SECPOOL.

SECPOOL found its first block, 806,031, on 3 September 2023, and only a few more each month that autumn. Then, from the end of December, it suddenly grew. On 2 February 2024 the Spanish-language news site CriptoNoticias reported that the new 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. had just overtaken Binance Pool, and that the computing power it had gathered in a few weeks equalled about 100,000 of the newest mining machines. Its arrival, the site said, had taken the whole industry by surprise, and little was known about who ran it or where it came from.

That is still the case. SECPOOL’s website, in Chinese, English and Russian, names no company, no people and no address. Its privacy policy speaks for “SECPOOL Group and its global affiliates” without saying what or where they are, and its terms send disputes to arbitration in Singapore under Singapore law, which is a choice of law rather than an address. Its news page holds a single announcement, from October 2024.

SECPOOL mines only Bitcoin. Each SECPOOL block’s first transaction pays the block rewardBlock rewardWhat a block's miner earns: new bitcoin from the subsidy, plus the fees of every transaction in the block. to the pool’s own address, and the pool pays its miners from there once a day. That reward is separate from the transactions the block confirms. Its miners also earn Namecoin and Fractal Bitcoin from the same work, through merged mining: those networks accept the proof of workProof of workA puzzle that takes a computer real effort to solve, so the answer proves the effort was spent. Bitcoin’s miners use it to add each block. done for Bitcoin, so one effort can earn rewards on several networks at once.

Published research links SECPOOL to AntPool, one of Bitcoin’s biggest pools. In December 2023 TheMinerMag, a mining-industry publication, found that SECPOOL, which it called “a new pool”, had joined AntPool and several other pools in sending some or all of their block rewards to the same addresses, in the same transactions. In April 2024 mononaut, a developer at the block explorer mempool.space, reported that one custodian, a firm that looks after cryptocurrency for others, held the keys to the reward addresses of all those pools. The researcher 0xB10C counts SECPOOL in a group he calls “AntPool & friends”, pools assumed to hand out AntPool’s work under their own names, while noting that it isn’t proven one company runs them all.

0xB10C groups pools by comparing the block templates they send their miners: the draft blocks, with their chosen transactions, that the miners work on. In April 2024 he found SECPOOL’s template different from AntPool’s but shared with Sigmapool, another pool. “Two names, but probably one pool,” he wrote. That September he reported that Sigmapool’s server handed out only SECPOOL’s work, so blocks found by Sigmapool’s miners carry SECPOOL’s name, and that Binance Pool’s server sometimes passed on SECPOOL’s work too. SECPOOL hasn’t said what its arrangements with any of these pools are.