SVPool, a mining pool targeted at Bitcoin Cash miners, has been opened to the public after nearly two weeks of private activity. The pool’s invitation-only beta brought in several users earlier this month, and the pool mined its first BCH block on October 10th. It has already accumulated 3.1% of BCH mining activity, and as of today, anyone will be able to join the pool.

The History of SVPool

SVPool was created by Craig S. Wright of nChain. The pool is relying on its own node implementation called Bitcoin SV in an attempt to prevent a hard fork planned by a leading developer, Bitcoin ABC.

Bitcoin ABC produces node implementation software that is that currently dominant across BCH mining pools. The group’s dominance would allow it to fork Bitcoin Cash next month with divisive new changes.

SVPool opposes these changes, and Bitcoin SV will introduce entirely different changes to Bitcoin Cash if it is widely adopted by miners. Notably, Bitcoin SV will improve Bitcoin Cash’s scalability by continually increasing maximum block sizes, allowing more transaction data to be stored in each block.

Suggested Reading : Learn how Bitcoin Cash differs from Bitcoin here.

Can It Win Over Users?

SVPool’s press release positions the Bitcoin SV protocol as potentially triumphant, and the changes it proposes will supposedly restore the vision laid out in the original Bitcoin whitepaper. According to Wright:

“For too long, developer groups have repeatedly tried changing Bitcoin. The original Satoshi protocol for Bitcoin … has everything BCH needs to massively scale, support tokenization, smart contracts and other advanced features, and become the only global public blockchain.”

Hundreds of miners and groups reportedly pre-registered for the new pool, and this could cause the pool to grow in size significantly over the coming weeks.

Additionally, SVPool is endorsed by CoinGeek, a major pool which accounted for 25.9% of all BCH mining over the past week. CoinGeek issued a statement in August that indicated that it would take steps to support SVPool and not Bitcoin ABC.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin ABC’s node implementation is gradually losing the support of the Bitcoin Cash community. Bitcoin ABC once accounted for two-thirds of BCH nodes, but is now responsible for just over half of those nodes.

Whether Bitcoin SV can change the direction of Bitcoin Cash is still up in the air. Bitcoin Unlimited, yet another node implementation, is mainly responsible for Bitcoin ABC’s shrinking share of the mining market:

As such, it seems that Bitcoin SV will probably chip away at Bitcoin ABC’s dominance rather than dethrone it single-handedly. Nevertheless, SVPool has several selling points that will offer direct benefits to users: SVPool will not initially take mining fees from users, for one thing.

SVPool will also divide mining profits between miners according to a pay-per-last-N-shares (PPLNS) scheme, which is one way of fairly dividing rewards based on how much a user has recently mined. A Pay Per Share Plus (PPS+) reward scheme will be added in the future, and this will allow miners to receive more stable payouts.