Public Pool.

Public Pool is open-source software for running a Bitcoin 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., developed by Benjamin Wilson since June 2023. It is built for solo mining: each miner works on a block of their own, and if their machine finds one, the whole reward goes to the miner’s own address; if it never does, they get nothing. Anyone can run it at home on their own Bitcoin node, and Umbrel, a system for running a home server, offers it as an app. A hosted copy, also called Public Pool, runs at public-pool.io.

So a block named Public Pool may come from the hosted copy or from someone’s own. Copies running on Umbrel write “Public Pool on Umbrel” into their blocks. The first Public Pool block, 888,989 on 23 March 2025, was found on one of those, before the hosted copy had found any; the hosted copy’s first was 943,466, on 3 April 2026.

Every Public Pool block so far has paid the whole reward, in its first transaction, to the address of the one miner who found it. That reward is separate from the transactions confirmed inside the block. The hosted copy now also offers a shared mode, PPLNS, in which miners split each block’s reward by their recent work.

On 10 July 2026 a home miner’s Bitaxe, a palm-sized mining machine, found block 957,382 through the hosted copy and received the whole reward of about 3.14 BTC. Public Pool announced it as “Block #2 on hosted Public-Pool. By a lone Bitaxe.”