A $150 Box of Luck: Hobbyist Bitaxe Beats 1-in-18,000-Year Odds, Mines Solo $BTC Block 🪙

A solo Bitcoin miner validated block 957,382 on Friday using a single Bitaxe mining rig, securing a 3.125 BTC (3.1382 BTC per Public Pool data) block reward worth approximately $200,000, according to blockchain records on mempool.space. The miner operated through the Public Pool mining service and ran the rig for roughly eight hours at an average hash rate of 995 GH/s, about 1 terahash per second. It marks the second time a single Bitaxe has solo-mined a block on Public Pool, the service disclosed on X.

The Bitaxe is an open-source, credit-card-sized ASIC miner built around the same Bitmain BM1370 chip used in industrial Antminer S21 machines. The Gamma version delivers 1 to 1.3 TH/s while consuming 15 to 21 watts and retails for between $60 and $150. The device represents a tiny fraction of the global Bitcoin network's hash rate, making the solo block statistically rare.

The win is part of a broader surge in solo mining activity. Solo miners have validated 12 blocks so far in 2026, bringing the 12-month total to 24 blocks, a 41% increase year-over-year, according to solo miner data aggregator Bennet.org. Cumulative solo miner rewards over the past year total 75.4 BTC (75.44 BTC per the second source), or roughly $4.7 million. The average interval between solo blocks stands at 15.2 days, while the longest drought without a solo block reached 58 days.

Prior solo wins this year include a 3.16 BTC block on Solo CKPool on June 29 and a May 31 block on Braiins Solo mined with a 14-device Canaan Nano cluster totaling 157 TH/s. In February, another retail miner validated a solo block using rented hashrate rather than owning the physical rig.

The broader Bitcoin mining sector continues to face margin pressure. Network difficulty dropped 5% to