Per chain
Merge-mining revenue per year
| Year | Total | Implied daily average |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 YTD | $3,183,331 | $11,451/day |
| 2025 | $9,723,683 | $26,640/day |
| 2024 | $33,737,918 | $92,180/day |
| 2023 | $9,053,103 | $24,803/day |
| 2022 | $17,769,371 | $48,683/day |
| 2021 | $70,671,644 | $193,621/day |
| 2020 | $4,186,897 | $11,440/day |
| 2019 | $1,783,513 | $4,886/day |
| 2018 | $3,579,678 | $9,807/day |
| 2017 | $2,170,842 | $5,948/day |
| 2016 | $487,384 | $1,332/day |
| 2015 | $601,641 | $1,648/day |
| 2014 | $6,573,631 | $18,010/day |
| 2013 | $3,435,293 | $9,412/day |
What is merge mining? Merge mining is Satoshi's invention enabling many blockchains to achieve valuable network effect by using a single set of miners for economic security without any extra hashing, mining hardware, or energy expense. Merge mining involves a parent blockchain (e.g., Bitcoin L1) and an unlimited number of other blockchains (e.g., Namecoin, Rootstock, Syscoin) sending transaction fees to the L1, increasing the transaction fee revenue of the L1 miners. According to 2020 research by BitMex, at least 90% of bitcoin miners are engaged in merge mining, such as by participating in a pool that runs the nodes of one or more merge-mined bitcoin sidechains in order to receive transaction fees from those sidechains.
Is that a lot?
Not next to Bitcoin itself. Over the trailing 30 days, merge mining paid Bitcoin miners about $4,273 per day across all seven chains (valued as mined), while Bitcoin's own block rewards and fees paid them about $41,456,558 per day — a 0.010% bonus on top of hashprice, for zero additional energy. Since Namecoin's first merged block in October 2011, Bitcoin miners have earned roughly $100,611,367,048 from Bitcoin; merge mining added $158,056,925 as mined — about 0.16%.
Bitcoin revenue and hashrate from blockchain.info charts (miners-revenue, hash-rate), as of 2026-10-05. The merge-mining rate averages each chain's last 30 days of data.
Who captures it — and who doesn't
Merge mining happens at the pool, not the ASIC. The pool runs a node for each auxiliary chain, embeds that chain's block commitment in the Bitcoin coinbase it hands to its miners, and collects the auxiliary rewards when a share happens to meet the other chain's difficulty. A miner on a pool that doesn't do this — or does it but keeps the proceeds rather than paying them out — earns nothing here, no matter how much hashrate they point at it.
Capturing it is a configuration choice, not a hardware one. For miners: pick a pool that merge-mines the chains above and passes the rewards through (most publish a merged-mining payout list). For pool operators: run each chain's node and add its AuxPoW work to the stratum job — every chain here exposes that through its standard createauxblock / getauxblock interface. The revenue is small next to Bitcoin's, but it is pure margin: the electricity has already been spent.
The numbers
| Chain | Mechanism | Merge-mined blocks | Share of blocks | Revenue (native) | USD today | USD as mined | Data through |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Namecoin | AuxPoW | 814,429 | 97.7% | 18,709,373 NMC | $16,038,901 | $19,490,232 | 2026-07-16 |
| Fractal Bitcoin | AuxPoW | 727,222 | 33.4% | 17,940,489 FB | $7,061,376 | $34,939,483 | 2026-10-05 |
| Rootstock | AuxPoW | 9,130,730 | 98.2% | 71.575 RBTC | $6,190,385 | $3,344,262 | 2026-10-04 |
| Hathor | AuxPoW | 7,123,955 | 99.1% | 142,749,454 HTR | $1,252,438 | $39,681,492 | 2026-10-05 |
| Elastos | AuxPoW | 2,132,262 | 92.3% | 2,061,360 ELA | $841,044 | $5,918,777 | 2026-10-05 |
| Electric Cash | AuxPoW | 212,968 | 71.6% | 13,705,238 ELCASH | $680,764 | $50,586,875 | 2026-09-25 |
| Core DAO | hash delegation | 112,690 | 55.5% | 12,706,765 CORE | $281,992 | $8,901,000 | 2026-09-28 |
| Syscoin | AuxPoW | 2,318,598 | 99.9% | 28,337,770 SYS | $68,422 | $4,095,804 | 2026-10-05 |
What this measures: the block rewards (or the miner's consensus share of them) of blocks carrying valid merged-mining proof — i.e., blocks produced by Bitcoin miners reusing Bitcoin proof-of-work — measured per block from each chain's own consensus data. Full details on the methodology page.
Two USD views: “today's prices” multiplies all-time native totals by current market prices; “valued as mined” multiplies each UTC day's revenue by that day's closing price — what miners would have realized selling immediately. Revenue earned before any reliable market price existed is excluded from the as-mined figures rather than guessed: 4.44M NMC (Oct 2011 – Apr 2013) and 44.7M HTR (Jan – Sep 2020) are unpriced. Fractal's first four days are valued at its first listed close.
Syscoin's current price collapsed after its May 2026 Binance delisting, which is why it earned ~$4.1M as mined but that revenue is worth ~$66K today. Syscoin coverage begins at its 2019 chain restart; the 2016–2019 legacy-chain era is not reachable from any running node and is an acknowledged undercount. Rootstock's RBTC is valued at the Bitcoin price (1:1 peg).
Two chains carry extra caveats. Electric Cash was merge-mined by Bitcoin pools mainly from January 2021 to November 2024, with a small tail through mid-2026; its consensus restricted coinbase payouts to project-whitelisted addresses throughout, and its market was thin (daily volume far below emission), so its as-mined USD is an upper bound on a quote nobody could have sold into. Core DAO is hash delegation, not merge mining: miners are paid CORE for tagged Bitcoin blocks without their work producing a Core block — shown separately, never in the headline — and its payouts have been frozen by governance since August 31, 2026. Bitcoin Vault (2020–25, ~$270M nominal) is documented on the methodology page but excluded: its rewards went to project-controlled addresses, not verifiably to miners.
Data through 2026-10-05; per-block records verified for height continuity and exact emission-schedule conformance before inclusion.