- Poolin has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after years of mounting liquidity pressure.
- Unredeemed customer IOU tokens make up the largest share of the company’s debt.
- A stalled Texas power allocation left much of Poolin’s mining equipment unusable.
- A stalking-horse bidder has already set a floor price for the company’s remaining assets.
Poolin Technology, once the largest Bitcoin mining pool operator in the world, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey, listing $173.1 million in proven pre-petition debt against a depleted asset base of just $1 million to $10 million. The filing discloses a creditor list that could run as high as 25,000 names, an unusually large number for a company of Poolin’s size, and it confirms what mining circles had suspected for some time: the operator that commanded the top spot in global hashrate share back in 2019 could no longer service the debts it took on financing a Texas expansion that never delivered the power it was promised. Poolin is not trying to reorganize. It is pursuing an orderly wind-down. It shut its Texas facilities for good on July 10, 2026, and a court-supervised auction of its remaining assets is set to close on September 8.
A Wallet Freeze That Never Thawed
Poolin’s collapse did not start with a single bad trade. It built up over several years of decisions that looked defensible in isolation but left the company with no margin for error once conditions turned. Founded in China in 2017, Poolin rode aggressive growth to become the top-ranked mining pool by 2019. Then, in May 2021, Chinese authorities imposed a blanket ban on cryptocurrency mining, forcing the company to dismantle its domestic operations almost overnight and deregister its Beijing entity. The scramble to relocate infrastructure to the United States left incomplete financial records that later management teams had to reconstruct by hand.
To fund the buildout of new Texas facilities, Poolin turned to money that belonged to its own customers. In mid-2022 it borrowed $213 million from Antalpha Technologies Limited, pledging $355.8 million in customer crypto holdings as collateral. It was a bet that markets would hold steady long enough for the new sites to start generating revenue. They did not. When prices crashed later that year, Antalpha issued margin calls and liquidated the pledged collateral, and Poolin’s wallet division froze all customer withdrawals that September. The company never told customers the funds were gone. Instead it issued $163.7 million in unsecured IOU notes to more than 11,700 of them. Those notes never converted into anything redeemable. They simply reclassified a liquidity hole as debt, and today they account for more than 94% of what Poolin owes.
Why Texas Only Delivered a Sixth of the Power It Needed
Poolin’s debt problems might have stayed manageable if the Texas relocation had gone as planned, but the power never showed up. Poolin’s expansion assumed local utilities would allocate up to 600 megawatts of power to its West Texas sites, enough to run the fleet of rigs it had already bought. Grid operators approved only 100 megawatts, a fraction of what the company needed. Machines sitting unplugged generate nothing, but they still cost money to store, insure and eventually sell off. Between 2023 and 2025, Poolin sold off roughly five times more hardware than it could actually plug in, booking $8.8 million in losses on those discounted sales. The two U.S. subsidiaries running the Texas sites, Lonestar Dream and Lonestar Taproot, never turned a profit and had accumulated $45.9 million in combined losses by the time the lights went off in July.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Total proven pre-bankruptcy debt | $173.1 million |
| Customer IOU obligations | $163.7 million |
| Texas subsidiary losses to date | $45.9 million |
| Losses from discounted equipment sales | $8.8 million |
| Stalking-horse auction floor (Thor CALAP LLC) | $52.0 million |
The Auction Floor: Who Wants What’s Left
With reorganization off the table, Poolin’s case is proceeding as a straightforward liquidation. Thor CALAP LLC has agreed to serve as the stalking-horse bidder, setting a $52 million floor for the company’s remaining physical assets ahead of the September 8 auction. The bid splits into $37 million for the Tarbush site, which includes power rights and existing equipment, and $15 million for the Pyote site further west. Other qualified bidders can still outbid Thor CALAP before the deadline, and with West Texas power capacity now trading at a premium for reasons that have nothing to do with cryptocurrency, the final sale price could climb well above the floor. Whoever wins inherits interconnection rights that have become more valuable for data center use than for Bitcoin mining itself.
Mining Pools Versus the AI Land Grab
Poolin’s filing lands at a moment when the industry it once led is being pulled apart by a much larger force. Companies that spent the last decade building megawatt-scale infrastructure to secure the Bitcoin network are increasingly finding that same infrastructure worth more once repurposed for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. Bitfarms, Hut 8 and IREN have all signed deals converting portions of their power capacity toward AI workloads, and MARA Holdings recently acquired a 2-gigawatt site in Texas that industry watchers read as a signal of where capital is actually flowing. Under this reading, standalone mining pools are structurally disadvantaged: they compete for the same scarce grid connections as AI data center operators willing to pay far more per megawatt, leaving pure-play miners with no offsetting revenue exposed to rising energy costs.
That framing has real limits, though. Poolin’s failure traces back to specific decisions rather than an industry-wide funeral. A company that pledges hundreds of millions in customer collateral against a single loan, then commits to buy equipment before its power allocation is confirmed, has produced a story of mismanagement more than one of obsolescence. Several mining operators without Poolin’s debt load remain profitable in the current environment, and the consolidation underway in the sector says as much about weak balance sheets being weeded out as it does about a wholesale pivot away from mining.
The September 8 auction will be the next test of how much West Texas power capacity is worth once decoupled from cryptocurrency mining altogether. If bidding pushes meaningfully past the $52 million floor, expect data center operators and AI infrastructure funds, not mining companies, to be the ones driving the price up.