On July 9, 2026, at approximately 03:30 UTC, a solo miner using a palm-sized Bitaxe device mined block 957382 through Public Pool, claiming the full 3.1382 BTC block reward. That includes the 3.125 BTC subsidy plus roughly 0.0132 BTC in transaction fees, worth roughly $200,000 at the time.

The device ran at an average of 995.2 GH/s, close to its rated 1 TH/s, for about eight hours before submitting the winning share. That share carried a difficulty of 294.14 trillion, more than double the network target, which is what confirmed the block solve. Because the miner was the only worker on the address, the entire reward went to one person, with no pool fee taken.

The Odds Behind the Win

Bitcoin’s network hashrate sat at roughly 874 exahash per second (EH/s) at the time, with difficulty near 133.9 trillion. A miner running 1 terahash per second (TH/s) controls about one-eighty-seventh-millionth of the network’s total hashrate.

Analysts estimate a device with that hashrate would need roughly 16,000 to 18,300 years on average to find a block. This miner found one in a single overnight eight-hour session.

That is the nature of bitcoin mining. Every hash has an equal shot at solving the current block, regardless of who owns it or how much hashrate they control. Someone wins every block. Most solo miners run for years without a payout. A small number hit the jackpot on their first attempt.

What a Bitaxe Actually Is

The Bitaxe is an open-source, single-chip bitcoin miner built around Bitmain’s BM1370 chip, the same silicon family used in some industrial Antminer S21 units. A Gamma-series Bitaxe ships with roughly 1.0 to 1.3 TH/s of stock hashrate, draws 15 to 21 watts, and typically sells for $60 to $150.

It connects over Wi-Fi, runs community-built AxeOS firmware, and displays live stats on a small screen. Hobbyists built the platform a few years ago as an educational tool rather than a profit machine. Its share of global hashrate is too small to guarantee steady payouts through a shared pool, which is exactly why solo mining exists.

How the Public Pool Made the Win Possible

In pooled mining, rewards are split among everyone contributing hashrate. Solo mining works differently. If a miner’s device finds the winning share, that miner keeps the entire block reward.

Public Pool supports both modes and charges 0% fees on solo configurations, which has made it a common choice for Bitaxe owners. Miners connect through a Stratum address, use their own bitcoin address as the username, and watch the dashboard track hashrate and best difficulty share in real time.

This marks the second Public Pool solo win attributed to a single Bitaxe that the community has tracked in quite some time. Solo CKPool remains another major solo pool option, charging a small fee in exchange for a longer operating history. There’s also Braiins Solo, Parasite Pool, and Futurebit Solo among the list of solo pools available, each with different features and rules.

Roughly 42 days ago, Bitcoin.com News reported on a $300 machine, a Canaan Avalon Nano 3S with 6.68 TH/s of hashpower, discovering block height 951771. At the time, our newsdesk calculated that a Canaan Avalon Nano 3S, operating at just under 7 TH/s, has roughly a 6.72-in-a-billion chance of discovering any given Bitcoin block, or about one in 148,904,370.

Community Response

The win spread quickly on X under tags including #Bitaxe and #SoloMining. One widely shared post read, “Never let anyone convince you that you can’t mine a block!!!”

Several sites that track solo block wins logged the event alongside prior Bitaxe victories.

What This Means for Home Miners

The expected value of solo mining at this scale remains tiny, often pennies a day in BTC terms. Consistent income still comes from pooled mining. What events like this show is that the door stays open. A device costing less than a mid-range smartphone, running on standard household power, can still claim the same reward as a warehouse full of industrial rigs. In that respect, solo mining closely resembles a lottery: the odds of winning are extraordinarily long, but someone eventually beats them.

For the operator behind block 957,382, a $150 piece of hardware and a $1 to $2 monthly electricity bill turned into a life-changing payout in under a day.

This article first appeared in Miner Weekly, a weekly newsletter by BlocksBridge Consulting, curating the latest news in energy, bitcoin, and AI compute from The Energy Mag. Subscribe to receive it in your inbox once a week.

Bitcoin miners no longer needed to talk only about hashprice, fleet efficiency or the next difficulty adjustment. They could talk about campuses, lease terms, hyperscalers, neoclouds, inference workloads and “critical IT load.” The same substations that once fed racks of ASICs were reintroduced to investors as scarce energy gateways into the artificial intelligence boom. In a power-constrained market, that story worked.

It worked so well that a new question is starting to matter: who got liquidity while the story was working?

