Since Bitcoin mining is now an industrial-level operation, with the vast majority of hash rate coming from large-scale operations, it’s natural that the ecosystem and accompanying software would focus on the largest market share.
Most Bitcoin mining pools are built for people with serious hashrate. A hobbyist running a Bitaxe at roughly 500 GH/s is, at best, a rounding error to them, and the payout rules often reflect that. Minimum thresholds are set in the thousands of sats or higher, and pooled earnings at this scale amount to pennies.
So most Bitaxe owners end up solo mining and treating it as a lottery ticket, which further lowers your chances of securing any kind of payment.
While unlikely, there have been instances where Solo Miners have netted a block with a BitAxe and more power, netting 3.125 BTC and some change.
For those who don’t want to roll the dice and point their hash rate to a shared pool, building up towards the payment threshold can take years.
ArkPool, a mainnet alpha that went public in the last few weeks, is trying a different approach. It pays small miners tiny, regular amounts in sats over Ark, the off-chain Bitcoin payment protocol, with a one-sat minimum and settlement every hour.
It is a small, experimental project, aimed at supporting hobby miners, and continues the trend of new mining pool models, like the Parasite pool project.
How ArkPool Works
ArkPool describes itself as a proxy mining pool and hashpower purchasing service for Bitaxe and other SHA-256 home miners. You contribute verified hashrate, and you are credited for the work. Rewards are paid in sats.
It is not solo mining, and it is not a guarantee of profit.
- The connection. Stock Bitaxe firmware cannot talk to Tor on its own, so ArkPool provides an open-source home gateway (MIT-licensed, hosted on GitLab). You run it in Docker on a Linux machine on your local network. Your Bitaxe connects to the gateway on port 3333 over Stratum V1, and the gateway carries the traffic to the pool’s onion address over Tor. No port forwarding is needed, and the Tor destination comes prefilled.
- The account. There is no sign-up, no email and no invitation. Your username is your full mainnet Ark receive address (starting
ark1), and the password isx. Your account is created automatically when your miner authorises. Reconnecting with the same address keeps your balance, while a different address creates a separate account. - The payouts. Eligible whole-sat balances settle on UTC-hour boundaries, with fractions of a sat carrying forward until they add up to one. Payouts go to your own Ark wallet. ArkPool uses Bark, the Ark implementation built by Second, and the pool states that it never holds your wallet keys. It only accepts compatible Bark-format mainnet addresses.
- The stats. A public dashboard shows aggregate data, and a separate Tor-only dashboard lets you look up an address to see hashrate, verified shares, pending sats and confirmed payouts. As of the October 3 snapshot, the pool showed one active miner at about 1.25 TH/s, 100% share acceptance and 124 sats paid out in total.
What Is Ark, and Why Does It Matter Here?
Ark is a Bitcoin scaling protocol (rather than a true second layer solution) in which many users share on-chain UTXOs through trees of pre-signed off-chain transactions. Your balance is held as a VTXO, a virtual UTXO that can be published on-chain if needed. Ark can work on Bitcoin today without consensus changes, though it would scale better with covenants such as OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY.
For mining payouts, this solves a practical problem.
On-chain payouts of a few hundred sats would be eaten by fees. Lightning can handle small amounts, but receiving it requires channel liquidity or a custodial intermediary.
Ark lets an operator send sub-cent amounts every hour to a wallet the miner controls, without the miner managing any channels.
While Ark is an open-source protocol, this mining pool uses Bark, which opened on mainnet on June 9, 2026, and ArkPool is built on it.
Note: There are alternative Ark implementations in Arkade and OpenArk.
How It Differs From Other Pools
Compared with the pools most Bitaxe owners use today:
- Solo pools (Public Pool, Solo CKPool): Public Pool charges 0% and Solo CKPool 2%. Both pay the full block reward directly to your address if you find a block, and nothing otherwise. The odds are astronomical, though they do happen, and a 480 GH/s Bitaxe found a full block on Solo CKPool in March 2025. ArkPool is the opposite model: small, steady, certain-ish income rather than a lottery.
- Pooled mining (Braiins, OCEAN): Braiins pays FPPS at about 2.5% and offers Lightning payouts with a one-sat minimum, which is the closest comparison. On-chain, its minimum is 0.0002 BTC. OCEAN is non-custodial and aligned with decentralisation, but its on-chain payout threshold is far higher, around 0.01 BTC by one comparison.
