Bitcoin (BTC) is commonly praised as essentially the most decentralized cryptocurrency by its supporters, however the reality could possibly be one thing else. Onchain knowledge exhibits that solely two Bitcoin mining swimming pools mined over 51% of all BTC within the final three years. Right here is why it issues and will increase a centralization alert for the main blockchain community.
Finbold retrieved this info from mempool.house, a Bitcoin knowledge aggregator and block explorer, gathered straight from an observer node. Basically, this knowledge ranks Bitcoin mining swimming pools per their mined blocks towards the whole blocks mined in a sure interval.
Within the final three years from March 28, 2025, the Bitcoin mined blocks had been extremely dominated by two mining swimming pools.
Exactly, Foundry USA printed 46,076 blocks (28.72%) and AntPool 34,365 blocks (21.42%), out of 160,432. Collectively, these mining swimming pools have mined 90,441 blocks, or 56.37% of the whole, within the final three years.
Why does it matter to have solely two mining swimming pools above the 51% threshold
In accordance with the whitepaper written by Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s worth proposition lies in reaching consensus over the blockchain state in a decentralized method. That is achieved by way of Bitcoin mining, when particular nodes (the miners) use computational energy to crack cryptographic hashes, discovering blocks.
As soon as the blocks are found, the miner positive factors the best to gather the coinbase, that are newly created BTC models. Apart from the coinbase, miners may add transactions to the blocks, accumulating their respective charges.
For that, the miner must broadcast the found block with each their coinbase transaction and all of the third-party transactions. Different nodes, as designed by Satoshi, will comply with the longer chain, which implies the chain with extra proof-o-work connected to it, or extra added blocks.
There’s a theoretical assault known as the 51% assault, which, theoretically, might enable a nasty actor to make double spends. Furthermore, Bitcoin mining swimming pools might intentionally censor transactions from being broadcasted, in the event that they management sufficient of the mined blocks.
Finbold reported a case the place F2Pool, the third-largest Bitcoin mining pool, was caught – and later admitted – filtering transactions.
At its present state, the Bitcoin community has a Nakamoto Coefficient of two. The Nakamoto coefficient is a metric that measures the decentralization of a blockchain community by figuring out the minimal variety of impartial entities (like miners) wanted to manage or disrupt the community.
Bitcoin mining swimming pools and never particular person miners or nodes
Whereas every pool is supposedly made of various miners, it’s the pool coordinator, a single entity, chargeable for setting the block, broadcasting it to the community, accumulating the rewards, after which, if they need, distribute it to their miners.
Due to this fact, the mining swimming pools are the related entities when measuring the present blockchain consensus decentralization state. Not the person miners or nodes, that may migrate solely as soon as it’s too late, underneath a hypothetical assault.
We’ve got additionally seen instances the place transaction charges weren’t distributed to AntPool miners, as anticipated, however despatched again to the sender.
Moreover, AntPool was additionally the protagonist of one other discovery by the famend pseudonym analyst b10c. In accordance with the researcher, knowledge suggests the second-largest mining pool might have robust affect over 5 different Bitcoin mining swimming pools.
Trying on the merkle branches that mining swimming pools ship to miners as a part of stratum jobs, it is clear that the BTCcom pool, Binance pool, Poolin, EMCD, Rawpool, and probably Braiins* have precisely the identical template and customized transaction prioritization as AntPool. https://t.co/KTjFWtTXEP pic.twitter.com/xhCrdvkOH8
— b10c (@0xB10C) April 17, 2024
In conclusion, Bitcoin decentralization could possibly be in examine as economies of scale dynamics play out, growing huge miners’ dominance. The extra blocks a mining pool discovers, the extra rewards it collects from newly issued BTC and transaction charges. This permits for bigger investments in infrastructure, simpler entry to capital, and much more dominance over future block mining.
Featured picture from Shutterstock.
