Deep page

Mining: the work that orders everything

Miners do two jobs at once: they hold a lottery whose prize is writing the next blocks, and by writing them they build the web the ordering rule later reads. This page is the map of that work; the chapters carry the detail.

What a miner actually does

A miner assembles a block from waiting payments, points it at the current tips, and races to solve the block's proof of work puzzle. The puzzle is named: kHeavyHash, a hashing algorithm built around heavy matrix arithmetic, picked so that fast chips help and memory tricks do not. At ten blocks a second the race restarts constantly, and no miner waits for anyone: every honest block found enters the web, which is why Kaspa wastes almost no work. The problem shows what that speed does to a plain chain, and One order shows how the web gets read.

The machines: three hardware classes

Kaspa started on ordinary processors in November 2021, moved to graphics cards as the crowd arrived, and is now mined almost entirely by ASICs: chips built for kHeavyHash and nothing else. They run from a 100 W home box on a desk to 3 kW farm machines on racks; IceRiver and Bitmain's Antminer KS line are the names on most of them. A graphics card still works; it simply earns a sliver of what it did before the chips arrived. Classes in order: CPUs at launch, GPUs through the growth years, ASICs on top today. Makers and models as listed by IceRiver and ASIC Miner Value's Antminer KS5 Pro page, checked Nov 4, 2026.

What a miner earns

Each block's reward has two parts: new coins, issued by the schedule, plus the fees of the payments inside the block. The new coins step down every month on a fixed schedule; fees are the smaller part today. The staircase in Who got the coins draws the steps, and Who pays the miners later tests whether fees can take over as the steps shrink.

Solo against pool

A miner chooses how the lottery pays out. Mining solo, one machine keeps the whole reward of any block it finds, and finds one rarely: at one millionth of all mining power, about one block a day is the average wait, and the arithmetic sits in Check it yourself. Mining in a pool, thousands of machines pool their guesses and split every reward the pool finds, so income arrives in small, steady amounts instead of rare jackpots. Same work, same expected earnings over time; the difference is how lumpy the pay is, and whether a pool operator sits between the miner and the reward.

Pool share, and how it moved

Pools are where most of the power sits, so pool share is the concentration number that matters. On Nov 4, 2026, the two biggest pools reported about 59% of all mining power between them, and the top three about 70% (pool figures as reported by Mining Pool Stats, read Nov 4, 2026). Total mining power has moved the other way: about 362 PH/s on Nov 4, 2026, down from a peak of 1,592 PH/s on Jan 31, 2025 (the network's own hashrate record, api.kaspa.org/info/hashrate/max). Fewer, bigger pools splitting a smaller total is the current shape; the open questions register tracks whether it settles, and Try to break it works through what concentrated power could and could not do with it.

Pools and names

Many pools sign their blocks in the coinbase, the one place a block can carry a name. This panel reads the last 100 blocks and reports who signed, and how many blocks carry no readable name at all.

Checked Nov 4, 2026. Every figure on this page carries its source and read date in the text beside it.