Best Solo Mining Pools 2026: Fees, Coins and Who Each One Suits

Solo mining means you keep the entire block reward when your hardware finds a block, and earn nothing when it doesn’t. The pool you use does not change how often that happens — your odds come from your hashrate against the whole network, and no pool can move them.

What the pool does change is three things: the fee it takes when you win, which coins you can point hardware at, and whether it will actually pay you in that one moment that matters. This guide compares every pool with a real solo mode on exactly those terms.

The solo pools at a glance

Fees are taken from each pool’s own site on 10 September 2026. Block counts come from independent attribution (mempool.space) for Solo CKPool and from each pool’s own API for 2Miners.

Bitcoin or an altcoin: where solo actually works

Bitcoin is where solo mining is hardest — a single machine competes against roughly 940 EH/s, and the pool you pick cannot move that. On a smaller chain the same hardware owns a far larger slice, which turns the lottery into something with a plausible timescale.

The clearest evidence comes from one operator running both. 2Miners’ solo pools have found 91,343 Ravencoin blocks, 362,368 Ethereum Classic blocks and over 1.2 million Kaspa blocks — against zero on Bitcoin. Same company, same solo mechanism, opposite outcomes, purely because of network size.

So the first decision is the coin, not the pool. If you are set on Bitcoin, two pools below are worth your hashrate and the rest are not; if you are open to an altcoin, your odds improve by several orders of magnitude. Check the live network hashrate for whichever chain you are considering on its coin page before committing hardware.

Solo CKPool — the one that has actually paid out

2% fee 305 blocks since 2014

That block count is the entire argument. Every one of those 305 finds is confirmed by independent block attribution, not by the pool’s own dashboard.

The pool is blunt about what it is: “This is NOT a pool despite its name; it is a service to allow miners to mine solo blocks, as you cannot mine directly to a Bitcoin Core node.” No registration, no payment schemes, no operator wallet holding your money. It calls itself not-for-profit.

Three things it does that others don’t:

• No transaction filtering. It uses default Bitcoin Core transaction selection and publishes the live template at solo.ckpool.org/pool.txns so anyone can check. With pool censorship an active argument in Bitcoin, that is a position, not a footnote.
• Stratum V2 is live on port 3336, plus an experimental job declaration server — ahead of most of the industry.
• Endpoints in the USA, EU, Asia and Oceania with automatic lowest-latency selection and failover, and a separate high-difficulty port for rented hashrate.

Setup: point the miner at stratum.ckpool.org:3333, username is your Bitcoin address, password anything. An invalid address is rejected outright — a useful guard against typos that would otherwise send a block reward into the void.

Best for: anyone who would rather pay 2% than discover, at the worst possible moment, that a newer pool’s payout code has never been tested with a real block.

Public Pool — zero fee, and you can run it yourself

0% fee open source self-hostable

Public Pool charges nothing and funds its hosting through affiliate links instead. It runs solo and PPLNS side by side on separate ports, and supports Stratum V1, V1 over TLS, Stratum V2, and DATUM — the protocol that lets your miner build its own block template rather than accepting the pool’s. That last one puts it in OCEAN’s category on transaction sovereignty, at zero cost.

The real draw is that it is open source: run it on your own node and the third party disappears entirely. An Umbrel or Start9 box makes that a weekend project.

Username format: <your BTC address>.<worker name>.

Best for: miners who care about the fee and the ethos, and anyone planning to graduate to their own node. The honest caveat — it has no comparable public block record, so your block would be among the first to test its payout path.

SoloPool.org — non-custodial, ten coins

2% fee 10 coins

Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Dogecoin, DigiByte, Fractal Bitcoin, eCash, Bitcoin II and Bitcoin Cash II. Their Ravencoin pool currently sits at zero hashrate.

Two things to know. The fee went up on 1 September 2026 — from 1.5% to 2%, which the pool attributes to server costs. And since June 2026 it is explicitly non-custodial: no pool wallet, no balances, no withdrawals. Merged Litecoin and Dogecoin mining has been available since January 2026, so Scrypt hardware collects both.

Best for: solo mining something other than Bitcoin without hunting for a separate pool per coin. More detail on our SoloPool page.

2Miners — solo on every coin they run

1.5% solo 1% pooled ~20 coins

2Miners runs a parallel solo pool for each of its twenty-plus coins — Ravencoin, Ethereum Classic, Zcash, Kaspa, Ergo, Nervos and a long tail of smaller ones. Solo costs 1.5% against 1% for pooled mining, and payouts run automatically every two hours.

