Everything in Observer
Mining Pools
Business Description
F2Pool, co-founded by Shixing Mao and Chun Wang in Beijing in May 2013, became the first Bitcoin mining pool launched in China and ranks among the four largest Bitcoin mining pools by network hashrate globally as of 2025, 2026.
The pool operates across more than 40 proof-of-work algorithms and networks. Bitcoin miners connect through geographically distributed stratum endpoints covering Asia, North America, Europe, Africa, and Latin America. Primary payout schemes include PPS+ at a 2.5% fee for Bitcoin, FPPS at 4%, and PPLNS depending on the asset mined, with a minimum Bitcoin payout threshold of 0.005 BTC. F2Pool supports merged mining: Bitcoin miners automatically receive simultaneous secondary rewards in Hathor (HTR), Elastos (ELA), and Namecoin (NMC) at no additional hardware cost; Litecoin miners earn concurrent Dogecoin (DOGE) payouts through the same PPLNS mechanism.
Beyond Bitcoin (SHA256d), F2Pool supports Litecoin/Scrypt, Zcash/Equihash, Ethereum Classic/Etchash, Kaspa/kHeavyHash, Bitcoin Cash/SHA256d, Alephium/Blake3, Dash/X11, Conflux/Octopus, Siacoin/Blake2B, Nervos CKB/Eaglesong, and Aleo/zkSNARK, among others. As of May 2026, F2Pool's live Bitcoin pool hashrate is approximately 104 EH/s against a network hashrate of roughly 968 EH/s, representing approximately 10.8% of global Bitcoin mining capacity.
F2Pool's Bitcoin hashrate averaged 87.2 EH/s at the start of 2025, rising to 96.6 EH/s by mid-2025. F2Pool mined 2,778 Bitcoin blocks in the first half of 2025, accounting for 10.48% of all blocks network-wide during that period. By mid-2025, F2Pool ranked fourth among all Bitcoin mining pools behind Foundry USA (25.59%), AntPool (19.84%), and SpiderPool (9.40%). The pool once held a far larger position: in 2014, F2Pool controlled roughly one-third of total Bitcoin network hashrate; by 2020 it produced approximately 17.5% of all Bitcoin blocks before North American institutional pools expanded their share. Its relative network share has since held near 10% against a rapidly expanding global hash base.
CEO Shixing Mao authored the first Chinese-language Bitcoin mining tutorial and is credited with pioneering the 24-hour settlement protocol for pool payouts. Co-founder Chun Wang launched stake.fish in 2018 as a separate proof-of-stake validation business that now manages more than $3 billion in staked assets. In March 2025, Wang funded and commanded the SpaceX Fram2 mission (the first crewed spacecraft to reach polar orbit), which drew broad media coverage and renewed attention to F2Pool's foundational role in early Bitcoin infrastructure.