That question is moving to the foreground as the TEM AI Infrastructure Growth Index, a basket tracking bitcoin miners, neoclouds, power suppliers and other companies tied to the physical build-out of AI infrastructure, has fallen 16% over the past month. The pullback does not erase the long-term argument for energy-backed compute. Nor does it suggest that recent insider sales or shareholder trims were improper. Many of the transactions were disclosed as prearranged trades under Rule 10b5-1 plans, which are designed to let insiders sell stock according to instructions set in advance.

But market optics change quickly. A planned sale during a rally can look routine. A planned sale followed by a sectorwide drawdown starts to look like a liquidity window.

The recent tape has given investors several examples to digest. Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ)’s legal chief sold shares as the company’s AI data center narrative helped lift the stock. Riot Platforms (NASDAQ: RIOT)’ chief executive disclosed a prearranged sale after the miner’s stock rebounded. Tether trimmed Bitdeer (NASDAQ: BTDR) exposure after buying during an earlier selloff and selling into a recovery. TeraWulf (NASDAQ: WULF) disclosed a new batch of share sales by its chief shortly before one of the most consequential AI lease announcements in the sector.

And at IREN, the controversy is less about insiders selling than about insiders being paid. The company’s board approved more than 18 million restricted stock units for its co-founder co-CEOs, adding a governance and dilution debate to a stock that had become one of the most visible winners of the miner-to-AI pivot.

Together, these episodes mark a shift in the AI infrastructure trade. Investors are no longer only asking which companies have power. They are asking who captures the economics, who absorbs the dilution, who keeps upside exposure and who monetized the rerating before the trade cooled.

TeraWulf Enters the Spotlight

TeraWulf offers the most vivid case study because the company remains one of the sector’s clearest AI-infrastructure rerating stories.

On June 29, Beowulf E&D Holdings, an entity managed by TeraWulf Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Paul Prager, disclosed a sale of 275,000 TeraWulf shares at a weighted average price of $26.596 per share, generating about $7.3 million in gross proceeds. The sale came one week before TeraWulf announced its 20-year AI infrastructure lease with Anthropic.

That June transaction was part of a broader run of disclosed sales by Prager and Beowulf E&D Holdings since late March. In total, Prager and the entity he manages sold about 1.59 million TeraWulf shares for roughly $32.7 million in gross proceeds, implying a weighted average sale price of about $20.55 per share.

Then on July 6, TeraWulf announced a 20-year lease with Anthropic at its Justified Data campus in Hawesville, Kentucky. The lease is expected to generate about $19 billion of contracted revenue over its initial term and support about 401 MW of critical IT load. TeraWulf also agreed to sell its 50.1% interest in the Abernathy joint venture to a Fluidstack-led investor group, monetizing an investment valued at about $450 million and giving the company capital to redeploy into wholly owned AI infrastructure projects.

That is the sort of transaction investors have been waiting for from power-rich miners: a long-term AI customer, a large contracted revenue figure and an argument that legacy mining infrastructure can be upgraded into a higher-multiple asset base.

It is also the kind of moment that makes insider liquidity worth watching.

Cipher, Riot and Core Scientific Show the Same Pattern

Cipher Digital (NASDAQ: CIFR) adds the most recent example to the liquidity-window theme.

On July 8, Cipher CEO Tyler Page filed to sell 112,500 CIFR shares with a market value of about $2.38 million, implying an average price of $21.19. The sale was tied to a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan adopted on Dec. 19, 2025. Cipher previously disclosed that Page’s plan covered potential sales of up to 1.5 million shares through Dec. 24, 2026. The 112,500-share notice was 7.5% of the total 1.5 million-share ceiling under the plan.

Riot Platforms had its own version of the story. In May, CEO Jason Les sold 175,000 shares valued at about $4.2 million under a Rule 10b5-1 plan adopted in August 2025. On June 22, he sold another 250,000 shares with a market value of $7.03 million.

Core Scientific has been another focal point for the AI-mining crossover trade. The company emerged from bankruptcy in 2024 and has since repositioned itself around high-density colocation and AI infrastructure, while continuing to report a decline in self-mining revenue.

Core Scientific’s chief legal and administrative officer Todd DuChene filed on July 6 to sell 140,000 shares with a market value of $3.0 million. The planned sale followed 12 prior 10,000-share disposals since April 13, bringing disclosed sales under the plan to about 260,000 shares and $5.9 million in gross proceeds.

