ViaBTC.

ViaBTC was started in 2016 by Haipo Yang. He was at college in 2011, when, as he later put it, “the concept of Bitcoin was just beginning to spread on the internet”, and at first he “thought Bitcoin’s vision was too far-fetched”. He went into the industry in 2014, he said, and in 2016 Bitcoin Magazine reported that he had left the Chinese internet company Tencent to start a 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., finding an investor through 8btc, a Chinese-language Bitcoin forum. In May 2016, ViaBTC says, Yang wrote all of the pool’s code himself. Its first block, 414,875, came on 5 June 2016, tagged “viabtc.com deploy”, and by September it was the fifth-largest pool. Over the past year it has found about one Bitcoin block in ten, by mempool.space’s count.

Yang was on the side of bigger blocks in the long dispute over how many transactions each block should hold. “I support bigger blocks,” he told Bitcoin Magazine in 2016. “Obviously, the current 1MB block size restricts the development of Bitcoin.” In 2017 supporters of bigger blocks prepared to break away through a hard forkHard forkA change that loosens Bitcoin's rules, so nodes running old software reject the new blocks. Without near-universal agreement it splits the chain.: a change to the rules that older software rejects, so that a new coin splits off for those who adopt it. In July ViaBTC announced that it would call the new coin “Bitcoin Cash”, and before the coin existed it opened a pool to mine it and let its exchange’s customers trade it. The split came on 1 August 2017. ViaBTC found the first block after it on both sides: Bitcoin’s block 478,559 that afternoon, and the first Bitcoin Cash block, also numbered 478,559, that evening.

Critics suspected that Jihan Wu, a co-founder of the mining-machine maker Bitmain, was behind the split, Quartz reported. Bitmain had led a 20 million yuan investment in ViaBTC that March. Wu denied it, and when ViaBTC began trading Bitcoin Cash, Bitmain wrote that the two companies “only share an investment relationship in which ViaBTC operates independently”, and that ViaBTC’s founder had “ten times the voting rights as those of the investors”.

In December 2017 Yang started CoinEx, a cryptocurrency exchange, and ViaBTC grew into a group of companies around the pool. On 15 September 2026 he announced that CoinEx would close, saying that “the security and compliance risks of running a crypto exchange have become increasingly difficult to contain”. “Carrying unlimited risk for limited revenue is no longer a rational choice,” he wrote. ViaBTC said the pool was a “separate legal entity” and that the closure would have “zero impact on ViaBTC’s mining services”. A block found by ViaBTC doesn’t mean the transactions in it went through CoinEx or any other ViaBTC service.

ViaBTC has run a transaction acceleratorTransaction acceleratorA service, usually run by a mining pool, that tries to include a stuck payment in its next block, sometimes for a charge., a service for speeding up a waiting transaction, since May 2017. By that December, it said, Bitcoin was so crowded that the cost of speeding up a single transaction had “rocketed to over hundreds of dollars”, and it was speeding up 100 an hour free. Today, once you sign in, it puts a limited number into its own blocks free each hour, if they are no larger than 0.5 kB and already pay its minimum fee rate, and others for a charge. The effect shows in its blocks: in one ViaBTC block in September 2023, 0xB10C, a developer who studies which transactions pools choose, found about a quarter of the space taken by transactions it had given priority, probably through the accelerator.