DCG’s Foundry Shutters Free Mining Service (Report)

The Digital Currency Group will revamp its way of mining Bitcoin amid larger funding problems due mostly in part to another subsidiary of theirs, Genesis, going bankrupt as a result of their dealings with FTX.

Freeing Up Revenue

Although Genesis reached an agreement with its creditors – the crypto trading platform’s parent company, DCG, being one of them – the former is marked for sell-off as soon as a buyer appears.

The arrangement DCG and its subsidiary have entered was a step in the right direction. However, DCG is still in a tough spot and seems to be looking for new ways to generate revenue.

As of mid-April, Foundry USA, a Bitcoin mining subsidiary of DCG, will begin charging users for their service.
Up until now, using Foundry had been free ever since the service went online in 2019, which quickly turned into the largest mining pool in the world, going by computing power.

According to btc.com, Foundry currently controls 33.49% of the global Bitcoin mining pool, followed by F2Pool, with 14.06%, and Binance Pool, with 11.16%.

Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever, and DCG announced that the service would no longer be free.

Tiered Subscriptions

In all fairness, most mining pool services charge a fee – Foundry is only beginning to charge for what everyone else is.

However, the decision has left some of the service’s fans understandably disappointed.

According to Bloomberg, Foundry’s new business model will be a tiered list of subscriptions to the mining service, and the price will vary per quarter depending on the previous quarter’s hash rate.

“As the Foundry USA Pool continues to scale, we are implementing tiered fees that will further allow us to expand our feature set and continue operating within our FPPS [Full Pay Per Share] payout model. The pricing tiers for each quarter will be based on the previous quarter’s average hash rate – a measure of computing power.”

Although it’s unfortunate that the largest mining pool will abandon what brought it the status of top dog, it was not wholly unexpected.

For now, it’s unclear exactly what price current users will have to pay for the first quarter. Foundry’s new business model will take effect in about two weeks, somewhere between the 19th and 22nd of April.