Poolin, Once Bitcoin’s Largest Mining Pool, Files Chapter 11 With Up to $500M in Liabilities

Poolin Technology Pte. Ltd., the Singapore-based company that once controlled nearly a fifth of BBTC$63,971.00▼1.70%‘s global hashrate, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in a New Jersey court with liabilities of up to $500 million — including roughly $164 million owed to about 11,700 users who trusted the pool with their mining payouts.

Two U.S. affiliates, Lonestar Dream and Lonestar Taproot, filed alongside the parent entity, according to CoinDesk. The filings land in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey and represent one of the largest collapses in Bitcoin mining pool history — the final chapter of a multi-year slide from the peak position Poolin held when it was the world’s biggest pool by hashrate.

The Scale of the Shortfall

The scale of the shortfall is stark. Poolin listed liabilities of up to $500 million in its petition, with approximately $163.7 million to $164 million of that owed to roughly 11,700 individual users, CryptoSlate reported. Those users are, in effect, unsecured creditors — miners who contributed computing power to the pool and are now standing at the back of a bankruptcy queue that could take years to resolve. The gap between what Poolin owes its users and what it claims in total liabilities raises a harder question: where does the rest of that debt sit? With trade creditors, equipment financiers, or counterparties to positions that soured?

Texas Assets and a Distressed Sale

As part of the restructuring, Poolin is seeking to sell two Texas mining sites for $52 million. The Texas facilities, held through the Lonestar affiliates, represent the company’s most tangible remaining assets — physical infrastructure in a state that spent the last cycle aggressively courting Bitcoin miners with cheap power and favorable regulation. A $52 million exit on sites that likely cost considerably more to build or acquire is, at best, a distressed sale. It is the kind of number that signals a buyer’s market for secondhand mining infrastructure, not a vote of confidence in the seller.

What Brought Poolin Down

The Bondoro case summary cites two forces behind the collapse: China’s Bitcoin mining ban and the broader cryptocurrency market decline. The China ban, imposed in 2021, gutted the domestic mining industry that Poolin had been built to serve. Pools that once operated openly inside China were forced to offshore operations, relocate staff, and rebuild relationships with miners who scattered to Kazakhstan, the United States, and elsewhere. Poolin survived that initial dislocation. It never fully recovered the hashrate share it lost. As the market turned in 2022 and 2023, the pressure compounded — falling coin prices squeezed margins, rising energy costs eroded profitability, and the pool’s user base began drifting toward better-capitalized competitors.

At its peak, Poolin controlled approximately 20% of Bitcoin’s global hashrate, making it the single largest mining pool in the world. Hashrate share is a proxy for trust: miners route their computing power to the pool they believe will pay reliably and operate honestly. Losing that share is not just a business problem — it becomes a reputational death spiral, because each departing miner reduces the pool’s block-finding frequency, which in turn makes the pool less attractive to whoever stays. By the time Poolin reached bankruptcy court, it had long since been displaced by Foundry USA, AntPool, and F2Pool, among others.

Market Context

The filing lands against a jittery market. Bitcoin is trading at $64,088, down 1.6% over the past 24 hours, with a market capitalization of $1,285.72 billion and BTC dominance at 56.5%. The broader crypto market cap sits at $2,272.59 billion, off 1% on the day, and the Fear & Greed Index is at 27 out of 100 — firmly in fear territory. Mycryptoparadise.com noted that BTC slipped to $63,800 in the wake of the Poolin news, testing the $63,000 support level, though whether that dip was causally linked to the filing or simply part of a wider risk-off move is unclear. Mining pool bankruptcies do not directly remove hashrate from the network, but they rattle confidence in a sector already squeezed by halving-era economics.

What Creditors Should Expect

Skepticism is warranted here. Poolin’s users have been owed money for some time — reports of delayed withdrawals and frozen balances predate this filing by months, and the company’s communications grew sparse as the situation deteriorated. A Chapter 11 is, in principle, a restructuring tool rather than a liquidation, but the $52 million Texas sale and the sheer size of the user debt suggest unsecured creditors will recover pennies on the dollar at best. The U.S. bankruptcy process will determine the pecking order. Miners who treated their pool balances as cash equivalents have learned, again, that operational trust in crypto is not the same as legal recourse.

A Wider Pattern

Poolin’s collapse also lands at an awkward moment for the mining sector more broadly. The April 2024 halving cut block subsidies in half, compressing margins for every operator without access to sub-$0.04 electricity or next-generation hardware. Publicly traded miners have spent the post-halving period raising capital, buying distressed assets, and consolidating. A private pool going under fits that pattern — the strong are getting stronger, and the leveraged or poorly managed are being culled. What makes Poolin different is the user-facing debt. Mining pools are not supposed to hold large custodial balances; they are supposed to distribute block rewards promptly. The fact that 11,700 users are owed $164 million suggests either a failure of operational segregation or a deliberate use of user funds to cover shortfalls — questions the bankruptcy court will now have to answer.

The next milestones are the first-day motions in New Jersey: whether the court approves the Texas sale process, how user claims are categorized, and whether any secured creditors emerge to challenge the restructuring. Poolin’s creditors will also be watching for disclosure of where the $500 million in liabilities actually went — and whether the assets remaining are enough to keep this alive as a Chapter 11 rather than converting it to a Chapter 7 liquidation.