Foundry USA Pool Review 2026: The Largest BTC Pool

Foundry USA has spent the better part of three years sitting at or near the top of the Bitcoin pool hashrate rankings, and the pool now anchors a meaningful share of North American institutional mining. This foundry usa pool review covers the Digital Currency Group ownership structure, the 0% FPPS fee that drives so much of the pool’s appeal, the FPPS payout mechanics, stratum endpoint coverage, observed hashrate share as of early 2026, and the trust factors institutional buyers weigh when concentrating hashrate with a US-domiciled operator. Coin Web Mining is an independent reseller with no commercial relationship to Foundry; the analysis below relies on the operator’s published materials, mempool.space block data, and pool-share reporting from hashrateindex.com.

What is Foundry USA Pool and who runs it?

Foundry was launched in 2019 as a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group (DCG), the parent of Grayscale, Genesis, and CoinDesk. The pool is operated out of Rochester, New York, and the broader Foundry business spans ASIC procurement, financing, and a US-focused mining services platform in addition to the pool itself. The operator publishes corporate information on foundry.com and the broader DCG corporate site provides the parent-company context.

The pool’s positioning is explicitly North American institutional. Foundry’s product literature and conference presence emphasize service to publicly traded miners and large private operations rather than retail home miners. Smaller miners can and do connect, but the dashboard, support model, and account-onboarding flow are tuned for fleet-scale customers.

Foundry USA fee structure and payout method (early 2026 snapshot)

The headline fee is 0% FPPS for Bitcoin. Foundry has held that fee structure since launch, and the pool’s published fee page confirms it as of the snapshot date 2026-05-24. The economics behind 0% are that Foundry’s broader business model — financing, hosting services, ASIC procurement — subsidizes pool operations as a customer-acquisition channel. Operators benefit from genuine zero-fee FPPS settlement; the trade-off is that the pool’s commercial relationships with its largest customers run deeper than at fee-only pools.

Payouts use Full-Pay-Per-Share (FPPS), meaning miners are paid a fixed per-share amount covering both block subsidy and averaged transaction fee revenue. Settlement is daily once a miner’s balance crosses the configured threshold. The 0% headline fee genuinely is 0% — there is no hidden spread on the FPPS calculation that other zero-fee promotions sometimes carry.

Supported coins and onboarding

Foundry’s pool is Bitcoin-focused. The operator does run some additional services, but the BTC pool is the headline product and the one most operators interact with. There is no broad multi-coin dashboard equivalent to F2Pool’s or AntPool’s — operators running mixed-coin fleets typically pair Foundry on the Bitcoin side with a separate pool for Litecoin/Dogecoin, Kaspa, or other PoW networks.

Account onboarding has historically required a basic KYC step for institutional accounts, and the pool’s relationship management is concierge-style for larger customers. Smaller operators can self-onboard via the website. Operators evaluating where the Bitcoin pool fits in a broader hardware decision should review the Bitcoin mining hub for catalog context and the hashrate vs hashprice explainer for the revenue math that pool selection actually affects.

Stratum endpoints and protocol support

Foundry runs stratum endpoints distributed across North America with additional regional coverage for Europe and Asia. The primary endpoints are documented in the help center on foundry.com. For US operators, latency to the primary US-East endpoint is typically sub-20 ms from major data center metros. International operators have endpoint coverage but should benchmark latency before committing fleet-scale hashrate.

The pool runs Stratum V1 as its production protocol. Foundry has participated in Stratum V2 community work but, like most large pools, has not made V2 the default for retail accounts as of the snapshot date. Operators specifically prioritizing V2 today typically run Braiins Pool alongside any Foundry hashrate. The Stratum V1 vs V2 explainer covers what’s actually at stake in the upgrade.

Hashrate share and block-finding consistency

Foundry USA has been the largest single Bitcoin pool by hashrate share for most of the past two years. As of the snapshot date 2026-05-24, the rolling 1-week share reported on mempool.space placed Foundry at the top of the global rankings, ahead of AntPool and F2Pool. Daily share figures fluctuate but the trailing-week average has stayed comfortably in the high-twenties to low-thirties percent range over recent quarters.

At that scale the pool finds dozens of blocks per day and FPPS settlement is essentially deterministic from the operator’s perspective. Block-finding variance disappears as a practical concern for any individual miner. The trade-off that comes with being the largest pool is the same one that comes with any single pool exceeding the high-twenties percentage of network hashrate: network-level concerns about censorship resistance and 51% economics become relevant at the protocol-debate level even when the pool itself behaves benignly. That broader debate is unpacked in the mining pool centralization analysis.

Regional latency and operator experience

For North American operations, Foundry’s latency is excellent. The primary US endpoints are physically close to most major hosting metros (Texas, the Carolinas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Wyoming), and round-trip times stay inside the threshold where stale shares become measurable. International operators see acceptable latency to the EU and Asia endpoints but should benchmark per-rack before committing fleet-scale hashrate.

The web dashboard is clean and modern compared to legacy pools. Worker-level hashrate graphs, downtime alerting, and payout history are well-presented. The API surface is suitable for automated payout reconciliation. Large operators almost always supplement with their own monitoring stack regardless of pool, but Foundry’s UI requires less supplemental tooling than the older pools to get a basic operating picture.

