Braiins Pool turns 15: from Slush pioneer to Bitcoin mining giant

One of the most emblematic projects in cryptocurrency history has just marked a milestone. The world’s oldest Bitcoin mining pool, launched by a programmer using the pseudonym Slush, celebrated its 15th anniversary. What began in 2010 as Bitcoin CZ and later became Slush Pool now operates as Braiins Pool—and remains an active participant in the Bitcoin network, a rare feat in such a young industry.

Over its lifetime, the pool has mined 1,311,339 bitcoins, according to its own figures. At current prices, that’s about $115 billion, and at this year’s peak the amount would have exceeded $160 billion. For context, when the pool launched, one bitcoin was worth just $0.22, and the very idea of pooled mining was only beginning to take shape on enthusiast forums.

The rise in computing power is no less striking. In 2010, the aggregate hash rate hovered around 60,000 KH/s; by 2025, it had reached 13.56 EH/s. That’s roughly a 225–255 billion-fold increase, a scale that neatly captures how much the mining industry has transformed in a decade and a half.

The pool emerged as a response to rising mining difficulty, when solo miners found it increasingly hard to discover blocks consistently. Slush proposed a reward-sharing model that split income among participants in proportion to their contribution. The approach proved sustainable and helped the community endure and grow over the years—sometimes the most straightforward alignment of interests is the one that sticks.

Today, Braiins Pool brings together about 13,000 active users and develops a broader ecosystem that includes firmware for ASIC devices, mining management software, and its own hardware solutions. A project that began as an experiment now reads like a living archive of Bitcoin’s past and a clear illustration of how far the crypto industry has come in 15 years.