F2Pool

F2Pool is one of the longest-running Bitcoin mining pools, co-founded in 2013 by Chun Wang and Mao Shihang. It is also known by the nickname “Discus Fish,” the origin of the “F2” (Fish-squared) name — a relic of the era when pool operators were pseudonymous forum figures rather than incorporated firms. At its early peak F2Pool reportedly commanded close to a third of network hashrate; in 2026 it sits among the larger pools at roughly 9–10%. Few operations in mining have survived from the CPU-to-ASIC transition era to the industrial present, which makes F2Pool's operating record itself a data point.

Payout schemes

F2Pool offers different reward models depending on the coin, including Pay Per Share (PPS), Full Pay Per Share (FPPS), PPS+, and Pay Per Last N Shares (PPLNS). PPS+ pays the fixed block subsidy on a per-share basis while distributing transaction-fee revenue proportionally, blending the predictability of PPS with fee participation similar to PPLNS. As always, the scheme choice is a variance dial — smoothed income at higher effective fees, or exposure to the pool's actual luck at lower ones — and current terms should be confirmed directly with the pool.

Multi-coin breadth and merge mining

Beyond Bitcoin, F2Pool supports dozens of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies — commonly cited at 40-plus — and it pioneered several merge-mining arrangements, in which miners of certain algorithms earn auxiliary-chain rewards on the same work with no additional energy spent. For miners running non-SHA-256 hardware, or SHA-256 fleets that want auxiliary income streams, this breadth has long been F2Pool's calling card. Historically, the pool is also significant as one of the anchor institutions of the Chinese mining era, and its trajectory through China's 2021 mining ban and the industry's geographic rebalancing traces the whole sector's history in miniature.

Context for today's miner

The pool's longevity offers a few practical lessons. F2Pool survived multiple halvings, the ASIC arms race, exchange collapses, and a state-level mining ban in its home market — a stress-test record that newer pools simply cannot show, and one reason risk-conscious operators weight operational history alongside fee schedules when choosing where to point petahashes. Its transparency tooling matured with the industry too: per-worker dashboards, luck statistics, and payout records that let a miner reconcile expected against received earnings rather than taking the pool's word for it. That reconciliation habit is worth practicing wherever you mine — comparing your share submissions, the pool's reported luck, and actual payouts is the miner's equivalent of verifying rather than trusting. For fleet operators running mixed-algorithm hardware, F2Pool's merge-mining support can also change the revenue math on marginal machines, since auxiliary rewards arrive without additional power draw — exactly the kind of edge that decides whether older hardware stays plugged in. That said, merge-mining economics shift with each auxiliary chain's fortunes, so treat any such revenue as a bonus to be re-verified periodically rather than a fixture of the business plan.

F2Pool's long record makes it a common reference point in pool comparisons, and its founders have been vocal participants in Bitcoin's public debates over the years. From a decentralization standpoint it carries the same structural property as other legacy pools: the operator builds the block templates that connected miners hash against, which is the pattern that Stratum V2 job declaration and DATUM-style approaches aim to change by putting template construction back in miners' hands. A miner weighing F2Pool is really weighing the legacy model's maturity and breadth against the newer template-sovereignty options — see mining pool decentralization for that landscape.

See live pool share in the pool centralization tracker.