Trust factors and counterparty risk

Foundry’s primary trust signals are the DCG parent company (US-domiciled, publicly identifiable, well-capitalized) and the operator’s tenure since 2019 with no widely reported payout incidents. The pool’s coinbase outputs are auditable via any block explorer, so miners can cross-check pool-claimed blocks against on-chain reality.

The counterparty considerations to weigh: DCG and its subsidiaries (notably Genesis) went through significant turbulence in 2022–2023, and while Foundry itself was not the entity affected by Genesis’s bankruptcy, operators evaluating long-term concentration risk often factor the parent-group history into their analysis. Foundry has continued to operate normally throughout that period and the pool’s payout track record is intact.

The pool’s US domicile is also a relevant factor. Operators sensitive to OFAC-style transaction filtering at the pool layer should review the operator’s stated policy and recent reporting on coinbase output filtering. Pools that operate in the US are subject to US sanctions law; the practical impact on a typical miner is minimal, but compliance-driven operations sometimes weigh jurisdiction as part of pool selection.

Honest pros and cons

The strengths are the genuine 0% FPPS fee, the largest hashrate share in the market (smoothest possible FPPS settlement), the modern dashboard, the institutional-grade API and support model, and the US corporate domicile for buyers who prefer US-regulated counterparties. The weaknesses are the institutional-leaning onboarding (less retail-friendly than F2Pool or AntPool), the Bitcoin-only product (no merged-mining or multi-coin convenience), the still-pending Stratum V2 production rollout, and the centralization optics that come with being the largest single pool.

Who should choose Foundry USA Pool?

Foundry is a default-good choice for North American operators running fleet-scale Bitcoin hashrate who want zero-fee FPPS economics, modern tooling, and a US-domiciled counterparty. The 0% headline genuinely is hard to beat on pure economics, and the operator’s tenure and capitalization put it in the top tier on trust factors.

Small home miners can use Foundry too — the pool is open to retail — but the practical economic delta between Foundry at 0% and a 2.0–2.5% FPPS pool at a single-rig hashrate level is small in absolute dollar terms, so the choice often comes down to dashboard preference and whether the operator wants to participate in the pool’s ecosystem or stay with multi-coin convenience elsewhere.

Onboarding, KYC, and institutional account management

Foundry’s onboarding is the most institutional-leaning in the major-pool field. Retail accounts can self-serve through the website, but the workflow visibly assumes the typical user is a small business or fleet operator rather than a hobbyist. Institutional accounts that route meaningful hashrate (typically multi-petahash) go through a structured KYC and commercial-relationship step that opens up dedicated account management, priority support, and access to the broader Foundry product layer (financing, hosting introductions, hashprice tooling).

For US-based miners that prefer or require a US-domiciled pool counterparty for compliance reasons, Foundry’s onboarding is the closest the major-pool field comes to a turnkey institutional-grade flow. Withdrawal addresses are configured per coin with multi-address splits supported. Two-factor authentication is required for sensitive account changes. The API surface is documented and supports the depth of reconciliation that publicly traded miners need for SEC reporting.

The trade-off for the institutional polish is that the onboarding is less optimized for the home miner with a single S21 looking to start hashing in five minutes. Foundry will accept that miner, but the dashboard, support, and account flow are tuned for a different customer.

Tax reporting and 1099 considerations

Foundry’s US domicile means the pool engages with US tax-reporting infrastructure more directly than offshore competitors. The pool provides downloadable payout history in CSV and PDF formats covering daily settlement records with block-find date, share contribution, payout amount in coin, and withdrawal transaction ID. For US accounts that cross applicable reporting thresholds, Foundry may issue 1099-MISC or 1099-NEC forms consistent with IRS guidance for mining income — operators should confirm the current threshold and form type with the pool directly because IRS guidance on digital-asset reporting continues to evolve.

Non-US operators using Foundry are subject to their home-jurisdiction tax rules with the same CSV-export workflow used at any other pool. Operators in any jurisdiction should retain settlement records for the statute-of-limitations period applicable to their tax regime, and the bookkeeping-software ingestion of the Foundry CSV is straightforward through any tool that accepts standard exchange-style transaction imports.

How Foundry compares to its closest peers

Against AntPool, Foundry’s 0% FPPS undercuts AntPool’s 4% headline FPPS, but AntPool’s 0% PPLNS tier offers a different risk profile and AntPool ships preconfigured on Bitmain firmware. Against F2Pool, Foundry is cheaper and has a more modern dashboard; F2Pool is multi-coin and has longer tenure. Against Luxor, both are US-domiciled with modern UX; Luxor’s hashprice-trading product is a differentiator Foundry does not match. Against Braiins, Foundry is much larger by hashrate but lacks the Stratum V2 production support.

The diversification logic that argues against running 100% on any single pool applies to Foundry too — even with the strong trust profile, running at least 30–50% of fleet hashrate on a second pool is a defensible operational practice.

References

• Foundry corporate site (DCG subsidiary) — Foundry
• Bitcoin mining pool hashrate rankings (1-week) — mempool.space
• Bitcoin mining pool historical share data — Hashrate Index
• Industry coverage on Bitcoin pool concentration — The Block

For sourcing the SHA-256 hardware that pairs with Foundry’s 0% economics, the Coin Web Mining catalog carries current-generation Bitcoin ASICs, or request a bulk quote for orders of five units or more.