AntPool

AntPool is a Bitcoin mining pool launched in 2014 by Bitmain, the company behind the Antminer line of ASIC miners. Its close ties to the dominant hardware manufacturer have helped it remain one of the largest pools by hashrate for over a decade, commonly cited at roughly 17–18% of the Bitcoin network as of 2026. Alongside Bitcoin, AntPool supports mining for several other proof-of-work coins, and it sits inside Bitmain's broader vertical stack of chip design, hardware manufacturing, and hosting.

Payout options

AntPool lets miners choose among multiple reward schemes, including Pay Per Share (PPS), Full Pay Per Share (FPPS), PPS+, and Pay Per Last N Shares (PPLNS). The choice is a risk dial: PPS-family schemes pay a predictable amount per share and let the pool absorb luck variance, while PPLNS exposes the miner to the pool's actual block-finding fortune in exchange for typically lower fees. Published fees vary by scheme — historically a flat percentage on FPPS and lower or zero rates on PPLNS — but commercial terms change, and any miner comparing options should confirm current rates and payout thresholds at the source rather than trusting summaries, including this one.

Vertical integration and the centralization context

AntPool features prominently in discussions of mining concentration for two compounding reasons. First is raw share: combined with the other largest pool, its hashrate has periodically exceeded half of all blocks found. Second is vertical integration: when the same corporate family designs the chips, sells the machines, hosts the fleets, and operates the pool, the ecosystem's checks and balances thin out. As with most legacy pools, AntPool constructs the block templates that connected miners hash against — connected hardware contributes work but does not choose which transactions its blocks contain. That template concentration is the technical root of the concern, and it is what newer approaches like Stratum V2 job declaration and DATUM exist to unwind by letting miners build their own templates. These are structural observations about incentives, not accusations of misconduct.

What it means in practice

AntPool's history also tracks the industry's institutional turn. It rose alongside Bitmain's hardware dominance in the 2014–2018 era, weathered the 2021 Chinese mining ban that forced its customer base to redeploy globally, and adapted as FPPS-style smoothed payouts became the expectation of financed, industrial miners. For students of mining history, AntPool is also a recurring character in Bitcoin's governance episodes — pools signaled for protocol proposals during the block-size era, which taught the ecosystem a lasting lesson about how much expressive power block construction confers and foreshadowed today's template-decentralization work. The practical takeaway for an operator is unchanged by any of it: know which payout scheme your workers point at and why, reconcile expected against received earnings periodically (a discipline stale-share rates and fee lines reward), and remember that repointing a fleet takes minutes. Hashrate is the most mobile capital in Bitcoin, and that mobility — exercised, not merely theoretical — is what keeps every pool operator honest. The same logic scales down to a single machine in a garage: even one repointed miner is a real vote.

For the individual miner, AntPool's appeal is straightforward — scale, longevity, flexible payout schemes, and natural compatibility with the Antminer fleet most people run. The sovereign counterweight is equally straightforward: pool choice is one of the few votes a miner casts continuously, and directing even part of a fleet toward pools that decentralize template construction, or toward solo mining for those who accept the variance, keeps that vote meaningful. For the wider debate, see mining pool decentralization.

See live pool share in the pool centralization tracker.