- ArkPool: Ark payouts, a one-sat minimum, hourly settlement, and Tor as the default transport. Its website says the Tor connection is for privacy, since your home IP isn’t exposed to the pool.
The Tor-first design is also unusual. Most pools expect a plain clearnet connection, while ArkPool makes the privacy layer the default and the dashboard Tor-only.
Why It Appeals to Hobbyist Miners
For someone with a Bitaxe, there are several reasons to try this.
- Tiny balances are paid out. At 500 GH/s, an ordinary pool’s minimum payout could take months or years to reach. A one-sat threshold with hourly settlement means you see income arrive, even if the amounts are very small.
- Feedback is immediate. Part of the hobby’s appeal is watching your hardware earn something. Hourly payments make that real in a way a lottery doesn’t.
- Self-custody of payouts. You supply your own Ark address. The pool doesn’t hold your keys, and you aren’t maintaining a balance in a custodial account that you’d need to withdraw from.
- Privacy. Tor-based mining with no account, email or KYC suits miners who care about this, especially at a scale where privacy is cheap to maintain.
- Low stakes. The pool’s alpha limits cap exposure at 50 sats per miner per hour and 250 sats of cumulative unattended pool exposure. That makes it a low-risk thing to experiment with.
The Downsides
An honest write-up has to be blunt about the limits here. ArkPool says so itself on its own site.
It is an alpha with almost no track record. One active miner and 124 sats paid in total is an experiment, not infrastructure. There is no history to judge reliability by, and the operator warns that maintenance or safety limits can delay payment.
You are trusting the operator. The site is clear that Tor does not make the service trustless: the operator verifies work and sends the payouts. The backend is private, the frontend is only planned for open-source release, and the reward rates aren’t published. The public stats are operator-reported and explicitly not proof of reserves.
Earnings are tiny by design. The 50 sat per-hour cap means a miner could earn at most 1,200 sats a day. That is fine for an experiment, but it isn’t income. And as the site notes, mining has operating costs, and electricity for even a small device will usually exceed what the pool pays.
Ark carries its own trust model. VTXOs expire (roughly 28 to 30 days on mainnet), and wallets must refresh them before then. If the Ark server misbehaves or disappears, your ability to exit on-chain depends on pre-signed transactions you hold. There is also a dust problem. Second has said that amounts under 330 sats can’t be redeemed on-chain through the normal relay network, so very small balances aren’t safe if the server vanishes, though they consolidate once you hold more than that. For a miner receiving a few sats an hour, this is a real consideration. ArkPool also depends on Second’s mainnet Ark server.
Setup is not trivial. You need a Docker host for the gateway, a compatible Bark mainnet wallet, and Tor Browser for the dashboard. Not every Ark wallet or address format is supported, and Shhark integration isn’t advertised as complete.
Where the hashrate goes is unclear. The pool calls itself a “proxy” and a “hashpower purchasing service.” The site doesn’t say where the hashpower is ultimately directed, so you can’t tell which block templates it contributes to or whether it helps decentralise mining.
Name confusion. “ArkPool” has been used before, including by an older, unrelated Ark delegate pool and an earlier name in block explorer data. I couldn’t confirm any link between those and this project, so double-check you’re on arkpool.org.
Is It Worth Trying?
If you have a spare Bitaxe and are curious about Ark, ArkPool is an interesting, low-risk experiment. It is a good fit for tinkerers who want to see small payouts arrive and who are comfortable with a Docker gateway and Tor.
It is a poor fit for anyone looking for meaningful earnings, strong guarantees or a pool with a long history.
Treat it as what it says it is: a mainnet alpha.
Keep your expectations in sats, watch the dashboard, and don’t point anything you can’t afford to lose at it.
Do your own research.
If you want to learn more about the ArkPool, use this article as a starting point. Don’t trust what we say as the final word. Take the time to research other sources, starting with the resources below.
Sources: arkpool.org; Second’s Ark documentation and Bark mainnet launch notes; Bitcoin Optech’s Ark topic page; D-Central’s 2026 Bitaxe pool comparisons. The pool’s statistics are as of the October 3, 2026 snapshot and change often.