It is the only pool here that publishes solo block counts per coin, and they are worth reading before you pick a chain:

Twenty-nine miners share the Ravencoin solo pool, which tells you both how niche this is and how real the wins are. Their Bitcoin solo pool has never found a block — the clearest possible illustration that the coin, not the pool, decides your odds.

Best for: GPU miners who want a genuine shot on Ravencoin, Kaspa, Ergo or Ethereum Classic, where the expected wait is measured in months rather than centuries. See our 2Miners page.

SupportXMR — the cheapest solo fee there is

0.4% fee Monero

At 0.4%, SupportXMR’s solo mode is the lowest fee in this comparison by a wide margin — its own pooled PPLNS costs 0.6%, and even that undercuts most of the field. Monero is the one major coin where CPU mining still means something, so a solo attempt does not require an ASIC farm: an ordinary desktop contributes real hashrate to a network running at roughly 6.3 GH/s rather than 940 EH/s.

The pool has also enabled Tari merge mining, which pays out hourly alongside your Monero work at no extra cost — so even while you wait for a solo block that may never come, the hardware is earning a second coin.

One caveat on evidence: SupportXMR publishes a pool-wide block count (over 554,000 since launch), but does not break out how many of those came from its solo side. Details on our SupportXMR page.

Best for: CPU miners, and anyone already mining Monero who wants a lottery ticket that costs 0.4% of a win they will probably never see.

K1Pool — solo next to PPLNS on altcoins

from 1% altcoins

K1Pool offers SOLO alongside PPLNS on Ethereum Classic, both Quai chains (SHA-256 and Scrypt), EthereumPoW, OctaSpace and Pearl — the last of which merge-mines MDL automatically, so Pearl miners collect two coins for one set of shares. Base pool fee is 1% and payouts run every 24 hours, with a threshold set per coin (0.1 ETC, for example).

The appeal is switching without moving: if your rigs already point at K1Pool’s PPLNS pool, the solo endpoint is a configuration change rather than a migration, and you can put one rig on the lottery while the rest earn steadily.

What you do not get is a published solo block count, so there is no way to check from outside how often its solo side has actually paid. More on our K1Pool page.

Best for: miners already on K1Pool, and anyone mining Quai or OctaSpace, where few other pools offer a solo option at all.

Which one should you pick

• Bitcoin, and you want it proven → Solo CKPool. The 2% only ever costs you in the moment you win, and it has demonstrably paid out 305 times.
• Bitcoin, and the fee matters → Public Pool. Zero fee, open source, and a path to your own node.
• Litecoin, Dogecoin, BCH or DigiByte → SoloPool.org, non-custodial and merged LTC+DOGE.
• GPU altcoins → 2Miners, solo on every coin at 1.5%.
• Monero → SupportXMR at 0.4%, plus Tari on top.
• Full sovereignty → skip pools: run a node and Public Pool or ckpool-solo on it, and keep every satoshi including the transaction fees.

What happens if you actually find a block

Worth knowing before it happens, because the moment is short and mistakes at that point are permanent.

The reward arrives in the coinbase transaction of the block you found, paid to the address you used as your username. On Bitcoin that output needs 100 confirmations — roughly 16 hours — before it can be spent. This is a protocol rule, not a pool policy: every chain enforces coinbase maturity, and no pool can shorten it.

Three consequences:

• Your address must be one you control the keys to. Not an exchange deposit address, which may not credit a coinbase payment, and certainly not one with a typo. Solo CKPool rejects invalid addresses outright; not every pool does.
• The pool’s fee is deducted at that moment, and only then. Until you find a block, every pool in this comparison has cost you exactly nothing.
• Nothing is held on your behalf. On a proper solo pool there is no balance to withdraw and no support ticket to file — which is also why a pool going offline costs you nothing but downtime.

Pools that are not solo, however you configure them

Your miner connects to these happily, which is precisely how people end up not solo mining.

• Braiins — FPPS. Steady small payments for your shares.
• OCEAN — non-custodial and transparent, and worth a look on principle, but TIDES spreads your reward across many blocks. You are paid for shares, not for finding a block.
• Any pool with an account and a balance page — pooled by definition.

FAQ

Sources

• Solo CKPool — fee, endpoints, Stratum V2 ports, transaction selection policy, minimum difficulty
• Public Pool — zero fee, open source, solo and PPLNS ports, DATUM support
• SoloPool.org — fee change of 1 September 2026, coin list, non-custodial policy, merged LTC+DOGE
• 2Miners — solo and pooled fees, coin list, payout schedule
• SupportXMR — solo and PPLNS fees, Tari merge mining
• K1Pool — solo and PPLNS modes, pool fee, payout schedule
• mempool.space — Solo CK — independent all-time block count