Hydrapool
One-click deployable open-source Bitcoin mining pool
Hydrapool is a fully open-source Bitcoin mining pool software package that can be deployed with a single command. It supports multiple payout structures, Stratum V1/V2 protocols, and is designed to make running a mining pool accessible to individuals, communities, and organizations.
Why This Is a Core Grant
Mining pool software is critical infrastructure for Bitcoin mining, yet all major pools run closed-source software. This creates centralization risk and prevents community-governed pools from forming. Hydrapool makes it easy for anyone to run a pool — whether for personal use, community mining, or foundation fundraising events like TeleHash.
Why It's Necessary
The ability to spin up a Bitcoin mining pool has historically required significant technical expertise and proprietary software licenses. Hydrapool removes both barriers: it is fully open-source and designed for one-click deployment via Docker. This enables new use cases including community pools, hashrate donation platforms, and research pools — directly supporting the foundation's TeleHash fundraising events.
Why the World Needs Easy-to-Deploy Pool Software
Your miner can run open hardware. Your miner can run open firmware. But if every pool that accepts your hashrate is a closed, centralized operator that can be pressured, regulated, or compromised — the last mile of Bitcoin's censorship resistance is broken. Hydrapool exists because mining pool software needs to be as open, documented, and deployable as the rest of the stack.
Pools are the last chokepoint
Mining pools decide which transactions get included in the blocks they build. The top four pools control roughly 75% of Bitcoin's hashrate, and the effective concentration is higher when organizational relationships between pools are factored in. This level of concentration means that a small number of entities — each subject to the laws and pressures of their respective jurisdictions — have substantial influence over which transactions get mined. Pool-level transaction filtering has already occurred in practice. Open-source pool software that anyone can spin up is the mechanism that lets hashrate route around that pressure. If a pool starts filtering transactions, miners can redirect to an independently operated pool within minutes — but only if independently operated pools exist and are easy to stand up.
The existing options are hard or limited
The open-source pool software that exists today was built for different eras and different audiences. CKPool is written in C with sparse documentation and requires expert Linux administration to deploy — there is no official Docker path, and the primary support channel is IRC. Public Pool is easier to run but is solo-mining only: it has no shared reward mechanism, making it unsuitable for anyone who wants to operate a community pool or run PPLNS payouts. Neither was built with the goal of being approachable documentation-first software that a technically curious Bitcoiner could spin up in an afternoon. Hydrapool was.
Open firmware needs an open pool to develop against
Testing new firmware features requires a pool you control. Production pools cannot be used — they have rate limits, minimum share difficulties that reject low-hashrate development hardware, and no debugging interfaces. When the Mujina firmware team implements a new protocol feature, they need a local pool instance they can inspect, break, and run in a controlled environment. Hydrapool fills that role for the entire open-source mining stack. Every advance in Mujina and every new Ember One bring-up happens against a Hydrapool instance. The four pillar projects are not independent — they are a system, and Hydrapool is the component that makes the others testable.
A building block for fully decentralized pooling
Hydrapool's roadmap includes interoperability with P2Pool V2 — a ground-up Rust rewrite of the original P2Pool concept, actively developed by Jungly, who is also Hydrapool's lead engineer. P2Pool V2 aims to remove the pool operator entirely: miners collectively maintain a share chain and receive non-custodial payouts directly in the coinbase transaction, with no central server to shut down or coerce. Hydrapool is the well-documented, production-capable foundation that makes experimenting with and contributing to that future possible. The path from "one-click pool" to "fully decentralized pooling infrastructure" runs through the same codebase.
Technical Details
Hydrapool is written in Rust and licensed under AGPLv3. It deploys via Docker Compose and ships with a Stratum server, job manager, database backend, Prometheus metrics, and Grafana dashboards out of the box. Payouts are made directly from the coinbase transaction — the pool operator never custodies funds. The system supports up to 100 unique users per coinbase transaction by default, with zero-downtime rolling upgrades. The 256 Foundation runs a live Hydrapool instance at pool.256foundation.org:3333 — anyone can point hashrate there using any username or Nostr npub.
Key Specifications
Features & Compatibility
Payout Modes
- →Solo mining
- →PPLNS share accounting
- →Direct coinbase payouts
- →No operator fund custody
- →Up to 100 users per coinbase tx
Protocol & Connectivity
- →Stratum V1
- →Stratum V2 (planned)
- →Bitcoin Core RPC
- →Nostr npub as username
- →pool.256foundation.org:3333 (live)
Monitoring & Ops
- →Prometheus metrics
- →Grafana dashboards
- →Hashdash web interface
- →Share validation & database
- →Zero-downtime rolling upgrades
Update changelog for v2.6.0
pool2win · 1mo ago
Update config example file
pool2win · 1mo ago
Don't wait for chain sync in hydrapool mode
pool2win · 1mo ago
Release 2.5.9 - Ignore p2poolv2 pool difficulty
pool2win · 1mo ago
Release v2.5.8
pool2win · 2mo ago
Release v2.5.7
pool2win · 2mo ago
Jungly
@jungly
Lead Engineer
Distributed systems researcher with a PhD and the developer behind P2Pool v2. Jungly brings rigorous academic and hands-on protocol engineering to Hydrapool, building the open-source mining pool infrastructure the ecosystem needs.
Econoalchemist
@econoalchemist
Project Manager
Bitcoin educator, technical writer, and co-host of the POD256 podcast. Co-founder of the 256 Foundation and project manager across all four pillar grants.