A miner using FutureBit’s Apollo Solo setup found Bitcoin block 973,262 on October 26, earning the block’s full reward of 3.154 BTC, including the subsidy and fees from 2,477 transactions.
Several blockchain explorers, including mempool.space, attribute the block to “FutureBit Apollo Solo.” Its coinbase transaction also contains references to FutureBit and Apollo. The company said an Apollo device or a Solo Node running its built-in solo pool assembled the block template, provided the mining work and submitted the completed block to the network.
The public record does not reveal which specific hardware or hashrate produced the winning hash. FutureBit said the work could have come from an Apollo BTC, Apollo II, Apollo III or another compatible machine connected to a Solo Node.
The block is at least the fourth attributed to FutureBit Apollo Solo. Previous finds were blocks 867,760, 881,423 and 888,737. FutureBit’s devices are designed for people who want to run a full Bitcoin node and mine independently rather than join a large commercial pool.
Solo mining is often described as lottery mining because the odds of finding a block are low compared with the potential reward. The article reports that Bitcoin’s network hashrate had recently been around 1,070–1,087 EH/s, making the expected wait for a block with a home-scale 10–18 TH/s setup extremely long under current difficulty.
Another solo block was found the following day through CKPool Solo. While large pools produce most Bitcoin blocks, these finds show that individual operators can still earn the full reward when they find one. FutureBit says users operating its hardware control both the node and solo pool.
Sources: Bitcoin Magazine.