A bitcoin mining pool built to reject both the industrial pay-per-share model and the pure lottery approach has now proven its effectiveness. Twice.
Upstart mining pool Parasite Pool mined block 945,601 Friday morning, its second block since its launch in April 2025 and approximately 48 days after the pool’s first block at No. 938,713 in late February.
The block completed 7,398 transactions and 0.002 BTC in fees, reaching a Bitcoin trading price of $76,213.
The pool operates according to a hybrid model without equivalent in the traditional mining sector. A winning miner who solves a block receives 1 BTC, 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 payments 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 collect a reward.
This reward is currently 3.125 BTC plus transaction fees included, worth approximately $238,000 at Friday’s price, down from 6.25 BTC after the April 2024 halving and expected to drop again to 1.5625 BTC in 2028.
Competition is dominated by industrial operators who operate warehouse-scale installations containing specialized ASIC hardware that consumes enough electricity to rival a small city.
Mining pools exist to mitigate the variance of those who find the blocks, pooling the hashrate of thousands of participants so that profits are distributed by contribution rather than by winner.
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 response is to split the difference. The 1 BTC investigation fee preserves the lottery pay, while the proportional distribution of the remainder allows satoshis to flow to participants during periods between blocks.
The second block carries more weight than the first. The pool retained the hashrate during the 48-day interval between payments, and the proportional distribution mechanisms now have two actual validation cycles instead of one.
Parasite’s hashrate currently sits at 52 petahashes per second, down from the peak of 182 PH/s in June 2025, according to the pool dashboard. This is equivalent to approximately 0.005% of the Bitcoin network’s estimated hashrate at 1 zetahash.
The trend around solo and small pool mining is becoming more and more widespread.
CoinDesk reported earlier this year about a 230 terahash per second domestic miner who beat 1 in 28,000 odds to claim block 943,411 and a $210,000 reward, and a separate operator who rented $75 of cloud hashrate to validate block 938,092 through CKpool for a $200,000 payday. Both wins followed the CKpool model of win-win minus a 2% fee.
Parasite is the first pool at this scale to test whether a hybrid split allows participants to continue mining during periods of loss. A third block in the next two months would settle the Parasite model’s case, while a six-month drought would suggest the first two were the easiest.
