Bitcoin “people eat first” mining pool Parasite discovers second BTC block

A Bitcoin mining pool built to reject both the industrial pay-per-share model and a pure lottery approach has proven its design works. Twice.

Emerging mining pool Parasite Pool mined 945,601 blocks on Friday morning. This is the second block since its launch in April 2025, approximately 48 days after the pool’s first block #938,713 in late February.

This block contained 7,398 transactions and 0.002 transactions. $BTC With fees, Bitcoin is trading at $76,213.

This pool operates on a hybrid model that has no parallel in mainstream mining. Miners who solve the block and win receive 1 $BTC Complete with 2.125 remaining $BTC Additionally, fees are distributed proportionally to all pool participants based on the shares submitted since the previous block.

There is no charge to join this pool. Payments are routed through the Lightning Network.

Mining involves securing Bitcoin by having computers compete to solve cryptographic puzzles every 10 minutes, with the winner earning the right to add the next block of transactions to the blockchain and receive a reward.

Its reward is currently 3.125 $BTC That includes all trading fees and was worth about $238,000 at Friday’s price, down from $6.25. $BTC After the halving in April 2024, it is expected to fall to 1.5625 again. $BTC In 2028.

This competition is dominated by industrial operators who operate warehouse-sized facilities of specialized ASIC hardware that provide enough power to rival a small city.

Mining pools exist to smooth out the variance in who finds a block, bundling the hashrate of thousands of participants so that the revenue is divided by contribution rather than winner-take-all.

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

While pure solo pools like CKpool pay out the full block reward minus a 2% fee to finders, statistical reality means that the vast majority of participants never see the block.

But Parasite’s answer is to split the difference. 1 $BTC The finder’s fee keeps the lottery payday, and the remaining proration keeps satoshis flowing to participants during stretches between blocks.

The second block carries more weight than the first block. The pool holds the hashrate through the 48-day gap between payments, and the proration mechanism now has two actual validations instead of one.

According to the pool’s dashboard, Parasite’s hashrate currently sits at 52 petahashes per second, down from a peak of 182 PH/second in June 2025. This corresponds to approximately 0.005% of Bitcoin’s estimated 1 ZetaHash network hash rate.

Patterns around solo and small pool mining are becoming more active.

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

Parasite is the first pool of this size to test whether hybrid splits allow participants to continue mining during periods of loss. The completion of the third block within the next two months will settle the parasite model, but the six-month drought suggests the first two were easy.