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Binance Pool officially shut down! Mining pools are turning into a "public welfare business."

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Binance has announced that its mining pool business will officially cease operations on November 10, 2026, at 15:00, as the mining pool industry faces a structural paradox of profitability challenges and hash rate centralization.

Original title: "Even Binance Can't Hold On, Mining Pools Are Becoming a 'Charity Business'"
Original author: Heart of Hashrate

On October 13, Binance issued a not-so-long announcement: at 15:00 Beijing time on November 10, 2026, BinancePool will officially shut down.

Not a scale-down, not an adjustment, but the entire line being stopped.

Cloud mining, PoolSavings, transaction accelerator, mining API, and even marginal features like Telegram hashrate alerts and email notifications will all be shut down along with it. After the deadline, the mining pool's Stratum address will directly become invalid.

If your mining machine is still connected to it, the hashrate keeps running and the electricity bill keeps burning, but none of the submitted shares will be recorded.

A business that launched on April 27, 2020 and ran for six and a half years is just gone like that.

1. The announcement is short, but the miners' homework is long

First, let's sort out the timeline clearly. Miner friends can directly copy the homework:

· Before 15:00 Beijing time on November 10: switch your mining machines to another pool. This step is mandatory. An hour late, and the machines are just burning electricity for nothing.

· Before 23:59 UTC on November 10, which is 7:59 Beijing time on November 11: complete account steps such as identity verification, otherwise subsequent settlement may be stuck.

· Before 15:00 Beijing time on November 24: the historical data page can still be viewed, after which it will be permanently closed. If you need screenshots or exports, don't delay.

If you hold PoolSavings positions, redeem them in advance. For eligible balances, refunds, and rewards, the official statement says they will be "handled according to the rules" after the service shutdown. Note this wording: there is no promise of a unified arrival time, and it still has to go through risk control and compliance review.

Translated into plain language: the money will be given, but when it is given and whether it gets stuck depends on the review.

2. The share had already collapsed long ago; the shutdown is only the official announcement

The official reason is only one sentence: "continuous review of products and services." That says nothing at all.

But the numbers are more honest than the announcement.

According to the nominal hashrate figures from minerstat and MiningPoolStats, Binance Pool still has about 62 to 65 EH/s, accounting for 6% to 7% of the entire network.

Looking at actual block production share, the story is completely different. According to HashrateIndex data from October 14, BinancePool has only about 9.1 EH/s left, a 0.85% market share, ranking 11th.

Yet at the end of 2025, it still had 26 EH/s, a 2.3% share, ranking ninth.

The gap between the nominal figure and actual block production is seven or eight times, showing that the numbers on the dashboard are quite inflated. The hashrate actually still contributing to block production is only a tiny fraction.

Now look at its position in the industry. FoundryUSA, AntPool, and F2Pool combined have consumed more than 60% of the network's block production over the past month.

In a market where the top players take everything, Binance's mining pool is neither the largest nor the most profitable, so shutting down was only a matter of time.

And it is not retreating alone. On July 31 of this year, Japan's SBICrypto mining pool also shut down. At the end of June, it still had 20.9 EH/s and a 2.2% share, and within a month of announcing the shutdown, its hashrate fell by more than 60%.

This is an industry-wide ebb, not just Binance cutting ties.

III. The Hardest Infrastructure to Make Money From

"Heart of Hashrate" interviewed an industry insider who has run a mining pool for many years. In his view, Binance's exit is not just Binance's own matter, but a sign that the entire mining pool industry is no longer very profitable.

The work of a mining pool sounds simple: pool miners' hashrate together, and when a block is produced, distribute the money according to contribution. The Bitcoin network cannot do without it, but its own business is not easy to run. In earlier years, there was still money to be made from fees, but later, as everyone competed for customers, fee rates were pushed lower and lower. The negotiated rates for large miners were especially low, so low that many pools could no longer survive on fees alone.

According to him, mining pools are now somewhat like "public infrastructure." Working for the network is fine, but you are a company, and you have to survive.

So are there still mining pools making money? Yes, but not many. Those that can steadily make money generally have been in this business for many years, have accumulated a group of long-time clients, and can also channel mining pool traffic into other businesses to monetize it. Among Chinese-speaking circles, those who can reach this stage are basically veteran teams that have been working for eight to ten years or more. Newcomers do not have these resources, and entering the market most likely means burning money.

