tl;dr
Foundry USA Pool, the largest Bitcoin mining pool by hash rate, returned an 8.18 BTC transaction fee (worth roughly $777,000) that was accidentally overpaid during the mining of block 875475 on December 19. The pool refunded the excess fee after recognizing the mistake and assured that it did not af...
Foundry USA Pool – the largest Bitcoin mining pool by hash rate – recently took action to return an 8.18 BTC transaction fee, which is roughly worth $777,000, that had been accidentally overpaid. The error occurred on December 19 during the mining of block 875475, which included a transaction with a fee 91,127 times higher than what was needed.
After recognizing the mistake, Foundry reached out to the sender and refunded the excess fee after assessment. In a statement to The MinerMag, the mining pool assured that this refund did not affect the payouts of its regular customers stating that the payout system disregards the three highest and three lowest transaction fees each day. Its official tweet read, "We have received numerous messages from across the industry, and we want to extend our thanks to everyone who reached out on the user’s behalf. Please note that this decision was made after thorough deliberation, and we will continue to handle these instances on a case-by-case basis."
This incident marks the second such event in recent months, following a similar action by Antpool in November 2023, when it had to refund a $3 million Bitcoin transaction fee after a user error led to the highest-ever fee paid on the Bitcoin network. As reported earlier, the user mistakenly submitted 83 BTC as a fee on November 23, following which the Bitcoin mining company froze the fee temporarily, and announced its plan to verify the sender’s identity before issuing a refund.
Meanwhile, Foundry's pool, with a massive hash rate of 273.6 EH/s, remains the largest in the industry, far surpassing Antpool's 146.7 EH/s, according to data compiled by Hashrate Index. Additionally, Foundry controls almost 38% of the market share among pool operators, while Antpool accounts for 18%, at the time of writing.
The latest development comes less than a month after Foundry was reported to have laid off 60% of its workforce, as part of its "realignment" strategy. The layoffs at Foundry mainly affected employees outside of the company's core operations. Originally employing 250 people, 20 were reassigned to Yuma, while around 160-170 staff were let go. This included the entire ASIC repair and hardware teams, though mining pool operations remained unaffected. Foundry was also believed to have been exploring selling its site operations team, which oversees Bitcoin mining locations.