Author: Heart of Hashrate
On October 13, Binance issued a not-particularly-long announcement: at 15:00 on November 10, 2026 (Beijing time), Binance Pool will officially shut down.
Not a scale-down, not an adjustment—the entire line is being shut off.
Cloud mining, Pool Savings, the trading accelerator, the mining API—even peripheral features like Telegram hashrate alerts and email notifications are being shut down along with it. Once the deadline hits, the pool's Stratum addresses will simply become invalid.
Your mining machines can still be hooked up to it, your hashrate keeps running, your electricity bill keeps burning—but not a single submitted share will be credited.
A business that launched on April 27, 2020, and ran for six and a half years, is just gone like that.
I. The Announcement Is Short, but the Miners' Homework Is Long
Let's get the timeline straight first—miner friends can copy this homework directly:
Before 15:00 on November 10 (Beijing time): switch your mining machines to another pool. This step is mandatory—be an hour late, and your machines are just burning electricity for nothing.
Before 23:59 on November 10 (UTC, i.e., 7:59 Beijing time on November 11): complete account steps such as identity verification, otherwise subsequent settlements may get stuck.
Before 15:00 on November 24 (Beijing time): historical data pages will still be viewable, after which they will be permanently closed. If you need screenshots or exports, don't delay.
If you hold Pool Savings positions, redeem them in advance. For eligible balances, refunds, and rewards, the official line is they will be "handled according to the rules" after the service shutdown. Note that wording—there is no commitment to a unified payout time, and it still has to go through risk control and compliance review.
Translated into plain language: the money will be paid, but when it's paid and whether you get held up depends on the review.
II. The Share Had Already Collapsed; the Shutdown Is Just the Official Announcement
The official reason is just one sentence: "continuous review of products and services." That says nothing at all.
But the numbers are more honest than the announcement.
By the nominal hashrate figures from minerstat and MiningPoolStats, Binance Pool still shows about 62 to 65 EH/s, accounting for 6% to 7% of the total network.
But look at the actual block-production share, and the story is a completely different version. In HashrateIndex's October 14 data, Binance Pool has only about 9.1 EH/s left, a 0.85% market share, ranking 11th.
And as recently as the end of 2025, it still had 26 EH/s, a 2.3% share, ranking ninth.
The gap of seven or eight times between the nominal figure and actual block production shows 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 industry position. Foundry USA, AntPool, and F2Pool combined have taken more than 60% of the network's block production over the past month.
In a market where the top players take all, Binance Pool was neither the largest nor the most profitable, so shutdown was only a matter of time.
And it is not retreating alone. On July 31 of this year, Japan's SBI Crypto also shut down its pool. At the end of June, it still had 20.9 EH/s and a 2.2% share; within a month of announcing the shutdown, its hashrate fell by more than 60%.
This is an industry-wide ebb tide, not just Binance's own clean break.
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 issue—it's 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 found, distribute the money according to contribution. The Bitcoin network cannot do without it, but its own business is not easy to run. In the early years, fees were still profitable, but later, as everyone fought for customers, fee rates were pushed lower and lower. The negotiated rates for large miners are especially low—so low that many pools can no longer survive on fee income alone.
His take is that mining pools are now a bit like "public infrastructure." There's nothing wrong with working for the network, but you're a company—you have to survive somehow.
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 the Chinese-speaking circle, those who can reach this stage are basically veteran teams that have been at it for eight to ten years or more. Newcomers don't have these resources, and entering most likely means burning money.
Technology is not the barrier—what really holds people back is the fee rate. Low fees make miners happy, of course, but new teams simply can't make the numbers work. The only ones who can keep up with a prolonged price war are large pools with scale, deep pockets, and subsidies from other businesses.
His judgment is that 2026 to 2027 will see accelerated reshuffling in the mining pool industry, and in the end there may be only three or four major pools left. He also did the math: the fee rate a mining pool actually takes in needs to approach 2% before new teams will be willing to enter, and before anyone in the industry will be willing to put effort into technology and services.
But he also said that higher fee rates do not mean hashrate will become more dispersed. How miners choose, who has more money, and how settlement methods are set will all affect the final landscape.
IV. Hashrate Won't Disappear, It Will Just Move
When a mining pool closes, mining machines don't stop. All miners need to do is change a Stratum address, and the machines keep roaring.
The actual hashrate that really needs to find a new home is only around 9 EH/s or so—not a large volume, but enough for the top pools to fight over. Pools like 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 of opportunity: when platforms are competing for people, users have the most bargaining power.
One reminder when switching pools: settlement models differ from platform to platform, and the take-home returns of PPS, FPPS, and PPLNS differ considerably—don't just rush in because the fee rate looks low.
There is also a detail worth pondering. In May of this year, seven mining pools and institutions including Foundry, AntPool, and F2Pool had just joined the Stratum V2 working group, together accounting for about 75% of the network's hashrate at the time, with the goal of returning block-building power from mining pools to miners.
Binance did not appear on the list. That proves no causality, 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 Lesson of the Emptying Room
When Binance launched its mining pool in 2020, it coincided with the wave of exchanges 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 top exchange mining pools that followed the trend into the market back then, OKX had already shut down in 2024, and Binance Pool counts as one of those that lasted the longest.
The veteran's follow-up question deserves another round of thought from the entire industry: when the important infrastructure that maintains the operation of the Bitcoin network becomes increasingly difficult to profit from, can the mining pool market still sustain full competition over the long term?
The math is brutal. Miners want low fees, the network wants diversity, and diversity precisely requires someone willing to keep investing in a "not-so-profitable" business. The three are very hard to hold true at the same time. If fee rates forever hug the floor, 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 transfuse cash. Ironically, the stronger they become, the farther Bitcoin drifts from its original aspiration of "everyone can participate."
And when it comes to "centralization," the industry's own sensitivity is itself a double standard. KuPool CEO Zhu Fa mentioned a very interesting phenomenon: when the industry's number one used to be a Chinese mining pool, especially when this pool's share exceeded 20% or even 25%, overseas communities would rise up in attack, pointing directly at the Chinese mining circle for occupying too much of the network's hashrate. But now that U.S. hashrate is highly concentrated in Foundry, and Foundry's share remains high, long hovering around 30%, that kind of voice has disappeared again.
The data also confirms this. According to mempool statistics, Foundry at one point in March of this year took about one-third of the network's blocks, and over the past month it still has about 25.6%, firmly sitting in first place. The shares are similar, but the temperature of public opinion is completely different.
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What Binance shut down is only a product line, but what it illuminates is the entire industry's structural paradox: Bitcoin used code to achieve the decentralization of money, yet handed the infrastructure that maintains this decentralization over to the most centralized commercial competition.
Miner costs, mining pool profitability, network decentralization—this impossible trinity ultimately has to be solved by someone. Until then—
There are no forever mining pools in the mining world, only forever electricity prices.
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"Heart of Hashrate"'s English website tokenheart.ai focuses on reporting to the world the development of China's AI computing power industry chain: data center construction and liquid cooling, power, chip supply chains, domestic large models, and embodied intelligence.We are committed to providing overseas expansion services and resource matchmaking for companies in China's AI industry chain.