F2pool

F2Pool was founded by Wang Chun and Mao Shixing (Discus Fish) in April 2013 in Wenzhou, making it China's first Bitcoin mining pool. At that time, ASIC miners had just emerged, driving mining difficulty sharply higher and making it difficult for small-scale miners to compete independently — hence the birth of mining pools. By 2014, F2Pool's hashrate accounted for one-third of the entire Bitcoin network, making it the world's largest mining pool.

In 2016, F2Pool became an early supporter of Ethereum mining, capturing 25% of the network's hashrate within months. That same year, Wang Chun moved to Thailand, and in 2018 he founded stake.fish, entering the PoS staking sector. The company managed assets exceeding $3 billion at its peak, supporting more than 20 public blockchains including Ethereum, Solana, and Cosmos.

F2Pool has mined over 1.3 million Bitcoins in total, representing more than 9% of all Bitcoin blocks in human history. Wang Chun's personal journey is equally iconic: in 2015, he bought an apartment in Thailand with 2,900 BTC; in 2025, he commanded SpaceX's Crew Dragon on humanity's first crewed polar orbit flight; and in 2026, he announced he would command Starship on the first crewed interplanetary mission flying past Mars.

In protocol governance, Wang Chun publicly opposed the BIP-54 soft fork proposal in 2026, arguing that bundling multiple minor fixes was unreasonable, but pledged to update nodes if the absolute-majority signaling threshold was met strictly under BIP-9. This stance reflects the pragmatic role mining pools play in Bitcoin governance.

On April 27, 2026, F2pool launched DMT-NAT as a new reward token for BTC mining, enabling BTC miners to earn six cryptocurrencies simultaneously: BTC, FB, HTR, ELA, NMC, and NAT, diversifying miner revenue streams.

On May 7, 2026, F2pool joined the Stratum V2 Working Group alongside Foundry, Antpool, and four other major pools, marking a industry shift toward miner-selected transaction templates. Stratum V2 features end-to-end encrypted authentication, cuts bandwidth usage by roughly 60-70%, and can boost miner profitability by up to 7.4% through faster template delivery and improved fee selection. F2pool's participation represents tens of EH/s of hashrate supporting the V2 standard.

Looking ahead, F2pool is expected to accelerate Stratum V2 production deployment, promote miner-autonomous block template construction, and continue expanding multi-token reward mechanisms to enhance miner revenue diversity.

Co-founders and current core executives of F2Pool:

1. DiscusFish (Shixing Mao): Co-founder of F2Pool. One of China's earliest crypto pioneers, author of the first Chinese mining tutorial, and co-founder of Cobo (where he currently serves as CEO).

2. Wang Chun (Chun Wang): Co-founder of F2Pool and founder of stakefish. An early individual Bitcoin miner since 2011, he co-founded F2Pool in 2013 and remains actively involved.

3. Leon L.: Chief Strategy Officer of F2Pool and stakefish. Former Wall Street investor and UN finance officer, joined F2Pool in early 2020, overseeing business, marketing, partnerships, and investments.