Poolin, the second-largest Bitcoin mining pool, has partnered with BlockFi to expand its crypto lending and financial services business.
First reported by Coindesk, BlockFi will work as an interbank lender, thus providing a source of capital to the crypto mining giant.
Poolin ranks second in generating Bitcoin mining computing power, capturing around 20 percent of the total hash power with around 18.3 exahashes per second (EH/s) only following F2Pool which is generating a combined computing power of 19 EH/s.
But the mining giant is also operating other digital asset-related businesses.
In February, Poolin rolled out its crypto lending via Blockin, its Singapore-registered crypto wallet entity. The platform is specifically targeting miners with its services, providing Liquidity against their crypto holdings.
Many miners want to hold the mined digital assets, but to maintain their operation, they also need liquidity.
“[A] mining pool is a traffic business and it is getting more and more competitive,” Yang Jianguo, head of Poolin’s financial services, said. “Poolin has its unique advantage but we also want multiple business lines – not just lending but also financial services – that are parallel to our pool business.”
Mining is getting competitive, yet lucrative
Mining Bitcoin has become very hard for small miners as the industry is getting highly commercialized. With the recent Bitcoin mining network halving, the rewards for finding per block also dropped from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC.
Notably, Binance, one of the leading crypto exchanges, has also jumped into the crypto mining industry with the launch of its own mining pool. Many believe that Binance, with its reputation in the industry, will soon challenge top mining pools like F2Pool and Poolin.
