ViaBTC
ViaBTC is a Bitcoin company in the Mining Pools category, founded in 2016 by Haipo Yang.
The Idea
One of the world's largest Bitcoin mining pools, founded in 2016 by Haipo Yang, a former Tencent engineer. It quickly grew into a significant source of Bitcoin hashrate and became known for reliable, high-performance pool infrastructure. Yang was also an outspoken supporter of increasing Bitcoin's block size, and ViaBTC became a central player in the block size war, among the first pools to throw its hashrate behind what became Bitcoin Cash.
Early Traction
ViaBTC scaled quickly into a top global Bitcoin pool, open-sourcing its high-performance pool server and offering accessible services like cloud mining that let smaller miners point hashrate at Bitcoin. It built the ViaBTC Transaction Accelerator, a widely used tool that pushes stuck, low-fee BTC transactions through during network congestion. It also mined the first-ever Bitcoin Cash block on August 1, 2017, a defining moment in Bitcoin's most contentious fork.
Peak Stats
Consistently a top-five Bitcoin mining pool, securing roughly 8% of global hashrate, and one of the longest-running major pools, having served over a million miners across 150-plus countries with tens of billions of dollars in cumulative mining output. It mined the genesis Bitcoin Cash block, and the same team launched the CoinEx exchange.
Status Today
Active. Remains a major Bitcoin mining pool, still among the top five by hashrate, and operates pools for multiple digital assets alongside the CoinEx exchange.
Why It Matters
ViaBTC sat at the center of the block size war, Bitcoin's most important governance crisis, and helped birth Bitcoin Cash when that faction lost the fight to keep BTC's blocks small. But its lasting importance is to Bitcoin itself: for nearly a decade it has been one of the largest and most durable Bitcoin mining pools, giving a huge global base of miners, many of them small operators, a reliable way to earn Bitcoin and pointing real hashrate at securing the network.