Huobi Pool.

Huobi Pool 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 Huobi Group, the company behind the Huobi exchange, which Leon Li founded in 2013 and which by 2017 was one of China’s three biggest. Huobi launched the pool in 2018, and its first block with the pool’s name, 517,826, was found on 12 April 2018. Bitcoin was one of several coins it mined. Huobi said it was among the five largest Bitcoin pools in 2019, and in 2020, its busiest year, it found about one block in thirteen. mempool.space credits it with 9,527 blocks, among them five from June 2015, years before the pool launched, that carry the words “Mined by huobi”; nothing published says who mined them.

Each Huobi Pool block paid the whole reward to one Huobi Pool address in its first transaction, and the pool paid its miners from there. These are payments to the pool’s miners, separate from the transactions confirmed inside the block. Huobi ran the exchange as well as the pool, but a block found by Huobi Pool doesn’t mean the transactions inside it went through Huobi.

In May 2021 China’s government said it would crack down on bitcoin mining. Huobi Pool was then the fifth-largest pool, with 8.7% of Bitcoin’s mining power over the previous day, Decrypt reported. Huobi stopped selling and hosting mining machines for new users in mainland China, though the pool itself kept running, the journalist Colin Wu noted. From late June the pool found only 1–2% of blocks, by mempool.space’s count. On 24 September 2021 China’s regulators banned cryptocurrency trading and mining, and Huobi said it would stop serving its users in mainland China by the end of the year. Huobi Pool’s last block, 710,871, was found on 22 November 2021. No announcement that it had stopped mining Bitcoin was found.