BATPOOL.

BATPOOL was a mining poolMining poolA group of miners who share the work of finding blocks and split the rewards, so each gets paid steadily instead of rarely. for Bitcoin and Litecoin, with a website in Chinese and English that named no company or people behind it. It went online in December 2016, it later said, and found its first Bitcoin block, 446,259, on 2 January 2017.

It paid miners by pay per share, or PPS: a set amount for each piece of work they sent, whether or not the pool found a block. So each BATPOOL block’s first transaction paid the whole reward to the pool’s own address, and the pool paid its miners from there. These are payments to the pool’s miners, separate from the transactions confirmed inside the block. mempool.space credits it with 441 blocks, about 0.05% of all Bitcoin blocks. At its busiest, from June to August 2017, it found about 55 a month, a little over 1% of all blocks.

Its last Bitcoin block, 497,074, came on 1 December 2017, but the pool stayed open. On 18 March 2019 it announced that it would shut down all its services on 24 March and stop operating indefinitely, and asked miners to move their mining power elsewhere by 23 March. It gave no reason.