Which XBT (BTCB2) pool should you point hashrate at?
The fee is the number everyone compares first and the least interesting of the four things that actually differ between pools on this chain. The others: whether the pool ever holds your coins, whether the transaction fees in a found block reach the miners or stay with the operator, and whether the pool does anything at all to limit its own share of the network.
| Pool | Fee | Reward scheme | Who holds your coins | The block's transaction fees | Limit on its own share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lazarus Pool | 0% own DATUM gateway · public stratum donation, validation and fallback endpoint at 100% (kept by the pool), with a 24 h / 96 h grace at 25%, then 100% | TIDES, 8× difficulty | Nobody. The block's coinbase pays your address | Scale every miner's payout up | Stratum held to 15%, enforced by relaying new miners elsewhere |
| Riptide | 0% own DATUM · 1% stratum (variable; currently 1%, half the skim to live DATUM miners) | TIDES | Coinbase | Not published separately | None published |
| CONVOY | 1% DATUM · 2% failover stratum | TIDES | Generation transaction when it fits; otherwise a balance until 0.01048576 BTC | Included in the TIDES split | None published |
| B2Pool | 0% own DATUM · 1% TIDES stratum | TIDES, 4× difficulty | Coinbase where it fits, otherwise the pool until your balance passes 10,000 sat | Stay with the pool (only the subsidy is shared) | None published |
| Xorpool | 1% own DATUM · 2% pooled stratum (they build the template) | TIDES | Nobody. The block's coinbase pays your address | Scale every miner's payout up | None published |
| iohzrd | 0% own DATUM · 10% their public gateway | TIDES, 8× difficulty | Coinbase | Scale every miner's payout up | Network share limit on their dashboard |
| AlphaPool | 2.95% PPLNS · DATUM fee advertised as half of that | PPLNS | The pool, until a block reaches 100-confirmation maturity and a batch cycle pays out | Not published | 30%, pledged after it passed 50% of the network |
Read that honestly and our public stratum is the expensive one: a donation, validation and fallback endpoint at 100%, with a 24 h / 96 h grace at 25%, then 100%. That is deliberate. Bitcoin Knots has announced a rule to invalidate coinbase payouts to addresses that hash through a pool's stratum, on every pool, so a cheaper pool is not a way out: a stratum hasher there will not be paid either. The pool keeps that fee. The path we actually recommend, your own node and gateway, is 0% on a full window share.
The rest of the table is where nothing else on this chain matches. Transaction fees in a block scale every payout up here instead of staying with the pool. Nothing is ever held — the block itself pays your address, so there is no balance, threshold or withdrawal. And once its stratum passes 15% of network hashrate this pool turns new miners away and hands them to someone else. The five pools we relay to are grouped in the table with Lazarus; figures are as each pool published them on 18 September 2026 — check their sites before you commit a fleet.
Decentralize the hashrate
Other pools that speak DATUM and TIDES.
No single pool should hold a third of this chain. We cap our own stratum at 15% of the network (own-gateway hashrate doesn’t count); past that, new stratum connections are relayed to one of these pools. All five support DATUM and TIDES. Keep one as a failover.
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0% DATUM · 1% stratum, variable
Maveth’s TIDES pool. Zero fee through your own gateway; the SV1 skim is variable (currently 1%) and half of it goes back to live DATUM miners as STRATUM BOOST. Prefers a CONVOY gateway with the largest-coinbase patch.
- Stratum
- stratum+tcp://sv1.riptide.maveth.ca:23337
- DATUM
- tides.maveth.ca:28916
-
1% DATUM · 2% failover
The pool behind the CONVOY DATUM gateway. Non-custodial TIDES; DATUM is their standard 1% fee, and mining on their failover stratum (they build the template) is 2%.
- Stratum
- stratum+tcp://mine.convoy.xyz:3333
- DATUM
- see Get Started on convoy.xyz
-
0% DATUM · 1% TIDES
DATUM on 28915 is 0%. Shared TIDES on 3333 is 1% over a window of four times difficulty; solo on 3334. Regions in Frankfurt, Helsinki, Chicago, Los Angeles, Kyiv and Hong Kong.
- Stratum
- stratum+tcp://ord.b2pool.io:3333 · de · hel · lax · ua
- DATUM
- port 28915 on any region
-
1% DATUM · 2% pooled stratum
Bitcoin Xor’s TIDES pool. Coinbase-direct payouts, DATUM-first: you build the template at 1%, or mine on their pooled stratum (they build the template) at 2%. xorpool.com.
- Stratum
- stratum+tcp://datum.xorpool.com:23335
- DATUM
- datum.xorpool.com:28915
-
0% DATUM · 10% their public gateway
Omega Pool, run by iohzrd, the author of Ratum. Own gateway is 0%; their public gateway is 10%. Miners connect through ratum-gateway or CONVOY and are paid from a TIDES window of eight times difficulty.
- Stratum
- stratum+tcp://gateway.iohzrd.tech:23334 · their public gateway
- DATUM
- config on pool.iohzrd.tech
Relayed miners are paid by the pool they land on: see Relayed to other pools. Own-gateway miners are never relayed. Fees as each pool published them on 18 September 2026; check before you point hashrate.