Once the world’s largest Bitcoin mining pool, Poolin @officialpoolin, has just filed for bankruptcy.

You might think it couldn’t mine anymore, or that its AI computing-power transition failed. Neither is true.
Poolin fell for the most cliché reason: it used users’ coins to add leverage.
In 2019, the pool controlled nearly one-fifth of the global Bitcoin hashrate. Users kept their coins in its wallets, and it promised annual returns ranging from 2% to 8.8%.
Behind the scenes, it took users’ coins as collateral and borrowed $213 million to buy mining machines. In 2022, when BTC fell below $20,000, the collateral was liquidated by creditors, and users’ coins were gone.
So Poolin froze withdrawals—once frozen, it lasted four years. Until today. More than 10,000 users got nothing back.
Now it has officially filed for bankruptcy, owing $173 million, with cash on hand of only $1.2 million.
The two mining sites in Texas where it operates have been put up for auction with a reserve price of $52 million. Even if they sold for the full amount, it would only cover about a third of the debts.
And in the court filings, there’s a detail that’s a bit too darkly humorous. The court mentioned that demand from today’s AI data centers for electricity is strong, and they might help Poolin’s mining sites fetch a better price...
But it couldn’t live long enough—just because it was in debt—to reach the day it could have transformed into providing the power infrastructure needed for AI.