These are important caveats. Rule 10b5-1 refers to prearranged trading plans designed to separate insider transactions from later corporate developments, and sales by executives with large equity holdings can reflect diversification, taxes or personal liquidity rather than a negative view of the company. It is not a confession of bearishness. Executives with large stock-heavy compensation packages often sell even when they remain optimistic about a company.

But public markets do not only process legality. They process alignment. When executives sell after a stock has rerated on AI expectations, and the sector then pulls back, investors start asking whether the balance of risk and reward has shifted from insiders to the public float.

The liquidity-window theme is not limited to executives.

Tether’s recent Bitdeer transactions show how strategic holders also used the AI-mining rebound to reduce exposure. As TheEnergyMag reported, Tether trimmed its Bitdeer positions at an average price of around $20 in early June, after buying into Bitdeer for $8.85 apiece during a market selloff earlier this year. While Tether remained one of Bitdeer’s largest shareholders, the trade still fits the pattern: buy into weakness, trim into the AI rerating, and retain a large enough position to keep participating if the story continues.

IREN Adds the Governance Layer

IREN brings a different but related issue into focus.

The company has become one of the most closely watched AI infrastructure names after moving beyond bitcoin mining and pursuing large-scale AI cloud and data center opportunities. But its latest compensation disclosure triggered a backlash among some retail investors and market commentators.

On June 30, IREN’s board approved grants of 9,099,328 restricted stock units each to co-CEOs William Roberts and Daniel Roberts. The awards are subject to a combined six-year vesting and holding period. The company said neither co-CEO will receive another equity incentive grant until fiscal 2031, and that the awards were designed to retain and incentivize the executives through IREN’s next phase of growth.

That explanation did not quiet the debate. Critics focused on the size of the package, its dilution and the fact that the company is still in the middle of proving that its AI infrastructure strategy can generate durable returns. IREN shares fell sharply as governance concerns met a broader selloff in AI-related stocks.

The IREN episode is not an insider-sale story. It is arguably more important: a debate over how much of the AI infrastructure upside founders and executives should receive before the business model has fully matured.

This is where the AI infrastructure trade begins to resemble other capital-intensive booms. The first phase of the rally was about scarcity. The next phase is about governance, capital discipline and execution. In that phase, disclosed insider sales, strategic-holder trims and large founder equity grants become part of the same story. They tell investors where the private incentives sit inside a public-market boom.

This article first appeared in Miner Weekly, a weekly newsletter by BlocksBridge Consulting, curating the latest news in energy, bitcoin, and AI compute from The Energy Mag. Subscribe to receive it in your inbox once a week.

High Prices Trigger Miner Curtailments

A record-setting heat dome that recently blanketed the eastern United States and forced the U.S. Department of Energy to issue emergency orders put the heat on bitcoin miners operating within or drawing power from the regions affected by the directive. The department’s directive authorized the PJM Interconnection to deploy additional generation units and tap backup power resources as needed.

The grid operator, which serves approximately 67 million people across 13 states and Washington, D.C., recently issued hot-weather alerts as triple-digit temperatures drove electricity demand toward historic highs. U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said at the time that maintaining uninterrupted service across PJM’s territory was a national priority as the heat wave intensified and late-afternoon demand spiked.

Wholesale electricity prices surged due to the increased demand, squeezing miners on variable-rate contracts. Furthermore, with demand-response programs activating, some miners voluntarily curtailed operations during peak hours. In some cases, operators are forced to throttle ASICs or shut down rigs after cooling systems hit thermal limits.

In the past, heat waves contributed to a 1% to 3% dip in global hashrate. Although this does not threaten network security, it can slightly slow block production until conditions normalize or mining difficulty adjusts.

While the federal order lasted until July 3, it underscored a growing national concern: rapidly rising electricity demand from artificial intelligence data centers, cloud computing and digital asset infrastructure. Utilities across the country are under pressure to modernize transmission systems and expand generation capacity to meet accelerating load growth.

Industry analysts expect electricity availability, pricing and regulatory flexibility to become decisive factors in where future bitcoin mining and AI facilities are built. With the National Weather Service projecting a moderate risk of extreme heat for July 14–19, investors are closely monitoring regional hashrate fluctuations, mining company curtailment disclosures, PJM reserve margins and wholesale electricity pricing trends.

Nevertheless, miners with flexible power agreements remain best positioned to navigate extreme weather, quickly reducing consumption during emergencies and resuming operations once grid conditions stabilize.

