On October 13, Binance put out a fairly short notice: at 3 p.m. Beijing time on November 10, 2026, Binance Pool formally shuts down. Not a trim, not a reshuffle — the entire line goes dark. Cloud mining, Pool Savings, the transaction accelerator, the mining API, even peripheral features like Telegram computing power alerts and email notifications all go with it. Once the deadline passes, the pool's Stratum addresses stop working. Leave your mining rigs pointed there and they will keep running and keep burning electricity, but not one submitted share gets credited. A business that launched on April 27, 2020 and ran for six and a half years, gone.

A Short Notice, a Long To-Do List for Miners

First, the timeline. Miners can copy this straight off:

  • Before 3:00 p.m. Beijing time on November 10: switch your mining rigs to another pool. This step is non-negotiable — an hour late and the machines are burning electricity for nothing.
  • Before 11:59 p.m. UTC on November 10 (7:59 a.m. Beijing time on November 11): complete identity verification and other account steps, or your settlement could get held up later.
  • Before 3:00 p.m. Beijing time on November 24: historical data pages are still viewable, and are closed permanently after that. If you need screenshots or exports, don't put it off.

Anyone holding Pool Savings positions should redeem early. Eligible balances, refunds and rewards will be "handled according to the rules" after the shutdown, Binance says. Note the wording: no unified payout date is promised, and everything still has to clear risk and compliance review. In plain terms, the money will come, but when it lands and whether you get stuck depends on the review.

Its Share Collapsed Long Ago; the Shutdown Is Just the Paperwork

The official reason is a single line about an "ongoing review of products and services." That says nothing. The numbers are more honest than the notice.

HashrateIndex data from October 14 put Binance Pool at roughly 9.1 EH/s and 0.85% of the market, ranking 11th. As recently as the end of 2025 it had 26 EH/s and a 2.3% share, good for ninth. The computing power still actually contributing blocks is a rounding error.

Then there is its standing in the industry. Foundry USA, AntPool and F2Pool together mined more than 60% of all blocks over the past month. In a market where the leaders take nearly everything, Binance Pool was neither the largest nor the most profitable. Closing it was only a matter of time.

And it is not retreating alone. Japan's SBI Crypto closed its pool on July 31 this year. At the end of June it still had 20.9 EH/s and a 2.2% share; within a month of the announcement, its computing power had dropped by more than 60%. This is an industry-wide ebb, not Binance decluttering on its own.

The Hardest Infrastructure to Make Money On

Computing Power Heart spoke with an industry veteran who has run mining pools for years. In his view, Binance's exit is not about Binance. The mining pool business as a whole has stopped making much money.

The job sounds simple: pool miners' computing power together, then split the proceeds by contribution when a block is found. The Bitcoin network cannot function without it, yet the business itself is hard. In the early years there was real money in fees. Then everyone started fighting for customers and rates were pushed lower and lower. Negotiated rates for large miners are especially low — low enough that many pools can no longer survive on fees alone. The way he puts it, mining pools now look a bit like "public-service infrastructure": doing the work for the network is fine, but you are still a company, and you have to stay alive.

So is anyone still making money running a pool? Some, but not many. The ones that earn consistently have usually been in the business for years, sit on a base of long-standing clients, and can route pool traffic into other business lines to monetize it. Among Chinese-speaking operators, the teams that pull this off are almost all eight to ten years old or more. Newcomers don't have those resources; entering now mostly means burning cash.

Technology is not the barrier. Fee rates are. Low rates make miners happy, but they also make the math impossible for a new team. The only players who can keep fighting a price war are the big pools with scale, deep pockets and other businesses to subsidize them.

His read is that consolidation will accelerate through 2026 and 2027, leaving maybe three or four large pools. He has run the numbers: the fee a pool actually keeps would need to approach 2% before new teams would be willing to enter, and before anyone in the industry would put real effort into technology and service. He also notes that higher fees would not necessarily disperse computing power — how miners choose, who has the most capital, and how settlement is structured will all shape the outcome.

Computing Power Doesn't Disappear, It Just Moves House

A pool closing doesn't stop the machines. All miners have to do is change a Stratum address, and the rigs keep roaring.

The computing power genuinely looking for a new home is only around 9 EH/s — not a large block, but enough for the leading pools to fight over. AntPool, F2Pool and ViaBTC have no reason to pass. Going by past playbooks, fee discounts and sign-up subsidies are probably already on the way. For small and mid-sized miners, that makes this a window: when platforms are competing for users, users have the most bargaining power.

One note on switching pools: settlement models differ. PPS, FPPS and PPLNS can produce meaningfully different take-home returns, so don't chase the lowest fee alone.

One more detail worth chewing on. In May, seven pools and institutions including Foundry, AntPool and F2Pool joined the Stratum V2 working group, together accounting for roughly 75% of network computing power at the time. The goal is to hand the power to build blocks back from pools to miners. Binance was not on the list. That proves no causation, but it does suggest that by the time the industry was debating the next-generation protocol, Binance Pool was no longer near the center of the table.

What the Exit Reveals

When Binance launched its pool in 2020, exchanges were piling into mining en masse. The company positioned it as a "bridge between traditional mining and financial services," a more inclusive platform for miners. Six years and two halvings later, the block reward has fallen from 12.5 BTC to 3.125. Of the major exchange pools that joined that rush, OKX shut its own down back in 2024, making Binance Pool one of the longest-surviving.

The veteran's follow-up question deserves a second look from the whole industry: when the infrastructure that keeps the Bitcoin network running becomes steadily less profitable, can the mining pool market sustain real competition over the long term?

The math is brutal. Miners want low fees, the network wants diversity, and diversity depends on someone willing to keep investing in a business that doesn't pay well. All three rarely hold at once. If fees stay pinned to the floor, the only players left standing will be the handful of giants that treat pools as a traffic funnel and subsidize them from elsewhere. The irony is that the stronger they become, the further Bitcoin drifts from its founding idea that anyone can take part.

Industry sensitivity to concentration is itself a double standard. Zhu Fa, founder and CEO of KuPool, points to a telling pattern: back when the world's top pool was Chinese, especially once its share passed 20% or even 25%, overseas communities would pile on, aiming their criticism at China's mining sector for controlling too much of the network's computing power. Now that US computing power is heavily concentrated in Foundry, whose share has stayed stubbornly high at around 30%, those voices have gone quiet.

The data bears this out. According to mempool, Foundry at one point in March this year mined roughly a third of all blocks, and still accounts for about 25.6% over the past month, comfortably in first place. Similar share, entirely different temperature in the discourse.


What Binance closed is just one product line, but it exposes a structural paradox running through the industry: Bitcoin used code to decentralize money, then handed the infrastructure that maintains that decentralization to the most centralized form of commercial competition. Miner costs, pool profitability, network decentralization — someone will eventually have to solve this impossible triangle. Until then, mining has no permanent pools, only permanent electricity prices.