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FutureBit Apollo Solo Miner Finds Bitcoin Block 973262, Earning 3.154 BTC

Bitcoin Magazine

FutureBit Apollo Solo Miner Finds Bitcoin Block 973262, Earning 3.154 BTC

A miner operating through FutureBit’s Apollo Solo setup found Bitcoin block 973,262 earlier this week, collecting the full reward of 3.154 BTC plus fees from 2,477 transactions. Multiple explorers, including mempool.space, list the finder as “FutureBit Apollo Solo,” and the coinbase transaction includes text referencing FutureBit and Apollo.

FutureBit posted about the find on X: “Gradually, then suddenly. We (the people) hit a Bitcoin block today. Bitcoin belongs in the hands of sovereign individuals. And we’re building to keep it there.” The company stated that an Apollo device or Solo Node running its built-in solo pool assembled the block template, served the work, and submitted the completed block to the network. The public record does not identify the exact hardware or hashrate that produced the winning hash. It could have been an Apollo BTC, Apollo II, Apollo III, or other compatible machines pointed at a Solo Node, according to FutureBit’s account of the block. 

This marks at least the fourth block attributed to FutureBit Apollo Solo. Earlier ones include blocks 867,760, 881,423, and 888,737. FutureBit designs its Apollo hardware for operators who want to run a full Bitcoin node and mine independently at home rather than through large commercial pools. The most recent model, the Apollo III, is rated for up to 18 TH/s in turbo mode with an integrated full node. Bitcoin Magazine covered the Apollo III launch in February 2026 and previously examined FutureBit’s approach to home mining in a July 2025 piece.

Solo mining, is often called lottery mining because of the low odds relative to the size of the reward, remains uncommon against a network hashrate that has recently sat near 1,070–1,087 EH/s. A home-scale setup in the 10–18 TH/s range still faces expected times to a block measured in centuries under current difficulty, yet verified solo finds continue to appear on-chain. Bitcoin Magazine examined the mathematics of these odds in an article titled Why Bitcoin Lottery Mining Has Better Odds Than The Powerball. It compared continuous Bitcoin block attempts with the much lower frequency of major lottery draws.

Another solo block was found the following day via CKPool Solo,  illustrating that individual operators can still capture full rewards even as industrial pools produce the large majority of blocks. For users running FutureBit hardware, the company notes that the individual users control both the node and the solo pool, retaining the full reward when a block is found. Solo mining also has significant privacy benefits, and hardware and energy costs can be written off against taxes in some jurisdictions.

The October 26 block is one more validation that solo mining can be viable. Satoshi Nakamoto’s original Bitcoin design intended the full Bitcoin node to be able to mine blocks, not just validate and audit the blockchain. Improvements in hardware and mining optimizations later on led to the creation of mining pools, which created a very competitive and industrial mining sector. The secondary effects of industrial Bitcoin mining, such as reliable energy demand that can stabilize the grid, have been a boon for states like Texas. 

However, the dream of bringing mining back to homes and end users remains alive through companies like FutureBit, Bitaxe, and HeatBit, among others, that are converting heating appliances into Bitcoin miners or designing hardware of the sort for the home.

This post FutureBit Apollo Solo Miner Finds Bitcoin Block 973262, Earning 3.154 BTC first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

Chinese warships and aircraft operate around Taiwan overnight

Taiwan detected six Chinese military aircraft, seven People’s Liberation Army Navy ships and one Chinese official ship operating around the island in the 24 hours to 6 a.m. local time on Oct. 29, the Ministry of National Defense said on social media. Five of the six aircraft sorties entered the northern, central and southwestern parts […]

Hacking the Modern Tamagotchi With UART

Although not technically the first virtual pet, the Tamagotchi handhelds certainly popularized the idea and made it a worldwide phenomenon. In the late 90s it was hard to go out in public and not see them dangling from backpacks and belt loops. They turned out to be more than a passing fad, too. There have been Tamagotchis in various forms since then, and one of the latest, the Tamagotchi Paradise, is uniquely hackable thanks to this custom UART interface.

The build starts with a simple and inexpensive CH340G UART adapter with a built-in USB interface. A custom 3D printed enclosure is used to house the adapter and also help to expose the interface to the Tamagotchi. This is done by wiring three pins to nickel strips, which are threaded through slits in the case and looped back around to create a pogo-style adapter for the Tamagotchi’s custom dock. Normally this would be used to link to other Tamagotchis, but in this case the USB-to-UART adapter mimics it, allowing for all kinds of in-game shenanigans. The project’s creator [Squalius] shows it off by connecting it directly to a browser tool in Google Chrome.

Not only that, but this can also be used to modify the software running on the handheld entirely, with the video showing demos playing not only Super Mario but also DOOM (of course). This isn’t too surprising given that these games are built with modern 32-bit ARM microcontrollers. For the 90s purists, though, it probably won’t surprise anyone to know that these devices have been the subject of various hacks almost since they came out.

Code-execution flaw in UEFI firmware affects most servers on planet Earth

Defenders across the world face the burden of responding to yet another botched code-execution vulnerability, this time in boot-time firmware used by most of the world’s server vendors and data centers.

The vulnerability, with a severity rating of 9.5 out of 10, resides in the TianoCore EDK II, an open source codebase that hardware makers and cloud providers use to create the UEFI firmware that runs during the boot-up sequence. Last year, a representative of the UEFI Forum called EDK2 the "preeminent solution / implementation of the UEFI specifications." Virtually all UEFI suppliers (sometimes still called IBVs or independent BIOS vendors), including AMI, Insyde, and Phoenix, use the reference code extensively. Project Mu, Microsoft's hardened EDK2 fork, used the code containing the vulnerable component as well.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-97631, is a memory-corruption flaw in an ICMP component that attackers can exploit to execute malicious code that runs before the operating system and firmware can implement defenses like Secure Boot, which establishes a chain of trust for all code, including the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), loaded during boot. While final payloads delivered by CVE-2026-97631 have no persistence—meaning they run only once—they can give attackers a wide opening to install other payloads that also run each time early in the boot process.

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