Split Takes Effect This Week

The Nasdaq-listed miner, trading under the ticker ABTC, disclosed that the split becomes effective at 5 p.m. on July 2, 2026. Shares are expected to begin trading on a split-adjusted basis when the market opens on July 6 under the same ticker and a new CUSIP number, 02462A 203.

Shares Fall From Over a Billion to 73 Million

Every 15 shares of Class A and Class B common stock will convert into one share. That reduces total shares outstanding from roughly 1.09 billion to approximately 73 million, split between about 24 million Class A shares and 49 million Class B shares. American Bitcoin holds no Class C shares. Stockholders who end up with fractional shares will receive a cash payment instead, handled by transfer agent Continental Stock Transfer & Trust Company.

Nasdaq Compliance Drives the Move

The company detailed that the split is meant to lift its per share price and keep it above Nasdaq’s minimum bid price requirement. Stockholders approved the split at the company’s annual meeting on June 22. The board then set the ratio at 1-for-15. Registered shareholders do not need to take action. Investors holding shares through a broker or bank will see their positions adjusted automatically.

“The reverse stock split is primarily intended to increase the per share price of each class of the Company’s common stock, particularly its Class A common stock, which is currently trading on Nasdaq, to maintain compliance with the minimum bid price requirement for maintaining its Nasdaq listing,” ABTC said on Wednesday.

Trump Family Ties Stay in the Spotlight

American Bitcoin operates as a majority-owned subsidiary of Hut 8 Corp. Eric Trump serves as co-founder and chief strategy officer, and Donald Trump Jr. holds a role as strategic advisor. The company combines bitcoin mining with an accumulation strategy built around growing bitcoin holdings per share rather than chasing traditional earnings. It runs roughly 89,000 miners generating about 28.1 exahash of capacity and has reported bitcoin holdings above 7,500 BTC in recent updates.

What This Means for Investors

A reverse split does not change a company’s market capitalization or the value of an existing position. It reduces the number of shares while raising the price of each one proportionally. For American Bitcoin, the split addresses a listing requirement rather than a change in the company’s mining output or treasury strategy. Traders watching ABTC should expect the adjusted price and share count to appear when trading resumes on July 6, with fundamentals unchanged by the mechanics of the split itself.

The company launched the pool in March 2021 as part of SBI Holdings’ push into digital assets. Today it sits between the 10th and 11th largest Bitcoin mining pool by hashrate, controlling 20,412.11 PH/s. That figure represents just over 2% of the global hashrate aggregate, according to mempool.space and cloverpool.com data.

SBI Crypto’s 2% hashrate share reflects how much mining power customers have chosen to point at its pool for payout purposes, not a stake in Bitcoin’s underlying security or supply. SBI disclosed that it started the mining operation in 2017 and managed to start the pool in 2021 with 1,100 petahash.

CEO Hiroaki Morita signed the closure notice sent to customers this week. The letter set a hard cutoff: the pool stops accepting mining shares at 07:00 JST on July 31, which lands at 22:00 UTC on July 30. Shares submitted after that point will not count toward final payouts.

Until then, SBI Crypto says operations continue as normal. Miners keep submitting shares and receiving payouts on the usual schedule.

What Miners Need to Do Now

SBI Crypto is urging customers to keep directing hashrate to the pool through the cutoff date. Doing so ensures every eligible share gets included in the final payout calculation. Miners who stop early risk leaving rewards on the table.

The company has also lined up reference options for the transition. Three pools appear in the notice, listed alphabetically:

Braiins, reachable through its sales contact page Luxor Pool, which operates mining infrastructure and financial products for miners Neopool, a newer entrant in the pool market

SBI Crypto said some of these operators may offer special terms for customers moving over from its pool. The company is not endorsing any of them. It framed the list as a courtesy based on prior business and technical conversations, and it told customers to evaluate each option on their own.

Details Still Coming

SBI Crypto has not yet released a full transition schedule. The company explained it will share more on the final payout timeline, API access, and web portal availability as those details firm up.

Furthermore, the notice does not explain why SBI Crypto is closing the pool. The company thanked customers for their support since 2021 and said it remains available to help with the transition. During its tenure, SBI Crypto also mined other SHA256-compatible crypto assets.

What This Means for the Network

A pool controlling roughly 2% of global hashrate closing its doors does not threaten Bitcoin’s security model. Miners on SBI Crypto’s pool have time to redirect their equipment, and the alternatives named in the notice already operate at a meaningful scale.

