BitFury.

BitFury was the 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. of Bitfury, a company founded in 2011 by Valery Vavilov and Valery Nebesny. Bitfury designed bitcoin mining chips and machines, and the data centres to run them, and called itself its own biggest customer. In 2014 it mined in data centres in Finland, Iceland and Georgia; by 2019 it listed sites in Georgia, Iceland, Canada and Norway. In 2017 it was estimated to be the third-largest bitcoin miner, behind Bitmain and F2Pool, CoinDesk reported. Business customers could also add their own machines to the pool, under an agreement with Bitfury.

mempool.space credits it with 19,513 blocks, from 15 June 2014 to 25 March 2020: about 2% of all Bitcoin blocks so far. Its first blocks carry no name; Blockchain.info’s list of pools, which mempool.space’s list grew out of, linked their reward addresses to BitFury in April 2015, and from that year its blocks carried its name. From July 2015 to February 2016 it found about 15% of all blocks, and almost 19% in its busiest week, in August 2015. When signalling for SegWitSegWitSegregated Witness: a 2017 upgrade that moved signatures into a separate part of each payment, making room for more payments., an upgrade to Bitcoin’s rules, began in late 2016, Bitfury, Slush Pool and BTCC were among the few pools to signal support, Bitcoin Magazine wrote.

Each BitFury block’s first transaction paid the whole reward to one Bitfury address. Under its pool terms, customers were paid once a month, their share worked out from the blocks the pool found. These are payments to the pool’s miners, separate from the transactions confirmed inside the block. One customer was Hut 8, a Canadian mining company part-owned by Bitfury, whose machines ran in Bitfury-built data centres in Alberta; it moved them into the pool in December 2018, for a fixed monthly fee.

In July 2017 BitFury’s share of blocks fell to a few per cent; George Kikvadze of Bitfury said it had sold some of its mining power to other companies. The pool’s last block was found on 25 March 2020, and no announcement of its closing was found. Bitfury now describes itself as a technology incubator that builds and funds companies in web3, AI and computing.