Parasite.

Parasite is a small 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 people who mine at home or with a few machines. It was started by a developer known online as ZK Shark, who also created Ordinal Maxi Biz, a collection of images written into Bitcoin transactions; the pool names no company. ZK Shark announced it on 9 May 2025, and it still calls itself a beta. It runs on a modified version of ckpool, open-source pool software, and publishes its code on GitHub.

When Parasite finds a block, the miner whose work solved it gets 1 BTC. The rest of the reward, the remaining new bitcoin plus the block’s fees, is shared among the pool’s miners by how much work each did since its last block, and paid over Lightning, a network for small, fast bitcoin payments. So the first transaction in a Parasite block pays exactly 1 BTC to the finder and the rest to the pool. That reward is separate from the transactions confirmed inside the block.

Blocks are rare for a pool this small. Its first, block 938,713, came on 28 February 2026, almost ten months after the launch. CoinDesk called the design a way to “split the difference” between solo mining, where one miner takes a whole block’s reward, and pools that share every reward out by work.