During the first quarter of 2022, Bitcoin’s hashrate averaged between 180 to 200 exahash per second (EH/s) and during the course of that time, 13,233 block rewards were found by 16 mining pools. According to three-month statistics, Foundry USA was the network’s top mining pool in terms of hashrate percentage, as the bitcoin mining operation scored 2,380 blocks in Q1 2022.
Foundry USA Commands Q1 2022’s Top Bitcoin Mining Pool Position
The metrics show that bitcoin miners distributed approximately 82.706.25 BTC during the three-month period after having collectively received 13,233 block reward. This bitcoin block data doesn’t include fees for miners in the first quarter of 2022.
During that timeframe, there were 16 known mining pools and one “unknown” source of hashrate dedicating computational power to the Bitcoin network. Foundry USA, which captured 17.99% global hashrate in Q1, was the most popular mining pool.
Foundry USA was the only miner of Q1’s 2,380 BTC blocks. Following Foundry USA’s lead in Q1 was Antpool, as it captured 14.34% of the global hashrate in 90 days. Antpool mined 1,898 bitcoin blocks, though four of these were not yet completed.
F2pool was the third-largest bitcoin pool, commanding 14.05% of the network’s overall hashrate in the last three months. F2pool had 14.05% computing power, which gave it 1,859 block out of 13,233 block rewards in Q1.
Recordes show Poolin holding 12.06% with 1,596 block found and Binance Pool capturing 11.33%. Binance Pool also held 11.43% with 1,499 block found in Q1. The aforementioned five pools collectively captured 57.71% of Bitcoin’s global hashrate.
While there were 16 known mining pools, an “unknown” source of hashrate sometimes called “stealth miners” scored 158 bitcoin blocks, or 1.19% of the overall hashrate. The 2021 year was very popular for stealth mining, but the quarter that began in 2022 has shown an unknown amount of hashrate.
Mining difficulty rose close to 17% higher this year. Unknown hash is still the dominant miner with 225 778 blocks since 2009.
During 2022’s first three months, the difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA) saw five increases and just two reductions. Out of the seven epoch changes, the network’s mining difficulty increased 16.98% higher than prior to the first week of January.
On January 8, 2022, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty was 24.37 trillion and today, the difficulty is 28.59 trillion. Block 719,712, on January 20, saw the largest DAA growth. The DAA moved upwards 9.32%. At block height 725.760, the DAA fell by 1.49 percent during its first week.
Foundry USA was the most popular mining pool for 2022 in the past three months. However, lifetime statistics show that the pool represents only 0.9% of all hashrate since 2009. In terms of cumulative lifetime hashrate from 2009 to 2018, the unknown hashrate was the biggest entity, with 30.9%.
F2pool and Antpool follow the unknown hash, as well as Btc.com and Slush Pool. BTC Guild (now defunct) still holds the 6th-largest amount of hashrate, with 4.5%, or 32 935 blocks. For some comparison, Foundry USA has only found 6,300 blocks during the pool’s lifetime mining.
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