A bitcoin mining pool constructed to reject each the commercial pay-per-share mannequin and the pure lottery method has now proved its design works. Twice.
Upstart mining pool Parasite Pool mined block 945,601 on Friday morning, its second block since launching in April 2025 and roughly 48 days after the pool’s first block at #938,713 in late February.
The block carried 7,398 transactions and 0.002 BTC in charges, touchdown with bitcoin buying and selling at $76,213.
The pool operates on a hybrid mannequin that has no parallel in mainstream mining. A successful miner that solves a block receives 1 BTC outright, with the remaining 2.125 BTC plus charges distributed proportionally amongst all pool contributors primarily based on shares submitted because the earlier block.
There are not any charges to participate on this pool, and payouts are routed via the Lightning Community.
Mining secures bitcoin by having computer systems compete to resolve a cryptographic puzzle each 10 minutes, with the winner incomes the appropriate so as to add the subsequent block of transactions to the blockchain and gathering a reward.
That reward is at the moment 3.125 BTC plus no matter transaction charges are bundled in, value about $238,000 at Friday’s value, down from 6.25 BTC after the April 2024 halving and scheduled to drop once more to 1.5625 BTC in 2028.
The competitors is dominated by industrial operators operating warehouse-scale services of specialised ASIC {hardware} that pulls sufficient electrical energy to rival a small metropolis.
Mining swimming pools exist to easy the variance of who finds blocks, bundling the hashrate of hundreds of contributors so the proceeds get cut up by contribution moderately than winner-take-all.
Parasite is based by ZK Shark, the pseudonymous creator of Ordinal Maxi Biz (an NFT assortment on Bitcoin), and targets the house miner.
Pure solo swimming pools like CKpool pay the total block reward minus a 2% charge to the finder, however statistical actuality means the overwhelming majority of contributors by no means see a block.
However Parasite’s reply is to separate the distinction. The 1 BTC finder’s charge preserves the lottery payday, whereas proportional distribution of the rest retains satoshis flowing to contributors throughout the stretches between blocks.
The second block carries extra weight than the primary. The pool retained hashrate via the 48-day hole between payouts, and the proportional distribution mechanics now have two rounds of actual validation moderately than one.
Parasite’s hashrate at the moment sits at 52 petahashes per second, down from a peak of 182 PH/s in June 2025, in accordance with the pool’s dashboard. That works out to roughly 0.005% of bitcoin’s estimated 1-zetahash community hashrate.
The sample round solo and small-pool mining has been operating sizzling.
CoinDesk reported earlier this 12 months on a 230 terahash-per-second house miner who beat 1-in-28,000 odds to assert block 943,411 and a $210,000 reward, and on a separate operator who rented $75 of cloud hashrate to validate block 938,092 by way of CKpool for a $200,000 payday. Each wins adopted the CKpool mannequin of winner-take-all minus a 2% charge.
Parasite is the primary pool at this scale to check whether or not a hybrid cut up retains contributors mining via the dropping stretches. A 3rd block inside the subsequent two months would settle the case for Parasite’s mannequin, whereas a six-month drought would counsel the primary two have been the straightforward ones.