Antpool, F2Pool to Support Fractal Bitcoin Merge Mining

Antpool and f2Pool, two of the top five bitcoin mining pools, have announced they will support merge mining with Fractal Bitcoin, a Bitcoin sidechain that is set to launch its mainnet on Monday.

Antpool said on Friday that it “will soon launch Fractal merged-mining, allowing Antpool BTC miners to earn FRACTAL rewards by linking their FRACTAL wallet address.”

Hours after Antpool’s announcement on X, f2pool said it is launching a dedicated Fractal Bitcoin mining pool on Monday alongside the mainnet. “We will support both permissionless mining and merged mining for #Fractal!” the operator added.

As detailed in the latest Miner Weekly newsletter on Thursday, Fractal Bitcoin is a sidechain that introduces a merged mining mechanism called “Cadence Mining,” allowing bitcoin miners to merge-mine only every one of the three blocks in Fractal Bitcoin block rewards. The remaining two blocks are reserved for those solely mining Fractal Bitcoin.

The sidechain is designed to natively support BRC-20 tokens and Ordinals, aiming to take those transactions off the Bitcoin network and move them to the Fractal Bitcoin chain.

Notably, 50% of the total supply of 210 million FB is allocated to proof-of-work mining, while the other half is pre-mined by the project team, its advisors, contributors, and pre-sale investors.

Spiderpool, another Chinese bitcoin mining pool besides f2pool and Antpool, first said it was supporting the Fractal Bitcoin merge mining last week.

Fractal Bitcoin was created by UniSat, a wallet platform core to BRC-20 and Ordinal activities that reportedly have ties to Bitcoin Satoshi Vision, a hard fork of Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin in 2018.