Foundry USA Pool

Foundry USA Pool is a Bitcoin mining pool operated by Foundry Digital LLC, a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group (DCG). It opened to the public in 2021 after a private launch and grew to become the largest pool by share of blocks mined, with roughly 30% of network hashrate as of 2026. Foundry's identity is institutional and North American: beyond the pool itself, the company has offered equipment procurement, infrastructure financing, and firmware and site-management services to large-scale miners, making it as much a mining-industry services firm as a pool operator.

Payout model

Foundry USA distributes rewards using Full Pay Per Share (FPPS). Under FPPS, the pool pays each miner a fixed amount per share, based on the block subsidy plus an estimate of average transaction fees over a rolling window. The pool absorbs luck variance — miners are paid whether or not the pool found a block that day — which is precisely what industrial operations with power bills and debt service need from a payout scheme. Foundry has advertised 0% pool fees for qualifying large-scale participants, with terms tiered by contributed hashrate; like all commercial terms, current rates should be confirmed at the source. Its institutional posture also shows in requirements such as KYC onboarding, which distinguishes it from open-registration pools.

Scale and the centralization question

Foundry's scale keeps it at the center of the hashrate-concentration discussion. It and one other large pool have together, at times, accounted for more than half of network blocks — a fact worth stating without embellishment. The technical crux is not who aggregates hashrate but who constructs block templates: in the traditional pool model the operator decides which transactions candidate blocks contain, so template construction concentrates in a handful of firms. That is the specific concern protocols like Stratum V2 job declaration and DATUM address by returning template construction to individual miners, and that pools like OCEAN have built their identity around. Foundry has publicly signaled interest in approaches that decentralize template construction — a signal worth tracking, since adoption by the largest pool would move the needle more than any protest.

What it means for smaller miners

Foundry's rise is also a story about where mining's center of gravity moved. The pool's growth coincided with the industrial build-out of North American mining after 2020 and accelerated sharply when China's 2021 mining ban redistributed global hashrate; a pool offering FPPS stability, US-domiciled counterparty relationships, and financing lines was positioned exactly where displaced and newly financed hashrate wanted to land. That history explains the pool's character better than any feature list: it is infrastructure built for miners with boards, lenders, and megawatt contracts. The concentration numbers that result should be read with one technical footnote — a pool aggregates and coordinates hashrate but does not own it, and miners can and do repoint machines within minutes when terms or trust change. That mobility is the network's quiet safeguard, and it only works if miners treat pool selection as an ongoing decision rather than a default they set once and forget. For the ecosystem's health, the most useful posture toward Foundry is informed attention: track its share, watch its template-decentralization moves, and keep your own hashrate mobile.

Foundry's tiered structure targets operations far larger than a garage full of S19s, and home miners are generally better served comparing fee structures and payout floors at retail-oriented pools — or pointing hardware at pools that let them build their own templates. The healthiest reading of Foundry is neither villain nor savior: it is what professional-grade pooled mining looks like under FPPS economics, and a standing reminder of why mining-pool decentralization remains Bitcoin's most consequential unfinished work.

See live pool share in the pool centralization tracker.