44.17 $
+0.16% +0.07 $
44.17 $
+0.16% +0.07 $
Every major Scrypt pool compared: fees, payout schemes, merged Dogecoin handling, and the uncomfortable math of five pools coordinating most of Litecoin's hashrate.
A single Antminer L9 does roughly 16 GH/s. The Litecoin network as a whole has been running somewhere between 2.5 and 3.3 PH/s through 2026, hitting record highs early in the year. Do the division and your shiny new machine controls about 0.0005% of the network. At 576 blocks a day, that works out to one solo-mined block every ten months or so, on average. The phrase doing the heavy lifting there is on average: you could hit one next Tuesday, or you could run the thing for two years, pay four figures in electricity, and earn exactly nothing. That's not a business. It's a lottery ticket with a power bill.
Pools fix the variance problem, and only the variance problem. Thousands of machines submit shares to one coordinator, the coordinator collects block rewards, and everyone gets paid in proportion to work done. Your expected earnings barely change. Your cash flow changes completely, from a slot machine to something resembling a paycheck. The price is a fee, some trust, and a small contribution to a centralization problem we'll get to.
The table below reflects roughly mid-2026 conditions. Hashrate shares drift week to week and fee schedules change without much fanfare, so treat every number as an estimate and verify against the pool's own site and a live tracker like miningpoolstats before pointing hardware anywhere.
| Pool | Est. share | Fee | Payout scheme | Merged DOGE |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ViaBTC | ~20–25% | 4% PPS+ / 2% PPLNS | PPS+ or PPLNS | Automatic, PPLNS-distributed |
| F2Pool | ~15–20% | ~4% | PPS | Automatic, plus minor Scrypt coins |
| Antpool | ~10–15% | ~3% | PPS | Automatic (DOGE, BELLS, LKY) |
| Binance Pool | ~10–15% | ~4% (est.) | FPPS | Credited to exchange account |
| litecoinpool.org | ~5–10% | ~2% effective | Pure dual PPS (LTC + DOGE) | Separate DOGE payouts, PPS |
| Poolin | Marginal | n/a | n/a | Effectively gone for new miners |
ViaBTC has led Scrypt block production for years; on-chain reviews have put it around a quarter of blocks mined. You choose PPS+ at 4% or PPLNS at 2%, and merged DOGE arrives automatically either way, distributed PPLNS-style in proportion to your hashrate. It's the default answer for most industrial Scrypt operations, which is both an endorsement and part of the concentration problem.
F2Pool runs a straightforward PPS scheme and merge-mines an entire zoo alongside DOGE: BELLS, LKY, PEP, JKC, DINGO, SHIC, CRC. Individually those are dust. Together they add a percent or two of revenue that most competitors leave on the table.
Antpool, Bitmain's pool, sits comfortably in the top five with PPS around 3% for Scrypt and merged DOGE, BELLS, and LKY. The obvious footnote: the company selling you the L9 also runs a pool it would like you to join. Draw your own conclusions about incentives.
Binance Pool pays FPPS into your exchange account, which is convenient if you were going to sell the coins anyway and mildly alarming if you weren't. Exchange custody of mining income means exchange risk on mining income. Some people are fine with that trade.
Litecoinpool.org is the veteran, run by Pooler (who wrote the original Scrypt miner software), operating since 2011 without a payout scandal. Since early 2024 it runs a dual pure-PPS system paying LTC and DOGE as separate, fixed-rate streams, with merged-mining income baked into the rate. Effective cost lands near 2%, and PPS on the DOGE side is genuinely rare. Smaller pool, longer track record than anyone.
Poolin belongs in the cautionary-tale section. After freezing withdrawals in 2022, its hashrate drained away and never came back. Miners can leave a pool in minutes, and when trust broke, they did.
Pay-per-share pays you a fixed rate for every valid share, block or no block. Unlucky week? The pool eats it. That insurance is why PPS fees run higher, typically 2 to 4%. It also concentrates risk on the operator: a PPS pool on a long unlucky streak is quietly bleeding money, which is why track record matters more here than anywhere else.
Pay-per-last-N-shares divides actual block rewards among recent shares. Lucky stretches pay above expectation, dry spells pay below, and over months it averages out slightly ahead of PPS because the fee is lower. The N-share window also punishes pool-hopping, since you earn nothing meaningful until you've built up share history.
