Where it came from
F2Pool's own history of itself is specific about the reason it exists. Purpose-built mining chips arrived in 2013 and made many existing operations obsolete almost overnight, difficulty climbed, and a small miner's odds of ever finding a block alone collapsed. Chinese miners were connecting to pools abroad over a network path that was slow and filtered. Two of them, Chun Wang and the co-founder who goes by Discus Fish, went to Wenzhou and built a domestic pool. The company says it launched in April 2013 and that by 2014 it carried about a third of the network's hash rate.
The name the block explorers used for it then was Discus Fish, which is how it appears alongside GHash.IO in the 2014 pool share charts. The two founders ran it alone until the end of 2016, by the company's account, with Wang writing the code and Discus Fish handling accounts.
What it does now
The service is a pool in the ordinary sense: miners point hardware at a Stratum endpoint, the pool assembles the block template, and payouts are made under a chosen scheme. F2Pool runs FPPS and PPLNS side by side and lists per-region endpoints. As of 21 August 2026 its own front page reported a pool hash rate of 142 exahashes per second against a network one-day average of 876 exahashes per second.
The operating entity is stated in the terms of service: Fram Farm Inc., a British Virgin Islands business company, number 2138445, with a registered office at Trinity Chambers, Road Town, Tortola. The pool no longer serves the country it was built for. A notice still carried on f2pool.com says that "due to the recent development in local regulation" it would stop providing mining pool services in mainland China, excluding Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, from 31 December 2021.
One block records what the operators thought they were doing. Block 629,999, the last before the 2020 halving, carries in its coinbase the line "NYTimes 09/Apr/2020 With $2.3T Injection, Fed's Plan Far Exceeds 2008 Rescue". It is the same gesture as the headline in the genesis block, put there by a pool rather than by the person who started the chain.