Every Bitcoin block ever mined contains exactly one transaction that isn’t like the others: the coinbase transaction, the one that creates new coins and pays them out to whoever found the block. Everything a mining pool promises about payout, fees, and custody ultimately comes down to what that one transaction says, and most people mining today have never actually looked at one.
What a coinbase transaction is
Unlike a normal Bitcoin transaction, which spends existing coins, a coinbase transaction has no inputs. It creates the block subsidy out of nothing, following Bitcoin’s own issuance schedule, and adds any transaction fees collected from the rest of the block. It then has one or more outputs saying where that value goes. Whoever constructs the block, in this case the mining pool’s software, decides what addresses go into those outputs. That decision is baked into the block itself, visible to anyone who looks, permanent the moment the block is confirmed.
This is the actual mechanism, not a metaphor. A pool doesn’t “send you your share” the way a bank sends a wire transfer, as a separate act of good faith after the fact. The payout is written directly into the transaction that creates the reward. Whatever address is in that output when the block confirms is where the money goes, full stop.
Why this makes some claims checkable and others not
Because the coinbase transaction is public and permanent, any block a pool claims to have found becomes independently checkable. If a pool says it found a block, anyone can look up the coinbase transaction on any block explorer and see, in plain view, whose addresses got paid and how much. A pool can put any number it wants on its own homepage. It cannot alter what’s already written into a confirmed transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain.
This is also where custody claims become checkable rather than just asserted. A pool claiming non-custodial, direct payout should show a coinbase transaction with exactly one paying output, going to the address the miner connected with, carrying the full reward. A pool that takes a cut for itself before paying miners will show that cut as a separate output in the same transaction, visible to anyone who looks. The claim and the on-chain reality either match or they don’t, and there’s no ambiguity in the answer once you know where to look.
What it can’t tell you
The coinbase transaction settles the question of where a specific found block’s reward went. It doesn’t tell you anything about your odds of ever being the one who finds a block. Those odds are set entirely by the network’s current difficulty, identical at every pool, this one included, and nothing about a pool’s payout structure changes that number. Solo mining is a lottery whether the payout mechanism is custodial or direct. A smaller difficulty on a given chain means a shorter expected wait, not a better guarantee, and an average is not a schedule.
Why this is worth understanding even if you never check one yourself
You don’t need to become someone who reads raw transaction data for fun. But knowing that this mechanism exists changes what you should expect from a pool’s own claims. A pool describing itself as non-custodial and paying you directly is making a claim about the exact shape of a public, permanent transaction. That’s a specific, falsifiable claim, not a marketing adjective. It’s worth asking any pool you’re considering whether that’s genuinely how their payout works, because the honest answer is sitting on the blockchain the moment they find their first block.
NexusPool’s payout works exactly the way described above: one paying output in the coinbase, the full reward, sent directly to the address you connected with. Miners who want to check that a given payout matches this pattern before trusting it can run it through NexusPool’s payout preflight tool. Free, non-custodial software, not an investment, and finding a block is never guaranteed.
Trust nothing. Verify the coinbase transaction the next time any pool, anywhere, finds a block.
About NexusPool: NexusPool pays the full block reward directly to the finding miner’s address in a single coinbase output, with no pool wallet in between. Miners can check a payout’s structure themselves using the payout preflight checker.
