BTC.com.

BTC.com is the Bitcoin 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. now called CloverPool. It began as a pool of the mining-machine maker Bitmain, which also ran AntPool, and found its first block on 5 September 2016. By 2019 it had been the largest pool for years, the news site 8btc reported, and mempool.space counts about 4.4% of all Bitcoin blocks as BTC.com’s. Its blocks still carry the tag “btccom”, so block explorers such as mempool.space still list them under its old name.

Bitmain moved the pool to Bitdeer, a company split off from Bitmain, in January 2021, and on 15 April 2021 it was sold to BIT Mining, a company listed in New York and now called SOLAI. In December 2022 hackers stole about $700,000 of the pool’s customers’ digital assets and about $2.3 million of the company’s own. BIT Mining sold the pool for $5 million to Esport-Win Limited, a Hong Kong company, in a sale that closed on 29 February 2024, and it took the name CloverPool that September.

CloverPool mines Bitcoin and several other coins; the blocks and figures here are Bitcoin’s only. For Bitcoin it pays miners by full pay per share, or FPPS: a set amount for each piece of work a miner sends, plus a share of the usual transaction fees, paid once a day whether or not the pool finds a block. So each BTC.com block’s first transaction pays the reward to the pool, which pays its miners separately. These are payments to the pool’s miners, separate from the transactions confirmed inside the block.

BIT Mining’s annual report for 2022 said the pool kept its rewards in a wallet run by an outside digital-asset firm, and that it had begun passing part of its miners’ computing power to other pools, which paid it whether or not they found a block. Researchers have linked the pool to AntPool. In 2023 and 2024 TheMinerMag and mempool.space’s mononaut found BTC.com’s block rewards being moved together with AntPool’s and several other pools’ by a single custodian, and in 2024 the researcher 0xB10C found its block templates, the draft blocks a pool gives its miners, 98% similar to AntPool’s. He counts CloverPool among the pools he calls “AntPool & friends”, while noting that it isn’t proven one company runs them all.