name: bitcoin-mining-pool-architectures
description: |
Mining pool reward schemes: PPS, FPPS, PPLNS, PPS+, Score, prop. Block
generation queue, share variance, payout cycles. Solo mining vs pooled.
USE WHEN: comparing pools, designing reward systems, understanding
miner economics.
allowed-tools: Read, Grep, Glob
Pool Architectures & Reward Schemes
Pools allow many miners to collectively find blocks. Differences are
in how rewards are distributed.
Reward schemes
PPS (Pay-Per-Share)
Miner gets fixed payment per accepted share. Pool absorbs all variance:
- Pro: predictable income for miners.
- Con: pool needs cash reserve to cover bad-luck periods.
Fee: typically 4-5% to compensate pool variance risk.
FPPS (Full Pay-Per-Share)
PPS but miner also receives proportional share of transaction
fees beyond just the subsidy.
Most popular scheme as of 2024-2025.
Fee: 2-3%.
PPLNS (Pay-Per-Last-N-Shares)
Reward = block_reward × (your_shares_in_last_N / total_shares_in_last_N).
- Pool doesn't pay until block found.
- Miners experience variance directly.
- Discourages pool-hopping (you must mine consistently to be in
the N window).
Fee: 1-2% (lower because pool doesn't bear variance risk).
PPS+
PPS for subsidy + PPLNS for fees. Hybrid.
Score (deprecated / niche)
Older scheme that decayed share scores over time. Largely replaced
by PPLNS.
Proportional
Reward = your_shares / total_shares_this_round × block_reward.
Vulnerable to pool-hopping; rarely used.
Pool block-finding
Pool's core function:
- Construct block templates.
- Distribute work to miners (Stratum V1 or V2).
- Verify share submissions.
- When a share is also a block (≤ network target), submit to network.
- Distribute rewards per scheme.
Variance considerations
A solo miner finding a block:
- Expected time = network_time × (network_hashrate / your_hashrate).
- For 100 TH/s on a ~980 EH/s network (September 2026):
~68,000 days ≈ 186 years.
Pooled:
- Get reward proportional to your hashrate share, daily/hourly.
- Variance reduced.
Pool centralization risks
- 51% attack: top pools by hashrate can theoretically reorg.
- Censorship: pools have OFAC-compliance pressure.
- Selfish mining: pool with > 25% hashrate could selfish-mine.
Mitigations:
- Stratum V2 (miners choose own tx).
- Decentralized pools (P2Pool, OCEAN DATUM).
- Solo mining (CKPool, Public-Pool).
Major pools (as of September 2026)
Shares below are blocks found over the trailing 3 months per
mempool.space, sampled 2026-09-15, on a network running ~980 EH/s.
- Foundry USA — ~25%; largest by hashrate.
- AntPool (Bitmain) — ~19%; second.
- F2Pool — ~15%; historical leader.
- SpiderPool — ~9%; fourth-largest.
- ViaBTC — ~9%.
- MARA Pool — ~5%.
- SECPOOL — ~4%.
- Luxor — ~3%.
- OCEAN — ~3%; ~21.2 EH/s (ocean.xyz, 2026-09-15). Non-custodial
TIDES payouts; miners building their own templates with DATUM get a
50% pool-fee discount.
- Binance Pool — ~2%.
- Braiins Pool (formerly Slush Pool) — ~2%; SV2-capable.
- DMND (DEMAND) — SV2-native pool; mined block 955,318
(2026-06-25), which DMND states is the first block built via Stratum
V2 job declaration (dmnd.work, 2026). Negligible network share so
far — one block in the trailing year as of 2026-09-15.
See also