  This work exhibits a novel phase transition for the classical stochastic
block model (SBM). In addition we study the SBM in the corresponding
near-critical regime, and find the scaling limit for the component sizes. The
two-parameter stochastic process arising in the scaling limit, an analogue of
the standard Aldous' multiplicative coalescent, is interesting in its own
right. We name it the (standard) Interacting Multiplicative Coalescent. To the
best of our knowledge, this object has not yet appeared in the literature.