The bigger story sits with SBI Holdings itself. The mining pool closure comes as the Japanese financial group expands its footprint elsewhere in crypto, including stablecoin initiatives and exchange infrastructure. Winding down a five-year-old mining business while building out other digital asset lines points to a company reallocating resources rather than retreating from crypto altogether.

Miners connected to SBI Crypto have four weeks to make a decision. Waiting until the final days narrows the options.

This article first appeared in The Energy Mag. The original article can be viewed here. The Energy Mag (formerly The Miner Mag) provides news, data, and insights on the energy–compute–markets nexus.

The company reported $51.4 million in revenue for the first quarter of 2026, with digital infrastructure leasing accounting for $44.0 million, compared with just $7.4 million from bitcoin mining. A year earlier, Ionic’s revenue came entirely from mining, which generated $41.1 million in the first quarter of 2025. Its net loss narrowed to $13.0 million from $28.0 million over the same period.

The revenue shift reflects Ionic’s decision to repurpose its flagship Ward County site in West Texas for AI and high-performance computing instead of bitcoin mining. Ionic entered into a 126-month “triple net” lease with Nscale in October 2025, committing the full 234 megawatts of current power capacity at Ward County. The company received its first payment in November 2025, while monthly fixed lease payments are scheduled to begin in August 2026. Payments under the lease represent about $1.95 billion of contracted revenue.

Ionic amended the Nscale lease in February 2026 to add a contractual obligation for Nscale to lease another 89 MW if the capacity becomes available, at the same price per megawatt. If Ionic secures that additional capacity in the second half of 2027, total contracted revenue under the Nscale agreement would rise to about $2.6 billion. The company cautioned that the added power remains subject to regulatory approval and that Nscale faces no penalty if Ionic cannot deliver it.

At the same time, Ionic has dramatically scaled back its bitcoin mining footprint. As of March 31, the company owned about 120,600 miners with a total nameplate hashrate of 12.2 EH/s, but only about 23,200 miners were active, contributing 2.0 EH/s. That compares with about 116,500 active miners and 8.9 EH/s of contributed hashrate a year earlier.

The company mined 95.7 bitcoin during the first quarter of 2026 and sold none, compared with 1,331 bitcoin mined during 2025. In 2025, Ionic sold 1,009 bitcoin at an average price of $100,547, generating $101.5 million in gross proceeds.

Ionic said it is consolidating what remains of its mining operations around four Midland-area sites in Texas: East Stiles, Garden City, Rebel and Stiles. Together, the sites represent 112 MW of current power capacity across about 59.5 acres, with another 10 MW expected at East Stiles in 2027. The company said it intends to bring those sites to market for HPC and AI development and may eventually wind down bitcoin mining over time, although it has not set a timetable or committed to exiting mining.

The S-1 shows that Ionic is now trying to position itself less as a hashrate-growth story and more as a power-and-land monetization platform. Its Ward County site currently has 234 MW of installed capacity, and the company is seeking to expand the property to as much as 700 MW.

Ionic expects capital spending of about $40 million through the first half of 2027 for the current 234 MW plus the additional 89 MW, and about $64 million for a full 700 MW buildout. It plans to fund the work with cash on hand and, if needed, sales of bitcoin held in treasury. Nscale has a right of first refusal on additional Ward County capacity, while Nscale has granted Microsoft an option for additional power at the property if it becomes available starting in the second half of 2027.

As of March 31, the company had $34.9 million of cash and cash equivalents, $192.1 million of cryptocurrency assets and $554.0 million of total assets. Total liabilities were $17.2 million. The filing also said Ionic had no debt and held 2,815.6 bitcoin in treasury as of March 31.

The company’s proposed public listing would be structured as a direct listing on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker “IOND,” rather than a traditional underwritten IPO. The filing registers the resale of up to 10.8 million shares held by selling stockholders. Ionic said it will not receive proceeds from those sales. About 37.2 million additional outstanding Class A shares may also be freely sold in the public market under securities-law exemptions tied to the Celsius bankruptcy process.

Ahead of the listing, Ionic completed a $400 million private placement on June 26, before an estimated $16.8 million in transaction fees. The company sold about 7.55 million shares of Series A convertible preferred stock at $53 per share, along with three tranches of warrants to buy about 1.01 million Class A shares each at exercise prices of $63.60, $74.20 and $87.45. The preferred shares convert into Class A common stock upon a Nasdaq listing or other qualifying public-market transaction. Investors agreed not to transfer the preferred stock, the converted Class A shares, the warrants or warrant shares at prices below $70 per share for six months after listing, subject to limited exceptions.

