OKEx Pool.

OKEx 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 OKEx, a cryptocurrency exchange founded by Xu Mingxing that in 2020 was one of China’s three biggest; it has been called OKX since January 2022. The pool launched in the summer of 2019 to mine Bitcoin, Ethereum and seven other coins, and within three months it was one of the five largest Bitcoin pools, Decrypt reported. Its first block with the OKEx name, 610,435, was found on 30 December 2019. Until that day, blocks paying the same address carried the name okpool.top, which mempool.space lists as a separate pool. In the three months to November 2020 its miners found about 5% of all blocks, about ten a day, The Block reported.

Each OKEx Pool block paid the whole reward to one OKEx 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. OKEx ran the exchange as well as the pool, but a block found by OKEx Pool doesn’t mean the transactions inside it went through OKEx.

On 16 October 2020 OKEx stopped all withdrawals of cryptocurrency, saying that one of the holders of its private keysPrivate keyThe secret number that lets you spend your bitcoin. Whoever knows it controls the coins, so it must never be shared. was helping the police with an investigation and couldn’t be reached. The pool’s miners left: within weeks it had lost more than 99% of its mining power, and it found only 12 blocks between 17 October and 11 November, The Block reported. Withdrawals reopened on 26 November, but the pool stayed small, finding 323 blocks in 2021. Its last, 720,017, came on 23 January 2022, five days after OKEx renamed itself OKX. On 26 January 2024 OKX stopped taking new miners and said the pool would close after 25 February, citing “business adjustments”; by then it had 19 active miners, ForkLog reported.