Bitcoin Core versions run by mining pools

By looking at which pools mine P2A spends, we can guess when a pool roughly upgraded their getblocktemplate node to Bitcoin Core version v28.

pool first spend first creation total P2A inputs total P2A outputs
MaraPool 867278 (2024-10-25) 881521 (2025-01-30) 51 40
ViaBTC 883626 (2025-02-13) 883626 (2025-02-13) 7 4
Foundry 896194 (2025-05-11) 850457 (2024-07-03) 9 10
F2Pool 898061 (2025-05-23) 850307 (2024-07-02) 6 16
AntPool 900676 (2025-06-10) 867352 (2024-10-25) 14 17
SpiderPool 907615 (2025-07-28) 907610 (2025-07-28) 17 13
Braiins 850000 (2024-06-29) 0 2
SecPool 896193 (2025-05-11) 0 1
MiningSquared 894977 (2025-05-03) 0 1

As per https://bitcoincore.org/en/lifecycle/, v28 was released on 2024-10-02. It seems like MaraPool upgraded fairly quickly. ViaBTC upgraded sometime in early Feburary 2025, about four month after the release.

On 2025-04-14, v29 was released. In May and June, Foundry, F2Pool, and AntPool upgraded to v28. SpiderPool upgraded sometime in July. This matches what I’ve heard elsewhere: some pools are lagging behind on purpose.

Braiins, SecPool, MiningSquared don’t have much hashrate, so we don’t know if they would mine a P2A spent if they see one. Similar with the remaining pools not appearing here.

The same can be done with Ephemeral Dust to see when the upgraded to v29 as described in https://github.com/0xB10C/mainnet-observer/issues/101.

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Which appears to exactly follow the release of minor release 28.1 (2025-01-15).

28.2 was released at the end of June.

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As of 2026-01-14:

pool count first ephemeral dust
MARA Pool 31 894455 (2025-04-29)
AntPool 66 900676 (2025-06-10)
F2Pool 50 901146 (2025-06-14)
SpiderPool 74 913602 (2025-09-07)
Ocean.xyz 9 925458 (2025-11-27)
Innopolis Tech 1 927765 (2025-12-13)

Bitcoin Core v29.0 was released on 2025-04-15. MaraPool mined their first block with it two weeks later. AntPool and F2Pool upgraded (at least partly) about two months after the release. Spiderpool upgraded on 2025-09-07.

mainnet-observer now has daily updated tables for both P2A and ephemeral dust: