What is EMBER?

EMBER is FenixPool's hybrid payout mechanism that rewards the miner who finds a block without leaving everyone else empty-handed. When a block is found, the finder receives a tiered bonus that scales with the pool's active miner count. The remainder — the embers — is distributed via EMBER's shared split to every miner who contributed shares to the recent payout window. You don't have to be connected when the block is found — if your shares are still in the payout window, you earn your slice. The finder's own shares count in that split like everyone else's: the finder receives the tier share plus their work-proportional slice of the remainder, paid together in one output, and the remainder is divided among every contributor in the payout window in proportion to their work — so nobody's expected earnings depend on who finds the block. EMBER is high-variance by design: in a small pool most of each block goes to its finder, so non-finders receive small slices often and a large payout only when they find a block themselves. Plan for the swings.

What rounding does to small miners

We pay you out of the block itself, in one coinbase output, in the coin’s smallest unit — a satoshi on Bitcoin and DigiByte, 0.01 XEC on eCash, and so on. There is no account, no balance and no payout run, which is the point. It also means the arithmetic has a hard floor that we cannot design around and will not hide.

Your slice is your work divided by everyone’s work, multiplied by the pot, rounded down to a whole unit. If that number comes out below one, there is no output for you on that block. Not a small one — none. Nothing is carried forward to the next block, because there is nowhere to carry it to: a pool that could carry a fraction would be a pool holding a balance for you, and we do not hold balances.

That is the only floor we have. We do not apply the chain’s dust threshold to coinbase outputs — that threshold is a relay rule for ordinary transactions and a coinbase is not relayed, so it does not apply. We removed that filter in September 2026 after finding it was quietly sending the smallest miners’ earnings to our own fee address. If your slice comes to one unit, you get one unit.

Where the un-credited value goes depends on the pool. On EMBER it lands in the pool fee output for that block, unless the finder was the only contributor, in which case the finder takes it. On GLOW it is spread across the miners whose slices did reach a unit. Either way it is written into the block and visible in the coinbase; nothing is swept, held, or taken from work that was credited.

What this means for your hardware. The threshold is your share of the pot measured in whole units: you are credited on a block when your slice reaches at least one. The bigger the pool and the fewer units in its reward, the higher that bar sits in hashrate terms — and on EMBER the bar is higher still for non-finders, because the shared portion is only part of the reward. On a large pool this puts USB and ESP32-class lottery miners (NerdMiner and similar) below the line by arithmetic — their work never adds up to one whole unit per block, so they are credited nothing, block after block. Bitaxe and NerdQAxe-class devices are well above it and are paid from their first block. We draw this line at a number, never at a brand or a user agent: nothing checks what hardware you run.

If you want to run a device under that line, use our solo pools. Nothing is split there — every share is a lottery ticket, and if it wins you take the whole post-fee block. One safeguard worth naming: if every miner’s slice on a block rounded to zero, the engine refuses to build that coinbase rather than pay the whole reward to us.

Before you point a rig or a rental at EMBER

My miner or rental works on a SOLO pool but not on EMBER or GLOW. Why, and what should I do?

Because of how we pay. On a SOLO pool the block’s coinbase has a handful of outputs. On EMBER and GLOW that same coinbase pays every miner in the window directly — often a hundred or more outputs — so the job your miner receives carries a far larger coinbase template than a conventional pool ever sends. Most hardware takes it without comment. Some stock firmware has a fixed buffer for that template and quietly mis-hashes once it is exceeded: the rig looks connected and keeps submitting, but every share comes back rejected or at near-zero difficulty. Some rental-marketplace proxies drop the connection before the worker is even authorized, so the rig never starts — while other rentals from the same marketplace run flawlessly, because it depends on the proxy and firmware in front of the hashboards, not on the marketplace. We will not shrink the template to suit them; paying every contributor inside the block itself is the point of EMBER and GLOW. If you see those symptoms, point that rig or that rental at the SOLO pool for the same coin: the standard-size coinbase works with everything, the rest of your hardware can stay on EMBER or GLOW, and nothing is lost but the shares that were never counted.