Bitmain, one of the world's leading manufacturers of Bitcoin mining hardware, has announced the launch of an open-source bitcoin mining pool, as a part of its free bitcoin block explorer, analytics tool and bitcoin wallet BTC.com.

The newly launched mining pool is the second from Bitmain family and follows Antminer. With this, the BTC.com team expects to set new technical standards for mining pools and remove barriers that limit the efficiency or ease of mining pools. To ensure stability and efficiency, the BTC.com mining pool has been tested for upto 180,000 miners (or workers) by using software simulators that mirror the load of real workers.

“Bitmain hopes that the open-source BTC.COM mining pool will set new benchmarks in terms of stability, efficiency and service for all mining pools and, by helping other developers around the world to develop mining pools using BTC.COM’s source code, further promote decentralization of the bitcoin mining network”, the announcement reads.

Moreover, to reduce latency of newly mined blocks and increase robustness, the BTC.com mining pool has independent server clusters in China and USA with more clusters planned for Europe and North America.

The BTC.com pool has many “firsts” for any mining pool. This includes a “PoolWatcher” function to “listen” to other mining pools for newfound blocks and start mining at the next height after a block has been found on any pool; and a “BtcAgent” software that allows mining farm owners or miners with multiple workers to view every worker in their LAN on the mining pool. In addition, users will be able to see the real-time stats on the pool immediately after connecting their worker and payouts are calculated almost instantly.

The BTC.com mining pool mobile app is available for download from App Store and Google Play store. This app also allows users to manage their miners by creating groups, deleting inactive miners and sorting their miners.

No mining fee will be charged until 2017. In addition, BTC.com is also offering a 1% subsidy to every new user within first 3 months of its launch, provided the user maintains his/her hashrate for at least one month. The BTC.com pool will offer rewards based on pay-per-share (PPS) and, after 31 December 2016, charge a fee of 1.5%, among the lowest in the industry.