This pool runs in pplns-thunder mode. A block is divided among the shares that produced it — the last N shares before it was found — so a share is worth a claim on blocks this pool actually finds, not a fixed price paid on arrival. Nothing is promised in advance, which is why there is no operator reserve here and why the fee is usually lower than PPS.

Your balance moves when a block matures, 100 confirmations after it was found (roughly 16 hours). Until then the block is still reversible and nothing is credited. After that your balance is settled over Thunder, sidechain #9, by the payout worker. The operator fee of 0.01% comes off the block before it is divided.

Connect a miner

stratum+tcp://pool.avonpool.xyz:3334
username:  <your-thunder-address>[.<rig_label>]
password:  (ignored — any value)

The username must be a bare base58 Thunder address. A Bitcoin address is rejected at authorize — that is the other rail. Both fail with "invalid payout address in stratum username".

Which port to connect to

stratum+tcp://pool.avonpool.xyz:3334   individual miners — difficulty from 1, vardiff follows your rig
stratum+tcp://pool.avonpool.xyz:3335   rented or aggregated hashrate (braiins) — difficulty 1,048,576, held
stratum+tcp://pool.avonpool.xyz:3336   rented or aggregated hashrate (nicehash) — difficulty 2,000,000, held

Which port you use does not change what you earn. Work is credited by its difficulty, so one share at 65,536 counts exactly as 65,536 shares at difficulty 1. The ports differ in the size of the unit, not in its price.

They exist because one difficulty cannot serve both kinds of miner. Rented hashrate does not arrive as a crowd of small rigs — a marketplace aggregates a whole fleet behind a single connection, and 1 PH/s at difficulty 1,024 is already about 227 shares per second down that one socket. On a port meant for a home ASIC the same fleet is hundreds of thousands per second: the pool limits the connection, and what the marketplace sees is a pool rejecting its work.

Vardiff cannot repair that after the fact. It moves by at most 4× per window, so climbing from 1 to 65,536 takes eight windows — around four minutes — and the rejects on the way up are what gets an order cancelled. The connection has to arrive at the right difficulty, which is what the second port is for.

A port with a held floor keeps it even when the chain is easier than the floor, because a marketplace measures the difficulty on the wire and cancels an order served under what the port advertised. When that happens your miner discards solutions the chain would have accepted, so mine on a floored port only if something is actually requiring it of you. This pool is not in that position right now.