Parasite Pool — the upstart “plebs eat first” Bitcoin mining pool aimed at home miners — has landed its second block, demonstrating that its unconventional design can produce real payouts more than once.
On Friday morning the pool mined block 945,601, which included 7,398 transactions but paid just 0.002 BTC in fees. The find came roughly 48 days after Parasite’s first block (#938,713) in late February and marks a second validation of the pool’s mechanics since it launched earlier in 2025. At the time the block arrived, BTC was trading near $76,213.
How Parasite’s hybrid model works
Unlike the dominant industrial pay-per-share pools or pure-solo/lottery-style pools, Parasite uses a hybrid payout that preserves a jackpot for the finder while smoothing rewards for everyone else. When the pool finds a block, the miner who solved the puzzle takes home 1 BTC immediately; the remaining 2.125 BTC of the 3.125 BTC block subsidy (plus transaction fees) is distributed proportionally to all pool participants based on shares submitted since the previous block.
Key details:
- No participation fees.
- Payouts are routed over the Lightning Network.
- The current block subsidy (post-2024 halving) is 3.125 BTC; it fell from 6.25 BTC in April 2024 and will drop again to 1.5625 BTC in 2028.
Why the second block matters
The second payout matters more than the first because it shows the pool retained miners’ hashrate through a nearly seven-week interval and that the proportional distribution scheme works across multiple rounds. Parasite’s dashboard shows current hashrate at about 52 petahashes per second (PH/s), down from a peak of 182 PH/s in June 2025 — roughly 0.005% of Bitcoin’s estimated 1 zettahash network hashrate.
Who’s behind it
Parasite was founded by the pseudonymous ZK Shark, known for the Bitcoin Ordinals collection Ordinal Maxi Biz. The pool explicitly targets home and small-scale miners who are squeezed by the large industrial operators that dominate the space with warehouse-scale ASIC farms and massive electricity draws.
Context in the solo-mining resurgence
The pool is part of a broader trend of small-solo and tiny-pool wins that reappeared after the last halving. Earlier this year CoinDesk reported a 230 TH/s home miner beating long odds to claim block 943,411 for about $210,000, and another operator who rented roughly $75 of cloud hashrate to capture block 938,092 via CKpool. Those wins followed CKpool’s pure solo model, which pays the finder nearly the full block reward minus a 2% fee.
Parasite’s experiment is different: by guaranteeing a 1 BTC jackpot it keeps the lottery appeal for would-be millionaires, while the proportional split of the remainder means satoshis continue to trickle into participants’ wallets during long losing stretches. If Parasite can hit a third block within the next couple of months, that will strengthen the case that its hybrid approach keeps miners engaged; a six-month dry spell, by contrast, would suggest the first two were unusually lucky.
For now, Parasite’s second block is an encouraging sign for its niche strategy — and an interesting real-world test of another way to share Bitcoin’s scarce rewards among the many, not just the largest.
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