The founders of the Poolin pool will have to pay Bitmain $170,000 in court.

   The founders of the Poolin lost the case against Bitmain and are obliged to pay 1.2 million yuan ($170,000) in payments and fines received earlier.

Bitmain sued its three former managers in August 2018 for opening their own mining pool, thus violating the anti-competition agreement.

Bitmain won the case and now Poolin's legal representative Pan Zhibiao and its two co-owners Zhu Fa and Li Tianzhao are due to return to Bitmain the wages they received between September 2017 and January 2019. The payment was to take place within 7 days of the court's decision on January 6 this year.

Bitmain wanted much more - 30 million yuan ($4.3 million), including a fine for violation of the terms of the agreement of $667,000 and a fee from 26,825 BTC, which were extracted by the pool for the entire period. The court considered this amount redundant and reduced it.

Bitmain's core business is the production of cryptographic mining equipment, and it also manages the pools of BTC.com and Antpool, which have long dominated the Bitcoin network in terms of hash rate. In September last year, Poolin outperformed Bitmain in terms of computing capacity.

Last week, the co-founders of Bitmain, Micree Zhang and Jihan Wu, were included in Forbes magazine's list of the richest people on the planet.