About block 963,648
Bitcoin block 963,648 was mined by BTC.com on August 23, 2026 at 12:48 AM UTC, 44 min 42 s after block 963,647. That is slower than the 10-minute target; long gaps are normal, since every hash attempt is an independent draw with the same tiny chance.
It confirmed 4,370 transactions in 1.57 MB (99.8% of the 4 million weight-unit limit). The median transaction paid 3.00 sat/vB, up from 2.00 sat/vB in the block before, and all fees added up to 0.0414 BTC. With the 3.125 BTC subsidy of halving era 5, BTC.com earned 3.1664 BTC for this block.
Block 963,648 is number 1 of 2,016 in difficulty epoch 478; 2,015 blocks remain until the next difficulty adjustment at block 965,663. The next halving is at block 1,050,000, 86,352 blocks after this one.
Its hash starts with 19 zeros: that is the proof of work, a number below the target that the whole network’s hashrate had to search for. BTC.com found 9 blocks in the week before. Today the block has 10,422 confirmations, so it is settled beyond any practical doubt.
Why block 963,648 is notable
Block 963,648 opens difficulty epoch 478. Every 2,016 blocks, each node recalculates the mining difficulty from how long the previous epoch took: if those blocks arrived in less than two weeks, difficulty goes up; if they took longer, it goes down, never by more than a factor of four. The new value, 125,807,076,547,198, took effect with this block, found by BTC.com on August 23, 2026 at 12:48 AM UTC, and applies until block 965,663; the following adjustment is at block 965,664.
Nobody schedules a retarget. It happens when the chain reaches the height, so the adjustment at block 963,648 came the moment BTC.com found it, not on a fixed date. The rule keeps the average close to one block every ten minutes however much hashrate joins or leaves the network.
Of the 3.16637632 BTC that BTC.com collected for this block, 3.125 BTC was new subsidy and 0.04137632 BTC came from fees, 1.3% of the total; leaving out the coinbase, its 4,369 transactions paid about 947 sats each on average.
Current difficulty epoch and next adjustment →
What’s inside a Bitcoin block
Every block, 963,648 included, is made of the same parts:
- Header
- Eighty bytes that miners hash over and over: the version, the hash of the previous block, the Merkle root that summarises every transaction, a timestamp, the difficulty target in compact form and a nonce. A block is valid when the hash of its header falls below the target.
- Coinbase transaction
- The first transaction, written by the miner. It spends no inputs: it creates the subsidy and collects the fees, and since BIP 34 it must also record the block height.
- Transactions
- Everything else in the block: payments taken from the mempool, usually picked by fee rate because space is capped at 4 million weight units. Block 963,648 holds 4,370, counting the coinbase.
- Fees
- The difference between what each transaction spends and what it creates. The miner claims them in the coinbase; they are the part of the reward set by demand rather than by the protocol.
- Subsidy
- New bitcoin created by the block, fixed by the halving schedule: 50 BTC at the start, halved every 210,000 blocks. At height 963,648 it is 3.125 BTC.