Technology is not the threshold; what really holds people back is the fee rate. Low fee rates are of course good for miners, but new teams simply cannot make the numbers work. The only ones that can keep fighting a price war are large pools with scale, lots of money, and subsidies from other businesses.

His judgment is that from 2026 to 2027, the mining pool industry will accelerate its reshuffling, and in the end there may be only three or four major mining pools left. He also did the math: the fees actually received by mining pools need to be close to 2% before new teams will be willing to enter, and only then will anyone in the industry be willing to put effort into technology and services.

But he also said that raising the fee rate does not mean hashrate will become decentralized. How miners choose, who has more money, and how settlement methods are set will all affect the final landscape.

IV. Hashrate Will Not Disappear, It Will Only Move

When a mining pool closes, mining machines do not stop. All miners need to do is change a Stratum address, and the machines keep roaring on.

The actual hashrate truly looking for a new home is probably only around 9 EH/s. The volume is not large, but it is enough for the leading pools to fight over. AntPool, F2Pool, and ViaBTC have no reason to let it go. Based on past playbooks, fee discounts and recruitment subsidies are most likely already on the way. For small and medium-sized miners, this is instead a window period: when platforms are competing for people, users have the most bargaining power.

One reminder when switching pools: settlement models differ across pools, and the actual returns from PPS, FPPS, and PPLNS vary considerably. Do not just rush in because the fee rate looks low.

There is another detail worth pondering. In May of this year, seven mining pools and institutions including Foundry, AntPool, and F2Pool had just joined the StratumV2 working group, together accounting for about 75% of the network hashrate at the time. The direction is to return the power of block construction from mining pools to miners.

Binance did not appear on the list. This does not prove any causal relationship, but at least it shows that when the industry discusses the next-generation protocol, Binance Pool is no longer at the center of the table.

V. The Lessons of an Exit

When Binance launched its mining pool in 2020, it coincided with a wave of trading platforms collectively entering mining. The official positioning at the time was to "bridge traditional mining and financial services," building a more inclusive platform for miners.

Six years later, after two halvings, the block reward has dropped from 12.5 BTC to 3.125 BTC. Among the mining pools of leading trading platforms that followed the trend into the market back then, OKX shut down as early as 2024, and Binance Pool can be considered one of those that lasted the longest.

The veteran's follow-up question is worth the entire industry thinking through again: when the important infrastructure that maintains the operation of the Bitcoin network becomes increasingly difficult to profit from, can the mining pool market still maintain full competition over the long term?

This account is brutal. Miners want low fees, the network wants diversity, and diversity requires someone willing to keep investing in a business that is "not that profitable." It is hard for all three to hold at the same time. If fees stay glued to the floor forever, the only ones left standing in the end will be those giants that treat mining pools as a traffic funnel and rely on other businesses to keep them alive. Ironically, the stronger they become, the further Bitcoin drifts from its original aspiration of "everyone can participate."

And when it comes to "centralization," the industry's sensitivity itself is a double standard. KuPool CEO Zhu Fa mentioned a very interesting phenomenon: previously, the industry's number one was a Chinese mining pool, and especially when this pool's share exceeded 20% or even 25%, overseas communities would attack en masse, pointing straight at China's mining circle for controlling too much of the network's hashrate. But now U.S. hashrate is highly concentrated in Foundry, and Foundry's share remains high, around 30% for a long time, yet this kind of voice has disappeared again.

The data also confirms this. According to mempool statistics, Foundry once took about one-third of the network's blocks in March this year, and in the past month it still had about 25.6%, firmly sitting in first place. The share is about the same, but the temperature of public opinion is completely different.

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What Binance shut down was only one product line, but what it illuminates is the structural paradox of the entire industry: Bitcoin used code to achieve the decentralization of money, yet handed the infrastructure that maintains this decentralization to the most centralized commercial competition.

Miner costs, mining pool profitability, and network decentralization—this impossible triangle ultimately needs someone to solve it. Before that—

In the mining world, there is no forever mining pool, only forever electricity prices.