Every payout is settled inside the block's own coinbase transaction. The pool never holds miner funds, and every distribution is publicly verifiable on-chain.
Zero X Pool combines the excitement of solo mining with the steadier income of a pool, without asking miners to trust an operator with their earnings.
When any miner in the pool finds a block, that miner — the finder — takes a flat 50% of the reward, exactly as they would solo. The remaining 50% is split among everyone else in proportion to the work they contributed since the last block. Crucially, the entire distribution is written directly into the block's coinbase transaction. The pool custodies nothing, promises nothing off-chain, and cannot withhold a payout. Anyone can audit any block and confirm the split was correct.
Bitcoin Cash blocks are found by brute-force search: miners repeatedly hash candidate block headers until one produces a hash below the network target. The process is memoryless — every hash is an independent attempt, and no work "accumulates" toward a block. Hashrate simply buys more attempts per second.
Solo mining is all-or-nothing: find a block and keep 100%; otherwise earn nothing, possibly for years. Conventional pools smooth this out by paying members a steady share — but they take custody of the reward and settle with miners later from their own ledger, which requires trusting the operator to pay.
Zero X Pool sits deliberately between the two, and removes the trust requirement.
For each block found, the coinbase reward R (block subsidy plus fees, less the pool fee) is distributed as:
The finder is excluded from the proportional split — their reward is the 50% bonus alone. This preserves the solo "I found it, I take half" incentive while still paying the wider field on every block.
This is the property that distinguishes Zero X Pool. In most pools — including off-chain SOLO-hybrid pools — the block reward is paid to an address the operator controls, and miner balances are tracked in a private database and paid out separately. Miners must trust that ledger.
Zero X Pool instead constructs a personalized coinbase transaction for every connected miner. The job a miner receives already encodes the full payout: "if this share solves the block, you are the finder and receive 50%, and here is exactly how the remaining 50% is split to everyone else." Whichever miner's share wins, their version of the coinbase becomes the block's coinbase, and the reward is distributed by the network itself in the same transaction that mints it.
Zero custody
The pool never receives, holds, or forwards miner funds. There is no operator balance to trust, no withdrawal to request, and no way to withhold a payment. Payouts are a consensus outcome, not an operator's promise.
Miners connect over the standard Stratum protocol. On connection each miner is assigned a unique extranonce, guaranteeing that no two miners search the same nonce space — the pool's combined hashrate translates into genuinely distinct attempts at the same block. The pool distributes jobs (previous block hash, coinbase parts, merkle branches, target), and miners return shares: hashes that meet a low share difficulty used only to measure contributed work. A share that also meets the full network target is a block, which the pool submits to its Bitcoin Cash node.
Pooling does not improve any individual miner's odds on a given block, nor does it merge hashes — the search remains memoryless. It simply points many independent searchers at the same target so that someone wins sooner, then shares the proceeds.
Each address accumulates a work score across the round (internally, its herp), proportional to the difficulty-weighted shares it submits. When a block is found, scores determine the proportional split, and the round resets. Work is credited to the address, not to a live connection: a miner that briefly disconnects, idles, or reconnects keeps its accumulated score and resumes where it left off. A disconnected miner is still paid its earned share on-chain — it simply cannot be the finder on a block during which it submitted no shares.
A Bitcoin Cash output must exceed the dust limit of 546 satoshis to be valid. A miner whose proportional share of a given block falls below dust therefore cannot receive an on-chain output that block. Rather than discard the earnings, the pool carries them forward: the miner's work score persists across the reset and is paid once it is worth a non-dust output.
The coinbase can hold thousands of payout outputs (bounded only by the 1 MB coinbase limit and, ultimately, by the dust rule). The pool's payout capacity is set far above any realistic miner count, so dust — not an arbitrary cap — is what determines who is paid on-chain each block. Everyone whose share clears dust is paid directly; the remainder is batched forward.
Dust expiry
If a miner submits no shares for 180 days, its carried-forward sub-dust balance expires and is returned to active miners (via a reduced payout denominator). This prevents unclaimable dust from accumulating indefinitely. The operator never receives expired dust. This policy is disclosed here as part of the pool's rules.
Because settlement happens in the coinbase, every payout is independently auditable. For any block the pool finds, decode the coinbase transaction in a block explorer and confirm: one output equal to 50% of the reward to the finder, and a set of outputs to the remaining participants summing to the other 50% in proportion to work. There is nothing to take on faith.
A worked example already exists on a live public network. On BCH testnet (Chipnet) the pool solved a real block whose coinbase pays the finder exactly 50% and divides the other 50% between the remaining miners in proportion to their work, with the finder excluded from that split — inspect the coinbase here.
The pool fee is 1%, deducted before the split. A portion of the fee is donated to the developers of the underlying node and pool software. No withdrawal fees exist because there are no withdrawals — payouts arrive directly in blocks.