Braiins Pool Review 2026: The Original Slush, Modernized

Braiins Pool is the oldest continuously operating Bitcoin mining pool — the same operator that launched as Slush Pool in 2010 and effectively invented the modern mining-pool concept. This braiins pool review covers operator history, the Stratum V2 native support that genuinely differentiates Braiins from peers, the fee structure as of early 2026, payout method, hashrate share, stratum endpoints, and the trust factors that come with using the pool whose operator authored most of the protocol standards the rest of the industry uses. Coin Web Mining is an independent reseller with no commercial relationship to Braiins; the analysis below relies on the pool’s published materials, mempool.space block data, and pool-share data from hashrateindex.com.

What is Braiins Pool and who runs it?

Braiins Pool started life as Slush Pool, launched in November 2010 by Marek Palatinus (Slush). It is, by a meaningful margin, the oldest Bitcoin mining pool. The operating entity is Braiins, a Prague-based company that today operates the pool, BraiinsOS open-source ASIC firmware, the Stratum V2 reference implementation, and a broader mining-software platform. The rebrand from Slush Pool to Braiins Pool completed in 2022.

The corporate domicile is Czech Republic, and Braiins is one of the few major mining-infrastructure companies based in continental Europe. The team is publicly identifiable, publishes regular protocol research, and has authored or co-authored most of the Stratum V2 specification work that has shaped the next generation of pool-miner communication. That technical leadership is core to the Braiins product positioning.

Braiins fee structure and payout method (early 2026 snapshot)

Braiins Pool’s Bitcoin product offers two payout methods: FPPS at 2% and a Score-based PPLNS-style scheme at 2%, as published on the pool’s fee page (snapshot date 2026-05-24). The Score system is Braiins’s variation on PPLNS that weights recent shares more heavily, reducing pool-hopping incentives. For variance-tolerant accounts the Score system pays out close to FPPS over rolling windows while sharing real block luck (good and bad) with the operator.

The 2% FPPS fee is competitive with ViaBTC’s PPS+ at the same headline rate and sits below F2Pool’s 2.5% and AntPool’s 4%. Foundry’s 0% remains the cheapest BTC FPPS in the market, but Braiins’s 2% combined with the V2 protocol support and the open-source firmware ecosystem gives the pool a different value proposition than pure fee-minimization.

Payouts settle daily once balances cross configured thresholds. The pool supports Lightning Network payouts in addition to standard on-chain withdrawals, which is unusual in the major-pool field and useful for small miners who want to consolidate without paying repeated on-chain network fees.

Supported coins and product focus

Braiins Pool is Bitcoin-only. There is no multi-coin dashboard, no merged mining, no altcoin product. The operator’s strategic focus is BTC plus the surrounding software ecosystem (BraiinsOS firmware, Stratum V2). Operators running mixed-coin fleets pair Braiins on the BTC side with another pool for Litecoin/Dogecoin, Kaspa, or other PoW networks.

The Bitcoin-only focus is intentional. Braiins’s positioning is that the BTC pool product is the one that matters at protocol-debate level and the one where Stratum V2 adoption changes the network’s security and decentralization characteristics. The hardware decisions feeding into that pool decision are unpacked in the Bitcoin mining hub, and the practical revenue math is covered in the hashrate vs hashprice explainer.

Stratum endpoints and Stratum V2 native support

This is where Braiins is structurally different from every other major pool. Braiins authored the Stratum V2 specification and runs V2 as a production-default endpoint alongside V1. Operators can connect to Braiins Pool over Stratum V2 today, in production, with documented endpoints — not as a beta or roadmap item.

Why does V2 matter? V2 supports miner-selected block construction (job declaration), which means individual miners or fleets can choose which transactions to include in the blocks they hash on, rather than having the pool centrally dictate that choice. That property is the technical foundation of the long-running debate about pool-level censorship resistance. The Stratum V1 vs V2 explainer covers the protocol distinction in depth.

For operators who care about the network-level decentralization properties of where their hash actually points, Braiins is currently the only top-ten pool that ships V2 as a production option. For operators who care only about settlement economics, V2 vs V1 is invisible — payouts arrive the same way regardless of protocol.

The pool also exposes regional V1 stratum endpoints across Europe, North America, and Asia for operators on legacy firmware. TLS-encrypted ports are available.

Hashrate share and block-finding consistency

Braiins Pool’s hashrate share has historically sat in the 1%–3% range — well below the top three pools but consistently top-ten. As of the snapshot date 2026-05-24, the rolling 1-week share reported on mempool.space placed Braiins inside the top ten globally. At that scale block-finding variance is genuinely present for the pool’s float, but FPPS settlement to individual accounts remains smooth because the pool absorbs variance on behalf of miners.

The smaller scale relative to Foundry or AntPool is part of the pool’s identity. Some operators explicitly favor smaller pools to support hashrate distribution, a topic explored in the mining pool centralization analysis. Pool-share historical data is available in aggregate on hashrateindex.com.

Regional latency and operator experience

Braiins’s stratum coverage is solid across Europe (the operator’s home region with the lowest-latency paths), North America, and Asia. European operators see excellent latency to the primary Czech endpoints; US and Asian operators have regional endpoints with acceptable RTT for typical operations.

The web dashboard is mature and well-designed, with worker-level hashrate graphs, downtime alerting, payout history, and detailed protocol-level metrics that other pool UIs do not surface (V2 vs V1 connection breakdowns, share submission latency histograms, etc.). The API supports automated payout reconciliation. Lightning Network payouts are uniquely supported in addition to on-chain withdrawals.

