After launching its Bitcoin (BTC) mining pool in April, crypto exchange Binance has now launched an in-house mining pool for the market’s largest altcoin by market cap, Ether (ETH).
For the first month, between Nov. 12 and Dec. 12, Binance is trying to attract miners by offering a zero-fee regime. After that, those contributing their hashin power to the pool will be charged a competitive 0.5% commission on their earnings.
Binance’s instructions for setting up a mining pool account note that participants will need to use a Windows or Linux operating system, GPU (NVIDIA or AMD graphics card memory of 4G minimum), 5GB virtual memory for each GPU, and mining software such as HiveOS or Easy Miner.
The Ethereum mining pool will use a similar system to the existing Bitcoin pool, called FPPS, or Full Pay Per Share. Binance’s Bitcoin pool notably also offers a feature called smart pool, which enables participants to automatically switch hash rates in order to mine the most profitable of three supported coins based on the SHA- 256 algorithm: Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) or Bitcoin SV (BSV). The settlement is still paid out in BTC.
An online pool distribution tracker for Bitcoin mining pools, BTC.com, indicates that Binance Pool accounted for 9.4% of Bitcoin’s total hash rate over the past week.
Centralization looks set to remain a concern for those committed to the founding decentralizing ethos of cryptocurrency. BTC.com’s data shows that over 50% of Bitcoin’s current hash rate is accounted for by four mining pools: F2Pool (18.5%), Poolin (12.2%), BTC.com (11.6%) and AntPool (11.5%).