Two Mining Pools Dictate Bitcoin Hashrate
Bitcoin hashrate is becoming increasingly centralised, with a small number of mining pools controlling the majority of blockchain mining power. According to the most recent Mempool data, Foundry USA and Antpool control 50% of the total hashrate.
For several weeks, Foundry USA has maintained a hashrate of more than 30% of the total Bitcoin network. Following China’s ban on Bitcoin mining in the middle of the same year, it became the first mining pool of non-Chinese origin to top the list in November 2021.
Foundry USA contributed 17% of the total Bitcoin hashrate at the time. Today, the US-based pool accounts for 34.1% of mining power, which equates to about 104 EH/s when the Bitcoin hashrate is around 300 EH/S.
Antpool comes in second, accounting for about 18.0% of total hashrate, or about 58 EH/s. The Chinese-based pool used to be the largest Bitcoin pool, but it was impacted by the crypto mining ban, which caused several miners in the region to migrate.
Some factors may have contributed to this increase. One of these is the location of the pools’ servers. The lower the latency of information transfer, the closer the servers are to the pools and mining facilities. This means that by connecting to a closer server, a miner will likely gain more shares in the mining process and earn more Bitcoin (BTC).
Another factor is the financial incentives provided by these major mining pools. Larger mining pools can consistently distribute profits to their members, who pay a commission for mining with their resources, attracting more miners. This is evident in the recent increase in mining difficulty as a result of Bitcoin’s bullish movement, making it difficult for smaller mining pools to be profitable.
(With inputs from Shikha Singh)
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