Pool fees are an unloved line item. Operators talk about hashprice, curtailment, and difficulty; the 2–3% the pool takes on every block feels small enough to ignore. Cumulated across a year, on a fleet measured in exahash, it is anything but small — and it is the one margin lever an operator can turn without touching hardware, power, or pool latency. This post walks through the math, end to end, on numbers an operator can reproduce.
Assumptions, labelled
Every number used below is a public reference, not a live read. Operators should swap the labels for their own window to produce their own delta.
Pool fee benchmarks
Cross-checked against each pool’s own public fee schedule. PPLNS / FPPS / PPS columns are reported as published; an operator should re-read them on the day, because promo tiers come and go.
| Pool | PPS / FPPS | PPLNS | Fee source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Foundry USA | FPPS 0.0% | — | foundrydigital.com/services |
| AntPool | PPS 2.5% | 0% | antpool.com |
| ViaBTC | PPS / FPPS 2.5% | 0% | viabtc.com |
| F2Pool | PPS 2.5% | 0% | f2pool.com |
| Luxor | FPPS 2.0% | 0% | luxor.tech |
The math, on one line
A rig’s daily BTC is its share of the network hashrate, multiplied by uptime, multiplied by the total reward the network pays per block on average:
dailyBTC = uptime × (rigHashrate / networkHashrate) × (blockSubsidy + avgFeesPerBlock)
Converted to USD, net of pool fee, the per-rig daily revenue figure is:
dailyUSD = dailyBTC × BTCprice × (1 − poolFee)
Worked example — single 100 TH/s rig
- Uptime share of network hashrate ≈ 100,000 TH/s ÷ 650,000,000 TH/s ≈ 0.000154
- Daily BTC at full uptime ≈ 0.000154 × 144 blocks/day × 3.175 BTC/block ≈ 0.0704 BTC/day
- Gross USD per day ≈ 0.0704 BTC × $65,000 ≈ $4,576/day
- Net at 2.5% pool fee ≈ $4,576 × 0.975 ≈ $4,462/day
- Net at 0.0% pool fee ≈ $4,576 × 1.000 ≈ $4,576/day
- Per-day delta on one rig ≈ $114/day
- Per-year delta on one rig ≈ $41,600/year
Worked example — 1 EH/s fleet
A 1 EH/s fleet is 10,000× the single-rig hashrate above, so the absolute delta scales the same way:
- Fleet hashprice ≈ 10,000 × single-rig hashprice
- Per-day delta vs a 2.5% pool ≈ $114 × 10,000 ≈ $1,140,000/day
- Per-year delta vs a 2.5% pool ≈ $41,600 × 10,000 ≈ $416,000,000/year
- Per-day delta vs a 2.0% pool (Luxor FPPS) ≈ ≈ 0.5% × gross ≈ $456,000/day
When active switching isn’t free
- Variance budget — FPPS reduces variance; PPLNS increases it. Switching into PPLNS to save 2% widens the daily P&L swing and bumps escrow.
- Share acceptance — pools with longer p2p lag inflate rejected shares. The fee saving is real, the latency cost is also real.
- Stranded work — a mid-block switch throws away in-flight shares. The fewer full periods per day the rig has, the more often this hurts.
A rational switch is one where the fee delta, net of expected variance cost and expected share loss, is still net positive. An operator that switches purely on the headline fee is paying the headline fee out of a different budget line.
Takeaway
Across a year, on a fleet measured in exahash, the difference between a 2.5% pool and a 0% pool is roughly 2.5% of gross revenue. For a 1 EH/s fleet against the labelled inputs above, that is on the order of a quarter of a billion dollars per year — large enough to fund the engineering spend on an automated agent many times over. The agent’s job is to capture that delta without crossing the variance-latency line that erases it. Ferrohive ships that loop and writes the audit row that proves it ran.
Sources
- CoinDesk BTC/USD index — coindesk.com/indices
- mempool.space live stats — mempool.space
- Foundry USA pool fee schedule — foundrydigital.com/services
- AntPool fee schedule — antpool.com
- ViaBTC fee schedule — viabtc.com
- F2Pool fee schedule — f2pool.com
- Luxor pool fee schedule — luxor.tech