The BTC Pool. The website shown was accessed from inside China, meaning it was automatically redirected to the China server cluster. For users accessing the new pool website from outside China, the hashrate shown will be significantly lower than pictured.

Bitmain’s BTC.com, the free bitcoin block explorer, analytics tool, and bitcoin wallet, has launched an open-source bitcoin mining pool, and is charging no mining fee until 2017.

With the the pool’s launch, the BTC.com team hopes to set new technical standards for mining pools and remove barriers that limit the efficiency and ease of mining pools.

To ensure stability and efficiency, the BTC.com mining pool has been tested for up to 180,000 miners (or workers), using software simulators that replicate the load of real workers. If each worker is assumed to have the hashrate of an Antminer S9, that would make the total hashrate of the simulation more than that of the entire bitcoin network.

The BTC.com pool boasts many firsts for any mining pool:

A “PoolWatcher” function to “listen” to other mining pools for newfound blocks, beginning to mine at the next height after a block has been found on any pool. This reduces the number of orphaned blocks and increases the productivity of the pool. A “BtcAgent” software that allows mining farm owners or miners with multiple workers to view every worker in their LAN on the mining pool. This software can be downloaded from GitHub, like the rest of the BTC.com mining pool source code. Users can see the real-time stats on the pool immediately after connecting their worker. This eliminates the long wait to see the stats of your new worker on the mining pool. Payouts are calculated almost instantly.

To reduce latency of newly mined blocks and increase robustness, the BTC.com mining pool has independent server clusters in China and the US, with more clusters planned for Europe and North America.

The BTC.com mining pool has a full-feature mobile app available for download from the App Store and the Google Play store. This app also allows users to manage their miners by creating groups, deleting inactive miners, and sorting their miners.

Besides a zero mining fee until 2017, BTC.com is also offering a 1% subsidy to every new user within first three months of the pool’s launch, provided the user maintains his/her hashrate for at least one month.

The BTC.com pool will offer rewards based on pay-per-share (PPS). After December 31, 2016, it will charge a fee of 1.5%—among the lowest in the industry.

Bitmain hopes that the open-source BTC.com mining pool will set new benchmarks in terms of stability, efficiency, and service for all mining pools, and, by helping other developers around the world develop mining pools using BTC.com’s source code, further promote decentralization of the bitcoin mining network.