Warning: Since this post was published, we have learned that GBMiners are associated with a Ponzi scheme

Roughly three to four percent of Bitcoin’s overall hashrate is now pointed at a mining pool in India, putting it in the top ten of mining pools in the world. This Indian mining pool, known as GBMiners, recently received an undisclosed amount of funding from Amit Bhardwaj, who is also a co-founder of the the new venture.

The vast majority of mining hardware currently pointed at the GBMiners mining pool is owned by Bhardwaj.

Although other news outlets have reported GBMiners is the largest bitcoin mining pool outside of China, both BitFury and Slushpool, which aren’t based in China, still have a greater share of the overall network hashrate.

In addition to their interest in bitcoin mining, GBMiners also plans to mine on the Ethereum and Zcash networks.

A Brief History of GBMiners

According to GBMiners’s Sanjay Goswami, the mining pool mined their first block on August 30th. Goswami explained how GBMiners came together when two of the founders of Darwin Labs were introduced to Bhardwaj at a party:

“Nikunj [Jain] and Sahil [Baghla] were introduced by someone to Amit [Bhardwaj] at a party, and Amit ran huge amount of mining power, spread across all major pools,” said Goswami. “We had just got interested in cryptocurrencies and were trying to decide our first product, and seeing our energy and enthusiasm, Amit said, ‘I have an idea we can work on together.’”

According to Goswami, this is an offer that could not be refused, mainly due to Bhardwaj’s relatively long history in Bitcoin. As someone who had been mining on multiple mining pools connected to the Bitcoin network, Bhardwaj was able to share some ideas on how a new pool could improve the efficiency of his own hashing power.

“We started researching, put out some of our test servers, and most of what he said resonated with our findings,” claimed Goswami.

Details of the Mining Pool

Although there are some other independent miners using GBMiners right now, a significant portion of the mining hardware currently pointed at the pool is owned by Bhardwaj. According to Bhardwaj’s personal website, his Amaze Mining & Blockchain Research Ltd. owns and operates bitcoin mining hardware that represents more than 5 percent of the overall network hashrate.

Although the mining pool is based in India, the hardware pointed at the pool is located in China. “We are still discovering in India about the machine setup and all,” said Goswami.

A Positive Outlook on Bitcoin Unlimited

Bitcoin Unlimited is a software client that intends to hard fork the Bitcoin blockchain after a certain amount of support for an increase in the block size limit is perceived on the network. ViaBTC and Bitcoin.com’s pool are the two major mining pools currently pushing the hardest for a hard fork initated by Bitcoin Unlimited.

In a recent AMA, ViaBTC founder and CEO Haipo Yang claimed GBMiners and a few other mining pools are planning to switch from Bitcoin Core (the current reference implementation of the Bitcoin protocol) to Bitcoin Unlimited. However, when asked directly for GBMiners’s views on Bitcoin Core and the block size limit debate, Goswami responded, “We are still forming a concrete opinion about it, but we are really positive about Bitcoin Unlimited.”

GBMiners came out of Darwin Labs, which is also working on a bitcoin bank currently operating in stealth mode.