Poolin Files Chapter 11, Puts Texas Mines Up for $52M Sale

Poolin Chapter 11 Starts With a $52 Million Texas Mine Bid

The proposed buyer, Thor CALAP LLC, has offered $52 million for the Tarbush and Pyote sites, according to a report on the first-day court materials by Crypto Economy. The proposal assigns $37 million to Tarbush and $15 million to Pyote, including associated power rights, equipment and other assets, the report said.

A stalking-horse bid gives a bankruptcy sale a starting price while allowing higher offers. It does not guarantee that Thor will acquire the sites or that $52 million will be the final value. The docket shows filings related to bidding procedures, including a motion to designate a stalking-horse bidder, but a final sale order was not visible when this article was published.

Poolin’s remaining mining and hosting operations in Texas stopped July 10, according to the court-materials report. Its public site still describes its mining-pool service and its July 3 service notice said the retirement of several small pools did not affect Litecoin or Dogecoin mining, a narrow statement that did not address the later Chapter 11 case.

The sale comes as rival operators are attaching growing value to Texas power infrastructure for both mining and computing. MARA’s planned 2-gigawatt Texas campus illustrates the other end of that market: a listed miner securing powered land for a future mix of AI data centers and Bitcoin mining.

Poolin Wallet IOUs Could Define Creditor Recoveries

The difficult part of Poolin’s case is not simply the idle infrastructure. Court materials cited by Crypto Economy put prepetition obligations at about $173.1 million, including roughly $163.7 million in unsecured IOUs linked to Poolin Wallet customers after withdrawals were suspended in 2022. The report said about 11,700 retail users held the affected IOUs.

Those numbers describe obligations, not a recovery promise. The parent petition reportedly estimates assets between $1 million and $10 million and liabilities between $100 million and $500 million. Bankruptcy priorities, administrative expenses, secured claims, contested claims and the eventual sale price can all affect what unsecured creditors receive.

The issue echoes the liquidity pressure that prompted BlockFills to freeze client deposits and withdrawals during Bitcoin’s February slide. The situations are different, but both show why a platform’s wallet or custody terms can matter as much as its visible trading or mining business when access to customer assets is interrupted.

Poolin is not a claim on the Bitcoin network itself. A mining pool coordinates miners’ work and distributions; the network’s difficulty mechanism and other pools continue independently. What the filing does concentrate is the ownership of two powered sites and a large group of unresolved customer claims in one court process.

Bitcoin Mining Asset Sales Test a Changing Texas Market

Poolin was a major pool during the last cycle, but the bankruptcy sale puts its remaining U.S. assets on the market after a long retrenchment. The prospective buyer will be evaluating the facilities’ power arrangements, equipment condition, hosting economics and options beyond pure Bitcoin mining, none of which the public case page fully details.

That last point has become more important as miners pursue data-center revenue. Our report on the $50 billion funding gap in miners’ AI pivot found that signed AI or high-performance-computing plans still require costly construction and delivery. A bankruptcy auction can reveal what buyers will actually pay for operating assets and power access rather than what a future development plan might imply.

Bitcoin’s price recovery does not settle Poolin’s creditor math. A higher Bitcoin price can improve mining economics, but it does not set the value of a particular site or determine the ranking of claims in a Chapter 11 case. Nor did the filings reviewed disclose a payout percentage, an approved auction result or a date for customer distributions.

Market sentiment remained cautious as the case surfaced.

The next material signals are a court-approved bidding calendar, any competing offers, the ultimate sale price and the claims process for Poolin Wallet users. Until then, the documented development is a Chapter 11 filing and a proposed $52 million floor bid, not a completed asset sale or a guaranteed creditor recovery.