A single, independent Bitcoin miner successfully mined an entire block on January 13, 2026, claiming the full reward of approximately 3.16 BTC, worth roughly $295,000 at prevailing prices near $93,900 per BTC. The payout included the standard block subsidy and transaction fees, and unlike pooled mining, the entire sum went to a single operator.
This event is a rare but notable occurrence in a network increasingly dominated by industrial-scale mining pools. According to data compiled by solo mining tracker Bennet, there have been 22 verified solo blocks mined over the past 12 months, averaging one every 15.6 days. The total rewards distributed to solo miners in that period sum to approximately 69.35 BTC.
The odds for an individual miner are exceptionally low. With Bitcoin's network hashrate sitting around 1,024 exahashes per second (EH/s), a hobbyist running a 6 terahash/second (TH/s) ASIC faces roughly a 1-in-170-million chance per block attempt. The expected wait time to find a single block at that hashrate exceeds 3,000 years.
"The win validates that solo mining continues to function exactly as probability predicts: mostly silent, occasionally spectacular," the report notes. Despite the brutal math, solo mining persists due to infrastructure improvements that lower technical barriers and a subset of miners who value the variance or treat it as a hobby or ideological commitment.
Services like Solo CKPool and open-source applications like Public Pool in the Umbrel ecosystem enable individuals to compete for full block rewards without running the entire node stack themselves. CKPool, which frames its service as "not a pool," currently shows around 20,950 users contributing approximately 188 petahashes of hashrate, charging a 2% fee for a successful find.
The recent solo mining success has sparked renewed interest in solo mining strategies among smaller operators, demonstrating that Bitcoin's open and permissionless design still allows individual participants to capture meaningful rewards, even in a landscape controlled by large-scale operations.
