How to pick a Ravencoin mining pool.
The pool you join determines payout regularity, variance, and how exposed you are to a single operator going dark. A few sane criteria solve most of it.
Pool selection without the marketing fog.
Pool marketing is mostly noise — '0% fees', 'biggest pool', 'instant payouts'. What actually matters is whether the pool pays out what it says it will, in RVN, to your address, on a schedule that makes sense for your hashrate. A handful of objective criteria cuts through the noise.
Hashrate share, payout scheme, fee, server location, and minimum payout. Get those five right and most other differences are aesthetic.
- Hashrate share — avoid pools commanding more than ~25% of network hashrate. Concentration is bad for the chain you're mining.
- Payout scheme — PPS smooths variance; PPLNS rewards loyalty. Both are fine, just know which you're getting.
- Fees — 1% is normal. 0% pools have to make money somewhere — usually transaction-fee retention.
- Server location — latency to the stratum server matters more than raw 'bigger pool' numbers.
- Minimum payout — a 100 RVN minimum is easy on a single GPU; a 1000 RVN minimum on the same rig means very long stretches before withdrawals.
PPS vs PPLNS, explained in one read
PPS (Pay Per Share) pays you a fixed amount per share submitted, regardless of whether the pool actually finds blocks. Variance is low — payouts are smooth — and the pool absorbs the risk of bad luck. The fee is usually slightly higher to cover that risk.
PPLNS (Pay Per Last N Shares) pays you proportionally based on the shares you contributed in the recent window leading up to a found block. Loyal miners benefit; pool-hopping is penalised. Variance is higher — payouts come in lumps tied to blocks — but the long-run expected value is usually slightly higher than PPS for the same fee.
Plenty of pools come and go. The ones that disappear with unpaid balances tend to share warning signs you can spot in advance.
- No transparent fee or scheme documentation.
- Anonymous operator with no track record.
- Dashboard reports that don't match block-explorer data.
- Withdrawals that require login or KYC — pool payouts should be on-chain transactions, not custodial.
- Custodial balance that you 'withdraw' instead of automatic on-chain payouts — that is an exchange, not a pool.
- Pool fee that mysteriously changes without notice.
The pool pays to whatever address you give it. Use a fresh receiving address from your Electrum RVN wallet, ideally a dedicated address used only for mining payouts so they are easy to track in the history tab. Many miners keep a single "mining" address for ongoing payouts and rotate assets and other receipts to fresh addresses for privacy. Either pattern is fine.
Geographic and infrastructure considerations
Latency to the stratum server affects how quickly your shares are accepted, which has a small but real effect on efficiency. Pick a pool with servers in your region (or with regional endpoints you can configure). Pools with single-region infrastructure routinely have outages that affect every miner at once; pools with multiple endpoints survive better.
Pool switching is cheap. The miner software takes a new pool URL, your wallet address stays the same, and the outgoing payouts on the chain just start arriving from a different sender. There is no reason to be loyal to a pool that has stopped paying out cleanly — and no reason to stick with a pool that grows beyond healthy hashrate share. Treat pool choice as ongoing, not one-time.
Pool dashboards display three numbers worth understanding before you trust them. Reported hashrate is your share rate converted into an estimate; it fluctuates short-term and should converge to your true hashrate over a few hours. Pending balance is unpaid work — shares accepted but not yet rolled into a payout — and exists only on the pool's books, not on-chain. Confirmed balance is what has actually been paid to your address and shows up in Electrum RVN. Trust the on-chain number; treat the pool dashboard as a convenience.
- Reported hashrate is an estimate; smooth it over hours, not minutes.
- Pending balance is custodial — funds sit on the pool until payout.
- Confirmed balance in the wallet is the only number with finality.
- If pending grows but payouts never arrive, switch pools immediately.
Payout thresholds and timing
Most pools set a minimum payout threshold (commonly 5–50 RVN) and a payout interval (daily or every few hours). A small rig at a high threshold can wait days between payouts, which means more custodial exposure to the pool and more impact from a sudden outage. Lower the threshold if your hashrate is modest; raise it if transaction fees on payouts become a meaningful drag (they rarely do on RVN, but the option exists). The address you point payouts at should be your own — never a pool-managed balance and never an exchange deposit address that might change without warning.
Payouts go to a Ravencoin address you control. Generate a fresh receive address in the asset and address management view specifically for mining income — that way the address is never reused for personal sends and the on-chain history stays clean. Back up the wallet seed exactly the same way you would for a non-mining wallet; payouts are real RVN and the same recovery rules apply. If you mine at scale, send accumulated balances to a hardware-wallet-backed cold-storage address on a regular schedule rather than letting them sit on the hot mining wallet indefinitely.
Open the pool's stats page. Confirm fee, payout scheme, and minimum payout. Check current hashrate share against the network — anything above ~25% is a centralisation concern. Confirm payouts go on-chain to addresses you control, not to a custodial pool balance. Read the last month of announcements for outage history. If anything on this list is missing or evasive, pick a different pool.
Red flags that mean leave a pool today
Pending balance growing while payouts stall. Repeated outages without honest postmortems. Dashboard hashrate quietly drifting away from real-rig hashrate over weeks. Fee or threshold changes pushed without notice. A pool quietly accumulating more than a quarter of network hashrate. Any one of these is a reason to switch the miner config to a different pool the same day — RVN mining loyalty is worth nothing and switching costs are effectively zero.
Frequently asked
Continue with Electrum RVN
- how to mine Ravencoin — GPU mining setup from scratch
- RVN wallet download — wallet for your pool payouts
- what is Ravencoin — chain context for new miners
Run your own Ravencoin wallet.
Open-source, lightweight, and built for the desktop user who wants real control over keys and assets. Download the wallet directly from our download page — signed installers for every operating system.