BraiinsOS firmware, the open-source ASIC firmware Braiins also publishes, integrates tightly with the pool. Operators running BraiinsOS get richer telemetry into the pool dashboard than operators on stock firmware, though the pool is fully usable from any firmware. The firmware itself voids Bitmain warranties — that warranty consideration is unpacked in the BraiinsOS firmware guide and in the broader custom firmware risks article.

Trust factors and operator transparency

Braiins’s primary trust signals are unmatched among Bitcoin pools: thirteen years of continuous operation under publicly identifiable leadership, deep protocol-level technical contribution (Stratum V2), open-source software releases (BraiinsOS, the V2 reference implementation), and a Czech corporate domicile in a stable jurisdiction. The pool’s coinbase outputs are publicly auditable via any block explorer.

The pool has paid reliably across every market cycle since 2010, including the 2018–2019 bear market that thinned the competitive field. There are no widely reported payout incidents in the pool’s history. Operator transparency is at the high end of the field — the team publishes regular research and engages openly in protocol-level debates.

Honest pros and cons

The strengths are unmatched tenure (since 2010), production Stratum V2 support (the only top-ten pool offering it today), Lightning Network payouts, open-source ecosystem (BraiinsOS, V2 reference implementation), competitive 2% fees, and a Czech corporate domicile with publicly identifiable leadership. The weaknesses are the Bitcoin-only product (no multi-coin convenience), the smaller hashrate share (less attractive to operators who explicitly want to mine on the largest pool), and the European latency disadvantage for North American or Asian operators who prioritize lowest-possible RTT.

Who should choose Braiins Pool?

Braiins Pool is the natural fit for operators who care about the network-level decentralization properties of Bitcoin mining, who want production Stratum V2 today, and who value the open-source ecosystem alongside the pool product. The fee is competitive (2% FPPS), the tenure is unmatched, and the technical leadership is real.

European operators benefit from the lowest-latency paths to the primary endpoints. Operators running BraiinsOS firmware get the richest integration with the pool dashboard. Small home miners specifically benefit from Lightning Network payouts that bypass repeated on-chain withdrawal fees.

For operators who want multi-coin coverage, Braiins is not the right pool — ViaBTC or F2Pool fit better. For operators optimizing pure pool fee, Foundry’s 0% remains harder to beat. Braiins’s sweet spot is the BTC-focused operator who values protocol modernization and operator transparency.

Onboarding, KYC, and Lightning Network payouts

Braiins Pool’s onboarding is retail-friendly: an email and password create an account, and workers can be configured immediately without identity verification at any retail tier. The pool’s European corporate domicile means the workflow respects the privacy norms common in EU regulatory frameworks, with KYC requested only where strictly necessary for the chosen payout method.

The Lightning Network payout option is the structural feature that differentiates Braiins’s account experience from the rest of the major-pool field. Small miners with single-rig hashrate are often stuck with on-chain withdrawal fees that consume a meaningful fraction of weekly settlement amounts; Lightning payouts bypass that constraint entirely. A miner can configure a Lightning invoice as the payout destination, and the pool pushes settlement over Lightning whenever balances cross the configured threshold. For a home miner with a single S21 producing modest daily revenue, the difference between on-chain and Lightning payouts can be the difference between economically viable settlement and accumulating balance indefinitely.

Withdrawal addresses for on-chain destinations are configured per coin (Bitcoin only in Braiins’s case) with multi-address splits supported. Two-factor authentication protects sensitive account changes. The API surface supports automated payout reconciliation and exposes more protocol-level telemetry than other pool APIs (per-worker V1-vs-V2 connection breakdowns, share submission latency histograms, stale-rate metrics).

Tax reporting and accounting workflow

Braiins Pool provides downloadable payout history in CSV format covering daily settlement records with block-find date, share contribution, payout amount in coin, and on-chain or Lightning transaction reference. The Lightning payout records include preimage hashes that can be cross-referenced against the operator’s Lightning node logs for audit purposes.

The pool does not issue 1099-style tax forms — operators handle that with local tax advisors. The Czech corporate domicile means the pool itself is subject to EU regulatory frameworks rather than US ones, and US-based miners using Braiins Pool should treat the income the same way they treat any other pool payout for US tax purposes (fair market value at time of receipt). Operators in any jurisdiction should retain settlement records for the statute-of-limitations period applicable to their tax regime. The mining-business-structure considerations applicable to scaling operations beyond hobby tier sit in Coin Web Mining’s content on crypto-mining LLC entity choices.

How Braiins compares to its closest peers

Against Foundry USA, Foundry is cheaper on raw fee but lacks Stratum V2 production support and the open-source ecosystem. Against F2Pool, Braiins is cheaper, has longer tenure, and ships V2 in production. Against AntPool, Braiins is independent of any hardware vendor and ships V2 (which AntPool does not). Against Luxor, the two are similar on dashboard sophistication; Luxor offers Hashrate Index data integration, Braiins offers V2 and the open-source firmware ecosystem.

For operators thinking carefully about pool selection as a network-decentralization choice rather than purely an economic one, Braiins is the clearest single answer in the current pool field.

References

• Braiins Pool published fee schedule — Braiins
• Bitcoin mining pool hashrate rankings (1-week) — mempool.space
• Bitcoin mining pool historical share data — Hashrate Index
• Stratum V2 specification and reference implementation — Braiins

For sourcing Bitcoin ASICs that pair naturally with Braiins’s Stratum V2 product, the Coin Web Mining catalog stocks current-generation hardware, or request a bulk quote for orders of five units or more.