What a Dishonest Mining Pool Could Get Away With

Every mining pool asks for the same three things on faith: that it received your work, that it counted it correctly, and that it would pay you honestly if you found a block. Most pools answer all three with a dashboard number and nothing else. A dashboard is not proof. A dashboard is a claim, styled to look like data.

Take the claim apart and it gets genuinely uncomfortable. A pool could quietly undercount your shares, and nothing on your screen would look wrong. A lower hashrate reading just looks like a bad day. A pool could serve you a harder difficulty than it logs, so every share you submit is worth less than it should be, and you'd have no way to tell your rig from a slow one. A pool could simply not credit a chunk of your work at all, and unless you're running your own independent counter, you'd never know the difference between "my rig had a rough hour" and "the pool dropped some of my hashes."

None of this requires malice from day one. It could be a bug nobody ever finds, because nothing checks for it. The real problem isn't that pools are dishonest. Most aren't. It's that until now, there was no way to tell an honest pool from a dishonest one from the outside. You were taking their word for it, every time.

Glass Ledger is NexusPool's answer to that. Every rig that mines here gets a signed receipt for the work the pool counted from it. It's not a number on a page. It's a cryptographic object you can check yourself, on your own machine, with nothing installed and no account required.

What the receipt says

Each receipt covers three things: how many shares the pool counted from your rig, the difficulty it served you at the time, and the window those shares fell in. That's the whole claim, stated plainly enough to be checked against reality.

The receipt is signed with a BIP340 Schnorr signature, the same scheme Bitcoin itself uses for Taproot, over that exact payload. You verify it against a public key NexusPool publishes and you pin yourself, the same way you'd pin any key you actually trust. Checking a receipt never asks you to trust NexusPool's servers, dashboard, or API. It asks you to trust arithmetic.

There's a standalone verifier for this, np-custody-verify, built to need nothing: no libraries to install, no dependencies to resolve, no network call to make. Point it at a receipt and a public key and it tells you, on your own hardware, whether the signature is real. If NexusPool's servers vanished tomorrow, every receipt you'd already collected would still verify.

Counted, and sometimes reconciled

Not every receipt is the same, and we don't pretend otherwise. A counted receipt is the baseline. It's what the pool saw from you (shares, difficulty, window), and every rig that mines here gets one. A reconciled receipt goes a step further and cross-checks your firmware's own reported hashrate against what the pool counted, catching a mismatch a counted receipt alone can't.

Most stock mining firmware has no way to report its own hashrate back to a pool, so most receipts issued today are counted, not reconciled. The receipt says so plainly instead of quietly averaging the difference away. A receipt that can't cross-check firmware still proves the pool counted what it counted. It just doesn't prove your rig agreed. That's a real limit, not a footnote we're hiding.

The key has to match, or the whole thing is theater

A signed receipt only means something if the key that signed it is the key NexusPool publishes, and that's less obvious than it sounds. If the key printed on the website ever drifted from the key the live pool was signing with, every receipt anyone verified afterward would be checking against the wrong thing, and nobody would notice, because the signatures would still look perfectly valid against that wrong key.

That's why the authority key is checked at deploy time, not published once and forgotten. Before any release ships, the key about to go public is diffed against the key the running pool is signing with right then. Ship them out of sync and the deploy is refused. It's a small mechanism, but it's the one that keeps "the key we publish" and "the key that's real" from quietly becoming two different things.

What Glass Ledger doesn't claim

It doesn't audit the pool's source code. You're trusting arithmetic on a signed payload, not certifying every line of C behind it. It doesn't prove you'll get paid either; that's a separate proof, Payout Preflight, which rebuilds the exact coinbase transaction before you've won anything. And it doesn't change your odds of finding a block: no receipt, no signature, no verifier touches the actual math of solo mining. What it changes is whether you have to take the pool's word for what happened in between.

How to check your own receipt

Grab a receipt from your dashboard and NexusPool's published authority key, then point np-custody-verify at both. It runs entirely offline, on hardware you control, and returns a plain pass or fail: no account, no API call, no dashboard required. The full mechanics are on the technology page; the receipts themselves live at /glass-ledger.

FAQ

What is Glass Ledger?
Glass Ledger is NexusPool's proof-of-custody system. Every rig that mines here gets a cryptographically signed receipt for the shares the pool counted from it, which you can verify offline against a published key.

Does Glass Ledger prove I'll get paid?
No. That's a separate mechanism, Payout Preflight, which reconstructs the exact coinbase transaction before a block is found so you can confirm where the payout lands.

What's the difference between a counted and a reconciled receipt?
A counted receipt reflects what the pool saw from you: shares, difficulty, window. A reconciled receipt also cross-checks your firmware's own reported hashrate against the pool's count. That's only possible for firmware that can report the number, and most stock firmware can't.

Do I need to trust NexusPool's dashboard to check a receipt?
No. The verifier runs offline on your own machine with no dependencies and no network call, checking the receipt's signature against a public key you pin yourself.

Does Glass Ledger improve my odds of finding a block?
No. Solo mining odds are fixed by network difficulty, not by the pool. Glass Ledger proves what happened to the work you already sent. It doesn't change how much work it takes to find a block.