Bitcoin ‘plebs eat first’ mining pool Parasite finds its second BTC block

A bitcoin mining pool built to reject both the industrial pay-per-share model and the pure lottery approach 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 fees, landing with bitcoin trading at $76,213.

The pool operates on a hybrid model that has no parallel in mainstream mining. A winning miner that solves a block receives 1 $BTC outright, with the remaining 2.125 $BTC plus fees distributed proportionally among all pool participants based on shares submitted since the previous block.

There are no fees to take part in this pool, and payouts are routed through the Lightning Network.

Mining secures bitcoin by having computers compete to solve a cryptographic puzzle every 10 minutes, with the winner earning the right to add the next block of transactions to the blockchain and collecting a reward.

That reward is currently 3.125 $BTC plus whatever transaction fees are bundled in, worth about $238,000 at Friday’s price, down from 6.25 $BTC after the April 2024 halving and scheduled to drop again to 1.5625 $BTC in 2028.

The competition is dominated by industrial operators running warehouse-scale facilities of specialized ASIC hardware that pulls enough electricity to rival a small city.

Mining pools exist to smooth the variance of who finds blocks, bundling the hashrate of thousands of participants so the proceeds get split by contribution rather than winner-take-all.

Parasite is founded by ZK Shark, the pseudonymous creator of Ordinal Maxi Biz (an NFT collection on Bitcoin), and targets the home miner.

Pure solo pools like CKpool pay the full block reward minus a 2% fee to the finder, but statistical reality means the vast majority of participants never see a block.

But Parasite’s answer is to split the difference. The 1 $BTC finder’s fee preserves the lottery payday, while proportional distribution of the remainder keeps satoshis flowing to participants during the stretches between blocks.

The second block carries more weight than the first. The pool retained hashrate through the 48-day gap between payouts, and the proportional distribution mechanics now have two rounds of real validation rather than one.

Parasite’s hashrate currently sits at 52 petahashes per second, down from a peak of 182 PH/s in June 2025, according to the pool’s dashboard. That works out to roughly 0.005% of bitcoin’s estimated 1-zetahash network hashrate.

The pattern around solo and small-pool mining has been running hot.

CoinDesk reported earlier this year on a 230 terahash-per-second home miner who beat 1-in-28,000 odds to claim block 943,411 and a $210,000 reward, and on a separate operator who rented $75 of cloud hashrate to validate block 938,092 via CKpool for a $200,000 payday. Both wins followed the CKpool model of winner-take-all minus a 2% fee.

Parasite is the first pool at this scale to test whether a hybrid split keeps participants mining through the losing stretches. A third block inside the next two months would settle the case for Parasite’s model, while a six-month drought would suggest the first two were the easy ones.