We recently released an update for Braiins Pool which includes a refreshed design and several new features that are the first of their kind in major bitcoin mining pools. For those who just want to know the basics of what’s new with the pool, you can check out our Braiins Pool News post.

In this blog, we’ll dive deeper into the update and share some insights about our approach to developing new features so that we can better serve modern bitcoin miners. If you mine with Braiins Pool and have ideas about ways we can improve, you’ll definitely want to keep reading.

Turning Feedback into Features for Bitcoin Miners

Nearly everything about the bitcoin mining industry has changed since Braiins Pool began operations 10 years ago. Today’s large bitcoin mining farms are often co-owned by multiple investors and operated by large teams of engineers, technicians, and business managers. Even retail miner

Ultimately, our latest pool update isn’t about the new visuals or redesigned interface that initially jump out at you, but about better meeting the needs of these modern bitcoin miners.

To do this, we looked at data and listened to feedback in order to find inconvenient and time consuming actions that pool users were frequently taking so that we could automate them. Take the new Reward Splitting feature, for example. It allows users to set up an automatic percentage split for mining rewards so that they can be distributed to multiple financial accounts within a single pool account (e.g. 25% each to 4 equal co-owners).

With so many mining operations having multi-party ownership these days, the Reward Splitting feature was a clear way to improve miners’ ability to manage financial flows without needing to transact as much on-chain. Reward Splitting can also be useful even for one-person operations, such as the case where you want to set aside some of the mining revenue for cold storage while sending another portion to an exchange wallet in order to cover operating expenses.

After your mining rewards are made available in your account, there’s still the matter of taking custody yourself. We’ve seen in our data as well as heard from miners both large and small that they frequently adjust their payout threshold in order to receive the payouts in regular time intervals rather than more randomly. We wanted to eliminate that hassle, so we developed a Timed Payout feature that allows users to set up a regular payout schedule for withdrawing funds to external wallet(s). 

Now, Braiins Pool miners can choose to keep the custom payout threshold as before, or to receive payouts on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis instead. (For weekly and monthly payouts, you can choose the specific day when it occurs.)  Additionally, there are new options to receive payouts immediately or to pause them indefinitely. The former makes it more convenient to withdraw funds as soon as possible without changing anything about your regular payout setup, while the latter is like an emergency break — a security feature that enables you to stop funds from leaving your account if you suspect that your mining pool account or external wallet may have been compromised.

We always aim to respond quickly to support requests, but nothing beats the efficiency of using these built-in options when time is of the essence.

On that note, the incentives for hackers to come after bitcoin miners and bitcoin holders in general have never been greater thanks to Number Go Up. If you haven’t already, we highly recommend setting up two-factor authentication (2FA) for all pool accounts. We support the common One-Time Password (OTP) option for apps such as Google Authenticator and Authy, but if you prefer using a hardware wallet or similar device for this we enable Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) as well.

TL;DR: Braiins Pool is now offering the most customization of any bitcoin mining pool for managing your financial flows. Convenience 📈. Operational risk 📉.

Coming Next: More Data

Today’s bitcoin miners are more sophisticated and data-hungry than ever before. We’ve been hearing lots of requests to make data more accessible, so we are already working on making it possible for miners to generate and download detailed hashrate reports for long time periods in a future update.

Meanwhile, we’re working on adding more general mining industry data and useful tools like our bitcoin mining profitability calculator on our Mining Insights site.

Let Us Know How to Keep Improving Braiins Pool

As the oldest bitcoin mining pool, we’ve always felt a strong responsibility to help move the bitcoin mining industry forward with projects like Stratum V2 and by taking the lead on initiatives like Taproot activation. But at the end of the day, our biggest responsibility is providing the best possible user experience to our miners.

If you have any feedback you’d like to share with us, you can login to your Braiins Pool account and send us a message at https://slushpool.com/feedback. We would love to hear from you!