Luxor.

Luxor began as a side project. Nick Hansen, then an engineer at Salesforce who had mined bitcoin on graphics cards in his basement as a hobby, met Eddie Wang on GitHub, and the pair, “two guys just working nights and weekends”, built a mining poolMining poolA group of miners who share the work of finding blocks and split the rewards, so each gets paid steadily instead of rarely. for smaller cryptocurrencies first, because that was less scary than a Bitcoin pool, Hansen told the Stephan Livera Podcast in 2022. Luxor Technology says it was founded in 2017, and Hansen, its chief executive, has named Ethan Vera and Guzman Pintos as co-founders too. The first Bitcoin block credited to its pool, 605,423, came on 26 November 2019. The company is incorporated in Delaware and based in Bellevue, near Seattle, and in September 2026 it opened an AI computing business.

Luxor’s business rests on putting a price on mining power. It says it coined the word “hashprice”, for what a unit of mining power earns over a set time, and introduced it in 2020 with Hashrate Index, its site of mining data; it also sells contracts that let miners fix that price ahead, along with mining firmware and machines. Its pool works the same way: in its own words, Luxor “purchases your hashrateHashrateHow many guesses a second all of Bitcoin's miners make together. More hashrate makes the network harder to attack.”, paying miners at the going rate, daily, weekly or monthly, whether or not the pool finds a block. So each Luxor block’s first transaction pays the reward to Luxor, which pays its miners separately. These are payments to the pool’s miners, separate from the transactions confirmed inside the block.

On 1 February 2023 Luxor mined block 774,628, at 3.96 MB then the largest Bitcoin block ever. Almost all of it was a single inscriptionInscription (ordinals)Data, such as an image, written into a Taproot payment's witness and tied to one satoshi, so it lives on the blockchain., a file written into a transaction: a picture of a wizard, based on the “magic internet money” meme, for Taproot Wizards, an inscription project co-founded by Udi Wertheimer and Eric Wall. Luxor says it made the inscription itself. “He refuses to be censored, he refuses to be silenced,” Luxor posted, The Block reported, amid an argument over whether such files are a reasonable use of Bitcoin’s blockchainBlockchainBitcoin's shared record of every payment since 2009, stored in blocks that each link to the one before — which is what makes it a chain. or spam. Later that month Luxor bought OrdinalHub, a site for trading inscriptions, and it went on to mine more blocks filled with them. Inscriptions had opened up “exciting new monetization strategies for Bitcoin miners”, Hansen said.

Until December 2023 Luxor’s block rewards went to the same custodian, a company that holds coins for others, as those of AntPool and several other pools, mempool.space’s mononaut reported; Luxor changed that setup, he wrote, “immediately after I first tweeted about this in early December”. The researcher 0xB10C counts Luxor among the pools he assumes belong to “AntPool & friends”, a group he put at about 40% of mining power in 2024, because its block templates, the lists of transactions a pool gives its miners to work on, have resembled theirs.