If you are looking for a full list of Ethereum mining pools, you have come to the right place. We cannot personally vouch for each and every one of these pools, but they are all fairly popular in the community and likely to be trustworthy. That said, we take no responsibility if one of them takes your money and runs.

Personally, we have used Ethermine and Nanopool, both of which we would highly recommend and both of which we have successfully received a full and fair payout from at least once. Others on this list are known to be trustworthy in the community, including f2pool and Ethfans.

The full list of pools

  • f2pool
  • Ethermine
  • Ethfans
  • MiningPoolHub
  • Nanopool
  • dwarfpool
  • BW
  • coinotron

There are surely plenty of other Ethereum pools that we are not aware of, but these are a pretty good collection of the most popular ones. If you run a pool, or are a member of a pool that is not on this list, be sure to leave a comment below.

What a mining pool actually does

If you are new to this, it helps to understand why pools exist at all. Mining is a competition: miners race to solve a cryptographic puzzle, and whoever solves it first earns the block reward. On a large network, the odds of any single miner winning that race are tiny — you could run your hardware for months and never find a block. A mining pool solves this by combining the computing power of many miners into one collective effort. When the pool finds a block, the reward is split among members according to how much work each contributed. As Wikipedia's overview of mining pools notes, pooling took off precisely once mining difficulty rose to the point where solo miners could wait years between rewards.

The trade-off is that you earn smaller, steadier payouts instead of rare, large ones — and you pay the pool a small fee, usually in the 1–3% range. For most people, that predictability is well worth it. Investopedia's explainer breaks down the main reward models (such as PPS and PPLNS) if you want to compare how different pools calculate your share.

How to choose between them

A few practical factors separate a good pool from a frustrating one:

  • Fee structure. Lower is better, but a rock-bottom fee on an unreliable pool is a false economy.
  • Payout method and minimum. Some pools only pay out once you have accumulated a threshold amount, which matters if your hardware is modest.
  • Server location. A pool with servers near you means lower latency and fewer rejected shares.
  • Reputation and uptime. A pool that goes offline is a pool that is not earning you anything.

Why you should spread the hashrate around

For a variety of reasons, it is a good idea to support pools that are not the two or three most popular ones. When the production of Ether and the hashrate falls under the control of only a few people who administer the largest pools, the chances of the network being compromised are slightly increased. If any single pool were ever to control more than half of the network's mining power, it would in theory be able to interfere with transaction ordering — the much-discussed "51% attack." Spreading your hashrate across smaller, reputable pools is a small act of network hygiene that keeps the system healthier for everyone.

Ethereum is best mined using a GPU rig, and you can learn how to build one of those in our GPU mining rig guide. Once your hardware is ready, our walkthrough on setting up Claymore's Ethereum miner on Windows covers the software side of getting your pool configured.