Centralized mining pools reduce payout variance, but they also place block-template selection and share accounting in one operator. Braidpool is an open-source attempt to separate those functions. Its published design uses a short-lived directed acyclic graph of lower-difficulty shares called beads. Each bead records proof of work and contributes to a miner's portion of pool rewards. A bead that also meets Bitcoin's network target can become a Bitcoin block.
The specification proposes full-proportional payouts over each 2,016-block difficulty period. Rewards would be aggregated and settled with threshold signatures among miners. Transaction selection would also move away from a single pool operator. Existing pools could still provide services on top, such as buying shares from miners in exchange for faster, more predictable payouts. These are protocol goals, not evidence that the complete system is operating today.
The current implementation is a prototype rather than a public production pool. Its README documents a node that connects to Bitcoin Core and to peers supplied manually. The roadmap labels that state version 0.0, with audit mode, data gathering, share validation, threshold signing and a public launch described as later milestones. The repository contains a Rust node, protocol primitives, tests, a monitoring dashboard and support for a CPU-only development network.
The main repository was created in February 2021 and is distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3. It remains unarchived and recorded branch activity in October 2026, although its default branch last changed in June 2025. The project does not publish a legal entity or organisational form, so its structure is recorded as undocumented. No individual profile is necessary to describe the work, and the directory uses its existing monogram fallback instead of an invented logo.