AntPool & Friends
Shows the assumed hashrate percentage of “AntPool & friends” along with other top mining pools.“AntPool & friends” is a group of mining pools consisting of AntPool and a few smaller pools. These pools have some kind of business relationship with AntPool / Bitmain and have been observed to provide similar templates to miners in their stratum jobs and to have the same weird quirks. These pools simply proxy the AntPool mining jobs and don’t run their own nodes to produce block templates. With “AntPool & friends” controlling over a third of the Bitcoin network hashrate, this is concerning in terms of hashrate centralization. Since many of the smaller pools kept using their normal coinbase tags and coinbase output addresses, this behavior is not possible to detect by looking at the chain. It’s not clear when exactly this behavior started happening, but it’s assumed that the first pools started to join AntPool around Q3 2022. During May 2024, “AntPool & friends” controlled about 40% of the Bitcoin network hashrate.
Pools currently assumed to be part of the “AntPool & friends” group are:
- AntPool
- Poolin
- Braiins
- Ultimus Pool
- Binance Pool
- SecPool
- SigmaPool
- Rawpool
- Luxor
- CloverPool (formerly BTC.com)
- Mining Squared
