The payment went to a Bitcoin address linked to CKPool—a solo mining service that allows users to connect their hardware to shared infrastructure without the need to run their own Bitcoin node. According to the pool operator's post on X, this was the 317th solo block found by CKPool.
What Made This Block Special
The reward consisted of the fixed block subsidy of 3.125 $BTC and transaction fees of about 0.032 $BTC, gathered from 4,243 transactions included in the block. All Bitcoin blockchain explorers, including mempool.space, Blockchain.com, and Blockchair.com, confirmed the payment and attributed it to Solo CKPool.
CKPool developer Dr -ck, whose real name is Con Kolivas, confirmed the win on X. He described the miner's computing power as "extremely volatile, presumably rented, with a peak of 100 PH." PH stands for petahash per second—a measure of how many calculations a mining rig can perform per second when trying to mine a block.
This peak performance was about 0.011% of the total Bitcoin network hash rate, which was around 924 exahashes per second at the time. An exahash is a quintillion hashes per second, or a million petahashes. At that hash rate level, the miner could expect to find a block roughly once every 64 days if the hash rate remained stable. This is a much shorter waiting period than the decades a typical small home setup would usually face.
Why Solo Mining Still Works
Individual mining differs from participating in a traditional mining pool. In a pool, miners share the reward based on each participant's contribution to the computational work, regardless of whether the pool finds a block or not. In solo mining, the miner receives nothing until they personally find a block, and then they receive the entire reward amount.
CKPool takes a small fee, typically around 2%, from any block found by its solo-mining users. To date, the service has helped achieve 317 such successes.
Dr -ck noted that the hash rate pattern of the miner suggests not a stationary home setup but rented computing power—a practice that allows people to temporarily access a much larger hash rate than they own. Rental markets have made such solo wins more accessible than one might assume based on pure hobbyist odds, although success on any given day is far from guaranteed.
The Developer's Own Words
Dr -ck reflected on this point against the backdrop of a challenging week for the crypto industry. "Despite the chaos caused by the hardware wallet vulnerability, Bitcoin just keeps ticking, generating the next block," he wrote, referring to reports about the infamous Coldcard hardware wallet vulnerability, with losses estimated to be in the nine-figure range.
The developer also highlighted a technical milestone associated with this win. "This is the first mainnet block mined after adding Stratum V2 code to the ckpool codebase," wrote Dr -ck in an X thread, adding that the block was actually found using the older Stratum V1 protocol. Stratum is a communication method that mining equipment uses to interact with a pool.
Dr -ck pointed out how deterministic this timing coincidence appeared in retrospect. "This block was found in the same main pool that found most blocks, solely due to its hash rate," he wrote. "AU, SG, and US East haven't found any blocks yet." He added that the find was "pretty deterministic at diff almost exactly 100%," referring to the pool's mining difficulty setting at the time the block was found.
Why This Matters for the Big Picture of Bitcoin's Development
Bitcoin mining has become concentrated around a few large industrial pools, including Foundry USA, Antpool, ViaBTC, and F2pool. Against this backdrop, solo finds remain rare, but they still occur. Each one demonstrates that anyone with sufficient hash rate and a valid block template can still claim the full reward, without needing permission from any company or government.
The 3.125 $BTC block reward will remain unchanged until the next Bitcoin halving, expected around block No. 1,050,000 approximately in spring 2028, after which it will drop to 1.5625 $BTC. Over time, fees will play an increasingly significant role in mining as this block subsidy continues to shrink.
What to Watch For Next
The next Bitcoin mining difficulty adjustment is forecast to occur this weekend, August 8th, which will recalculate the network's mining difficulty based on the current hash rate. Interestingly, the activation of the BIP-110 soft fork is also expected around the same time. The network hash rate itself has shown some decline from the peak levels of late 2025; analysts attribute this shift partly to mining economics and competition for electricity and equipment from artificial intelligence (AI) data centers.
The identity of the miner behind block 960,804 remains unknown, as is typical for Bitcoin addresses. Whether this person continues to rent hash rate, is scaling up, or is simply cashing out—this information is not publicly available.
Source of the main/title image: Mempool.space
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