Foundry vs AntPool vs F2Pool — Top Mining Pools Compared (2026)

The three pools that anchor Bitcoin mining in 2026

If you could only track three numbers to understand Bitcoin mining economics in 2026, they would be the hashrate shares of Foundry USA, AntPool, and F2Pool. According to Hashrate Index pool data, Foundry USA has ranged between 30% and 37% of global hashrate through early 2026, AntPool sits around 20%, and F2Pool holds roughly 10%. Everything else — ViaBTC, Binance Pool, SpiderPool, Luxor, Braiins, and the long tail of smaller pools — shares what's left.

Those three shares matter for two different reasons. For individual miners choosing where to point their hashrate, the trio offers the most liquid, reliable, and financially flexible endpoints — they find blocks often enough that payout variance is minimal. For the network as a whole, that level of concentration raises real questions about censorship resistance and decentralization — questions we'll get to in the final section of this comparison.

Foundry USA — the US-regulated giant that rewrote the leaderboard

Foundry Digital was founded in 2019 as a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group (DCG), the same parent company behind Grayscale and CoinDesk. Foundry USA Pool launched in 2020 and climbed rapidly after China's 2021 mining ban pushed hashrate west. By 2022 it had overtaken AntPool as the world's largest pool, and in 2026 it still holds that title.

Foundry's differentiator is its 0% FPPS fee for qualifying miners — essentially a loss-leader to win industrial hashrate that DCG then cross-sells into financing, equipment procurement, and treasury services. In exchange, the pool is selective about onboarding: small retail miners have historically needed an invitation or partnership, though access has broadened in recent years. The pool publishes detailed daily FPPS rates and credits payouts at 01:00 UTC, per its public knowledge base documentation.

The practical trade-off with Foundry: you get the lowest direct fee in the industry and US-jurisdiction exposure — valuable for miners that need a regulated counterparty for lender or auditor reporting. The flip side is that Foundry's published 0% FPPS is largely associated with its commercial tier; some retail miners report less predictable onboarding and higher practical hurdles than at the open Chinese pools.

AntPool — Bitmain's pool, and the original PPS+ pioneer

AntPool was launched by Bitmain in 2014, one year after F2Pool. Because its parent is the world's largest ASIC manufacturer, AntPool has always had a structural tailwind: every Antminer shipped is a potential AntPool customer, and Bitmain has sometimes shipped machines pre-configured to point at the pool. That integration gave AntPool the hashrate crown from roughly 2015 until Foundry overtook it in 2022.

AntPool's real technical legacy is the PPS+ payout scheme, which the pool introduced to give miners the predictability of PPS for block subsidies plus a fair share of transaction fees distributed via PPLNS. Many other pools later adopted PPS+, and it remains a middle-ground option between pure PPS and modern FPPS. AntPool today offers all three — FPPS at a ~2.5% flat fee, PPS+ at 4% from the block reward plus 2% from fees, and PPLNS at 1.5% — so operators can pick the payout shape they want.

For operators weighing AntPool: its open retail onboarding and multi-coin support make it the most flexible of the three for smaller or mixed fleets. The cautions worth naming are that Bitmain is both the pool operator and the dominant ASIC vendor, which creates the kind of concentration crypto-natives traditionally prefer to avoid, and that the 0.001 BTC minimum payout is meaningfully higher than what Foundry or F2Pool require — slower payouts for very small miners.

F2Pool — the elder statesman of Bitcoin pools

F2Pool was founded in Beijing in May 2013 by Chun Wang and Shenyu Mao, making it the oldest mining pool in our comparison still operating at the top of the table. For much of 2014–2015, F2Pool (sometimes nicknamed "Discus Fish" in its early days) was the largest Bitcoin mining pool in the world, only ceding that crown when AntPool's Bitmain-integrated growth took off.

In 2026, F2Pool still lands around 10% of network hashrate and carries a reputation as the multi-coin power user's pool. It supports BTC, LTC, ETC, Zcash, Dash, Kadena, and a dozen other assets, each with its own fee schedule. For Bitcoin specifically, its published payout scheme documentation lists FPPS at a 4% fee, PPS+ at 2.5%, and PPLNS at 2% — the widest menu of the three pools.

F2Pool's pitch to an operator is longevity plus optionality. Twelve years of continuous operation through multiple bear markets is not nothing, and the breadth of altcoin support means a mixed fleet (say, an S21 for BTC and an L7 for LTC/DOGE merge-mining) can live on one dashboard. The trade-off is that F2Pool's headline BTC FPPS fee is the highest of the three — miners who care primarily about BTC and nothing else will save money elsewhere.

Head-to-head — fees, payouts, and access

Pulled into a single view, the differences become easier to weigh. Notice that the headline FPPS fee isn't the whole story — PPS+ and PPLNS options, minimum payouts, and onboarding friction can matter more than a half-point of fee for a given miner.

One subtlety the headline numbers hide: a 2.5% FPPS fee on AntPool with a lower effective uptime or stale-share rate can out-earn a 0% fee pool with weaker infrastructure. Pool quality is not just fee — it's latency to the mempool, share acceptance rate, and block-template freshness. All three pools in this comparison score well on those measures; the fee gap is the easiest part to compare precisely.

How NoxHash uses these pools — and what it means for you

At NoxHash, we run Antminer S21-class fleet in Kazakhstan and route rented hashrate through major FPPS pools — including Foundry USA and AntPool — on your behalf. The reason is boring but important: FPPS is the model that smooths both block-finding luck and transaction-fee variability into a daily BTC credit, which is what lets us pay our users steadily every minute regardless of whether a specific pool happens to hit a lucky week.

If you're mining on NoxHash, you never actually log into Foundry or AntPool. You rent TH/s, we handle the pool selection, share submission, and fee layer, and BTC shows up in your wallet. Users who want to understand the deeper mechanics can read our companion pieces on what a mining pool is and why miners join one and solo vs pool vs cloud mining — they pair naturally with this comparison.

The concentration question — what does 67% in three pools mean?

Foundry USA plus AntPool alone account for roughly half of Bitcoin's hashrate in 2026, and adding F2Pool pushes the top three to around two-thirds. That concentration is the single most debated number in Bitcoin mining today, and it's worth unpacking what it does and doesn't mean.

What it doesn't mean: pools don't own the hashrate they route. A miner pointing an S21 at Foundry can re-point at AntPool or F2Pool in minutes via the pool's stratum URL and credentials. The pool is a payout layer, not a custody layer, and miners migrate in response to fee changes, outages, or censorship concerns — as seen when several pools briefly experimented with transaction filtering and lost meaningful hashrate to competitors.

What it does mean: a pool with 30%+ share chooses which transactions enter blocks it mines. If Foundry (or any single pool) decided — or was compelled — to exclude a category of transactions, those transactions would land in roughly one-third fewer blocks immediately. That's not a 51% attack, but it is real influence over UX and censorship resistance. The mitigation is to ensure new pools can compete on fees and quality, and that miners rotate when pools misbehave.

Takeaways for choosing a pool in 2026

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