Foundry Ends Bitcoin Mining Pool Beta Phase, Adds More Institutional Clients

Foundry, the cryptocurrency mining firm owned by Digital Currency Group (DCG), is opening its mining pool to additional institutional customers, emerging from a five-month beta phase during which the company has already grown into one of the industry's largest players. (DCG, a cryptocurrency-focused investment conglomerate, also owns CoinDesk.)

Foundry's North America-based pool ranks among the 10 largest with over 4 exahashes per second of mining power, according to network data collected by BTC.com. An exahash represents a quintillion computations, or computer-generated guesses at the cryptographic puzzles that must be solved every 10 minutes or so to keep the Bitcoin blockchain running.

CEO Mike Colyer said his company wants to offer an experience "tailor-made to fit the needs of institutional mining companies."

Concurrent with the end of its beta phase, Foundry's pool has added Texas-based Blockcap to its growing list of clients. Using roughly 10,000 mining machines in Foundry's pool, Blockcap represents over 0.9 exahashes of computing power.

In mid-January, Foundry teamed up with Minnesota-based Compute North to launch a 14,000-machine mining facility, also targeting institutional miners.

The past six months of growth puts Foundry "a step closer to its ultimate aim of securing a spot among the top 5 pools, which has historically been dominated by strictly China-based pools," according to a statement.

Last month, Foundry's pool mined 35 blocks, per the website BTC.com, and it's on pace to beat that pace in March, having already mined 22 blocks.