A bitcoin mining pool built to reject both the industrial pay-per-share model and the pure lottery approach has now proven 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 about 48 days after the pool’s first block of #938,713 in late February.
The block had 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 who solves a block receives 1 BTC directly, 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 participate in this pool and payouts are routed through the Lightning Network.
Mining secures bitcoin by letting 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 collect a reward.
That reward is currently 3.125 BTC plus the transaction fees bundled in, worth about $238,000 at Friday’s price, down from 6.25 BTC after the April 2024 halving and scheduled to fall again to 1.5625 BTC in 2028.
The competition is dominated by industrial operators running warehouse-scale facilities of specialized ASIC hardware that draw enough electricity to compete with a small city.
Mining pools exist to even out the variance of who finds blocks and aggregate the hashrate of thousands of participants so that revenue is shared by contribution rather than winner-take-all.
Founded by ZK Shark, the pseudonymous creator of Ordinal Maxi Biz (an NFT collection about Bitcoin), Parasite is aimed at the home miner.
Pure solo pools like CKpool pay the full block reward minus a 2% fee to the finder, but statistical reality means that the vast majority of participants never see a block.
But Parasite’s answer is to split the difference. The 1 BTC finder fee preserves the lottery payday, while proportional distribution of the remainder ensures that satoshis flow to participants during the stretches between blocks.
The second block carries more weight than the first. The pool maintained hashrate through the 48-day gap between payouts, and the proportional distribution mechanism now has two rounds of real validation instead of one.
The parasite’s hashrate currently sits at 52 petahashes per second, down from a peak of 182 PH/si in June 2025, according to the pool’s dashboard. That equates to about 0.005% of bitcoin’s estimated hash rate on the 1-zetahash network.
The pattern around solo and small-pool mining has been 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 in cloud hashrate to validate block 938,092 via $00CK,092. Both wins followed the CKpool winner-take-all model minus a 2% fee.
Parasite is the first pool of this scale to test whether a hybrid split will keep participants mining through the losing stretches. A third block within the next two months would settle the case for Parasite’s model, while a six-month drought suggests the first two were the easy ones.
