Block Reward
The block reward is what the miner who produces a block collects. It has two parts: the block subsidy, which is newly issued coin, and the transaction fees of every transaction in that block.
The subsidy is set by each coin's rules and usually falls over time. Bitcoin started at 50 BTC per block and halves it every 210,000 blocks. Since the halving of April 2024 it pays 3.125 BTC. Other coins lower the subsidy a little with every block, or settle at a small fixed amount.
Fees depend on how busy the network is. On a quiet chain they may be a tiny part of the reward. On a busy one they can be a large part, and they change from block to block.
A new block reward cannot be spent at once. The coin's rules make it wait for a number of further blocks first, called maturity. Bitcoin, for example, requires 100 more blocks. This protects against a block that loses a race with another block and is dropped from the chain. Such a block is called an orphan, and its reward is never paid.
That is why a pool shows new blocks as pending, then as confirmed. Your balance from a block becomes payable only after that block has matured.
On a pool the reward is shared. Say a block pays 10 coins, the pool fee is 1 percent and your shares were 2 percent of the work counted for it. You receive 10 times 0.99 times 0.02, which is 0.198 coins. How the work is counted depends on the payout scheme the pool runs.
A common misconception is that the reward is the same every block. The subsidy part is usually fixed for long stretches, but the fee part moves with network traffic. Check recent blocks on the pool's blocks page to see what a block really pays.
