EMCD Pool.

EMCD is a crypto company that started with a 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. in 2017; its founder and chief executive is Michael Jerlis. Its terms name EMCD Tech Limited, in Hong Kong, as the pool’s operator, and Exchange Management LLC, in Tbilisi, Georgia, for miners in the European Union and the United States. In 2023 Hashrate Index described it as a pool “primarily serving Russia and Eastern Europe”. EMCD also runs pools for other coins, a wallet and savings products; a block found by EMCD doesn’t mean the transactions in it went through them.

mempool.space credits EMCD with 860 Bitcoin blocks: a single block on 21 May 2020, then three bursts, from May to November 2021, June to September 2022 and February to 15 September 2023. EMCD pays its Bitcoin miners by full pay per share, or FPPS: a set amount for each piece of work they send, paid daily, whether or not the pool finds a block. So each EMCD block’s first transaction paid the reward to an EMCD address, and the pool paid its miners separately. These are payments to the pool’s miners, separate from the transactions confirmed inside the block.

EMCD still runs its Bitcoin pool, but no block has carried its name since 15 September 2023, and EMCD hasn’t said why. Its blocks had stopped once before: when none appeared from August 2022, Hashrate Index wrote that EMCD had “most likely started selling its hashrateHashrateHow many guesses a second all of Bitcoin's miners make together. More hashrate makes the network harder to attack.”, its miners’ computing power, “to another pool”, possibly AntPool, though “we don’t know this for sure”. EMCD found its own blocks again from early 2023. In September 2024 the researcher 0xB10C noted that EMCD’s servers were still sending miners work, a year after its last block.

Researchers have also linked EMCD to AntPool. In December 2023 TheMinerMag found EMCD’s block rewards being moved together with those of AntPool and several other pools. In April 2024 0xB10C found that the block templates EMCD sent its miners, the lists of transactions to work on, matched AntPool’s, with some differences further down the list. EMCD hasn’t said what the arrangement is. Shared templates suggest one pool passing on another’s work, but 0xB10C notes that it isn’t proven a single company is behind AntPool and the pools that match it.