining companies could now choose to migrate their hashpower to BitMain’s pool, looking for a higher chance of block discovery.