Foundry USA.

Foundry USA is run by Foundry Digital, a company in Rochester, New York, owned by Digital Currency Group (DCG), the crypto investment firm founded by Barry Silbert that also owns the asset manager Grayscale. DCG set Foundry up in 2019 to help mining companies, particularly in North America, buy and finance their machines, and announced it in August 2020, promising more than $100 million in funding. Its pool found its first block, 655,253, on 3 November 2020 without putting its name on it. Late in December its blocks began to carry the tag “Foundry USA Pool #dropgold”, a nod to a Grayscale advertising slogan, The Block reported, and on 11 March 2021, after months of private testing, the pool opened to other mining companies.

Its stated ambitions were modest at first. When Hut 8, one of North America’s largest bitcoin miners, joined later that month, Foundry’s chief executive, Mike Colyer, spoke of securing “North America’s place among the world’s top-five bitcoin mining poolsMining poolA group of miners who share the work of finding blocks and split the rewards, so each gets paid steadily instead of rarely.”. It went much further. After China’s crackdown on mining in 2021, mining in North America boomed. By the end of that year Foundry was the largest pool, with about 17% of all mining power, by the count of 0xB10C, a developer who studies mining pools, and in January 2023 it reached about 30%, near where it has stayed since. In November 2023 AntPool found 1,219 blocks to Foundry’s 1,216, the first month since early 2022 in which Foundry hadn’t found the most, TheMinerMag reported.

The pool is built for mining companies. It checks the identity of every member, and pays them by full pay per share, or FPPS: a set amount for their work, including a share of transaction fees, whether or not the pool finds a block. So each Foundry block’s first transaction pays the whole reward to one Foundry address, and Foundry pays its miners separately. That reward is separate from the transactions the block confirms, which Foundry chooses. On 14 November 2021 its block 709,635 was the first to confirm transactions using TaprootTaprootA 2021 upgrade that added Schnorr signatures and addresses starting bc1p, making complex payments cheaper and more private., an upgrade to Bitcoin that had taken effect three blocks earlier; the pools that found those three blocks had left such transactions out. Since July 2024 it has also mined transactions that people pay mempool.space’s Accelerator to speed up, as one of the service’s first five partner pools.

Because so much of its mining power is in the United States, Foundry’s share falls when the American power grid is under strain. Many US miners are paid to switch off when demand for electricity peaks; in Texas the grid operator, ERCOT, runs such a programme. In a Texas cold snap in January 2024 Foundry’s mining power fell by almost half, ForkLog reported. During Winter Storm Fern in January 2026 it fell by about 60% in two days, TheMinerMag reported, and blocks across the whole network slowed to about one every 12 minutes, rather than the usual ten.

Its size is debated. A pool decides which transactions go into its blocks, so a few large pools decide what most blocks contain. That doesn’t weaken Bitcoin’s resistance to censorship as long as they don’t collude to leave transactions out, 0xB10C wrote in April 2025, but in the two years before, Foundry and AntPool, counted together with the smaller pools he believes work with it, had between 60% and 70% of all mining power. He suggested that some large US mining companies “could probably leave Foundry and start solo mining given their hashrateHashrateHow many guesses a second all of Bitcoin's miners make together. More hashrate makes the network harder to attack.”. Foundry describes its pool as infrastructure that “contributes to the decentralization of Bitcoin’s hashrate”; when it opened, Bitcoin Magazine presented it as a North American alternative in a mining industry dominated by China.