Little-known Lubian is now one of bitcoin's biggest mining pools

Lubian.com, a little-known bitcoin mining pool, is now ranked the 6th largest pool on BTC.com, controlling almost 6% of the network's computing power.

The mining pool started gathering attention this week when BTC.com listed the website on its pool statistics webpage. As the webpage shows, Lubian's hashrate and ranking has been steadily rising since it first appeared on the site. It has so far mined over 150 blocks and the pool's 24 hours average hashrate reached over 6.5 EH/s by press time. 

THE SCOOP

Keep up with the latest news, trends, charts and views on crypto and DeFi with a new biweekly newsletter from The Block's Frank Chaparro

By signing-up you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
By signing-up you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

A look at Lubian's mining address shows that the pool started mining in late April. From April 26 to May 9, the address was mining with the tag "Buffett," which is a string of letters and numbers that block producers can attach to a block's coinbase input data to identify themselves. It changed the tag to lubian.com on May 10 at block 629755 and subsequently caught the attention of mining pool trackers like BTC.com. 

Lubian has no known owners and operators, and its website also reveals few details. It simply states in Chinese that Lubian, which means "roadside," is "the safest high yielding mining pool in the world."

A lookup of the website's IP address shows that the website URL is run on Alibaba's cloud service, based in Hong Kong. 

About Author

Celia joined The Block as a reporter after earning her BA in the History of Science from the University of Chicago. Having spent years pondering over why 2+2 cannot equal 5, she is interested in the history and philosophy of mathematics, computation, and cryptography. She also had a very brief stint at Crunchbase News.