Classic PPS paid only the block subsidy. PPS+ and FPPS fold transaction fees in as well, via PPLNS-style distribution or a full fixed rate respectively. On Litecoin, transaction fees are a small slice of the reward, so the practical gap between these variants is smaller than the acronym soup suggests. Just don't pay a premium fee for a scheme that pockets them.
The honest rule of thumb: one or two machines, take PPS or PPS+ and enjoy the predictable income, because variance hurts most when the paycheck is small. A container of L9s can afford PPLNS's swings and should keep the fee difference instead.
The DOGE question comes first, and it isn't close. At current prices, merged-mined Dogecoin frequently rivals or exceeds the Litecoin side of a Scrypt miner's revenue. Same electricity, same shares, free money, provided your pool passes it through. Every serious pool now merge-mines DOGE, but the handling differs: automatic and proportional at ViaBTC and F2Pool, fixed-rate PPS at litecoinpool.org, exchange-credited at Binance. Read exactly how DOGE is calculated and paid before comparing headline fees, because a 2% fee that shaves the DOGE payout loses to a 3% fee that doesn't.
After that, in rough order:
Add up the table and the top four or five pools coordinate a clear majority of Litecoin's hashrate, most of them also top Bitcoin pools with corporate ties to China-linked mining conglomerates. On paper that looks grim. Two or three operators cooperating could censor transactions or attempt reorgs.
The risk is real but bounded, and it's worth being precise about why. Pools coordinate hashrate; they don't own it. The machines belong to thousands of independent operators who can retarget a stratum URL in the time it takes to type one. History backs this up: pools that flirted with majority share or broke trust, from GHash.io on Bitcoin to Poolin, watched miners scatter within days. A pool's entire business is a low-single-digit fee on volume, and misbehavior torches that business for a one-shot attack that alerts the entire market while it's happening.
Bounded is not the same as zero. Pools choose which transactions enter block templates, and a coordinated handful could censor by default until miners noticed and moved. The defense is miners actually being willing to move, which is a genuine reason to consider litecoinpool.org or another mid-sized pool if your economics allow it. Spreading hashrate is one of the few decentralization gestures that costs almost nothing.
Setup is mercifully boring. Create a pool account, add a worker, and enter three things in your L7 or L9's web interface: the stratum URL (something like stratum+tcp://ltc.example.com:3333), a worker name (usually accountname.001), and a password, which most pools ignore. Add the pool's second and third servers as failovers. Set your LTC and DOGE payout addresses, and use addresses you control rather than an exchange deposit address, since exchanges occasionally change them without asking.
Then watch the rejected-share rate for a day. Under 1% is healthy. Persistently above 2% means latency, an overheating machine, or a struggling pool server; try the next-nearest server before blaming the hardware. And confirm the DOGE actually shows up. It should appear within a day or two of your first LTC earnings, and if it doesn't, you've found your reason to leave.
There's no universal answer, but the short version: ViaBTC for large operations that want scale and a PPLNS discount, litecoinpool.org for miners who value a clean track record and fixed-rate DOGE payouts, F2Pool for squeezing out minor merged coins. Judge any pool on total LTC-plus-DOGE payout per terahash, not on the headline fee.
All the major ones do now, automatically, but the mechanics differ: proportional PPLNS distribution at ViaBTC, pure PPS at litecoinpool.org, exchange credits at Binance Pool. Since DOGE is often the larger half of Scrypt revenue, how it's calculated matters more than the LTC fee. Verify before committing hashrate.
PPS, generally. With one or two machines, a bad-luck month on PPLNS is genuinely painful, and paying an extra point or two of fee for steady income is cheap insurance. Large farms average out the luck and usually come out ahead keeping the fee difference with PPLNS.
Not coins already paid to your wallet, but unpaid balances sit in the pool's custody, as Poolin's users learned in 2022. Keep payout thresholds low, withdraw regularly, and treat any payout delay or sudden threshold change as a signal to move your machines immediately.
Watch the rejected-share percentage in your miner's dashboard. Under 1% is fine, and persistent readings above 2% mean lost revenue, usually from latency to a distant stratum server. Switch to a closer server, add failover URLs, and compare the pool's reported hashrate against what your machine claims.
