CleanPool was built by a fellow pleb who looked at the state of Bitcoin mining, saw hashrate consolidating into a handful of large operators with custodial payouts and centralized block templates, and decided to do something about it instead of just complaining.

This is a self-hosted pool running open-source software, pointed at a sovereign full node, run by one person who believes mining should be something any pleb can take part in without asking permission. No middlemen, no custody, no gatekeepers — just plebs mining together.

PPLNS stands for Pay Per Last N Shares. As your miner works, it submits shares — small proofs that it's grinding on real Bitcoin hashes for the pool.

The pool keeps a rolling window of the most recent N shares across every connected miner. When the pool finds a block, that block's reward is split among everyone according to how many shares they hold in the window at that moment.

Because the window is share-based rather than time-based, it rewards consistent contribution and is naturally resistant to pool-hopping. If you have no shares in the window when a block lands, you don't get a cut of that one — so keep your miner pointed here and keep earning your place in the window.

This pool has no funding behind it. It's being spun up entirely out of pocket by one pleb who thought it needed to be done.

The -1BTC in the badge is the goal. The first 1 BTC comes from the first block mined (and the remaining BTC is split via PPLNS). That 1 BTC raised goes straight back into funding, building, and expanding this pool — better hardware, more capacity, more resilience. Nothing skimmed for a yacht.

By the plebs, for the plebs.

Pool fee: zero for now. After that first block hits, it moves to a simple flat percentage fee — no tiers, no surprises.

256 Foundation: 2.1% of each block goes to the 256 Foundation, the folks building the open-source software this pool runs on. Supporting the tools that make sovereign mining possible.

No minimum payout. You're paid on every block the pool finds, directly — not held in a custodial balance waiting to clear a threshold.

The math is simple: the more hash you bring, the larger your share of the rolling window, and the bigger your slice of each block. More hash, more reward.