Ionic was incorporated in January 2024 to acquire mining assets from Celsius Mining, the mining affiliate of bankrupt crypto lender Celsius Network. It began operations on Feb. 1, 2024, after acquiring the assets and assuming certain liabilities under Celsius’ confirmed reorganization plan. Ionic initially outsourced parts of its mining operations to Hut 8 (NASDAQ: HUT), but terminated that master services agreement in December 2024 and took operational control of its sites.

This article first appeared in The Energy Mag. The original article can be viewed here. The Energy Mag (formerly The Miner Mag) provides news, data, and insights on the energy–compute–markets nexus.

The Screws Tighten

Onchain data shows that on June 26, 2026, at block height 955,584, Bitcoin’s difficulty rating rose 7.15% after the prior epoch’s 10.09% decline. The adjustment means discovering a block is now 7.15% more difficult than it was before block 955,584 and the 2,016 blocks that preceded it. The increase lifts the difficulty to 133.87 trillion.

When Satoshi mined the genesis block, the network required a guess beginning with roughly eight leading zeros in hexadecimal to qualify as valid. Today, at a difficulty of 133.87 trillion, a valid hash needs about 22 leading zeros. Each additional leading zero makes the odds exponentially tougher because the target shrinks by a factor of 16 every time.

Bleeding but Standing

The difficulty increase arrives as bitcoin’s value has fallen 43% over the past 12 months and now sits 51% below its all-time high above $126,000.

That decline has weighed on miner revenue, with hashprice, or the expected value of one petahash per second (PH/s), sitting at $28.68. That figure is 18.34% lower than it was 30 days earlier on May 27, when hashprice stood at $35.12.

The Stubborn Machine

Still, hashrate remains elevated near the 1,000 EH/s range, sitting at 984 EH/s at press time. Despite several meaningful drawdowns, Bitcoin’s hashrate has held firm near that level. Not all hashrate is created equal. New hardware keeps the most efficient operators profitable, while low-cost or flexible power now defines much of the hashrate still standing. Low fees sting, but they are not the decisive variable.

Built to Outlast the Builders

The reality is that many miners operate on thin margins, or even brief losses, while betting on cyclical recovery. Deployed mining machines are sunk capital. Shutting down entirely means surrendering future upside, possible difficulty relief and the chance to accumulate BTC. What this means is visible in today’s hashrate: a network that has largely moved sideways since last year’s all-time highs, which arrived alongside bitcoin’s price peaks.

Bitcoin does not blink. The 7.15% difficulty jump shows a mining network doing exactly what it was built to do: ignore price, margins, and miner pain. Hashprice may be down 18% in a month, and bitcoin may trade 51% below its peak, but the protocol just counts blocks and tightens the target as necessary. The miners left standing are the efficient, the committed or both, keeping the bullseye 133.87 trillion times smaller than Satoshi’s in 2009.

A Milestone for Miner Autonomy

Digital mining firm Gomining revealed Thursday, June 25, that it successfully mined the first known live Bitcoin block utilizing the Stratum V2 protocol. The block was produced in a live production environment using the DMND bitcoin mining pool. The achievement demonstrates a functional blueprint for miner-controlled block creation, a structural shift away from the centralized transaction selection models that have long dominated the cryptocurrency mining sector.

For more than a decade, mining pools have held primary control over which transactions are included in Bitcoin blocks. Gomining bypassed this dynamic by leveraging Stratum V2’s job declaration functionality via the DMND pool, according to a media statement. This allowed the company to locally construct and declare its own block template rather than relying on a pool operator to select transactions.

“This block demonstrates that miners can now participate in pooled mining while retaining control over block construction,” said Mark Zalan, CEO of Gomining. “By creating our own block template and including GoBTC Pay transactions, we’re demonstrating one of the practical capabilities that Stratum V2 makes possible.”

The newly mined block included transactions processed through GoBTC Pay, an open-source, instant payment protocol designed by Gomining that settles transactions purely in native bitcoin. The successful deployment comes amid an aggressive push by Gomining to expand non-custodial utility across the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Alongside its protocol-level infrastructure advancements, Gomining recently announced an integration with Babylon to utilize its Trustless Bitcoin Vault system. Under the Babylon integration, asset holders will be able to lock up to 1,000 bitcoins into native, self-custodial onchain vaults. Users can programmatically commit those locked funds directly to Gomining’s industrial operations to earn native mining yields, eliminating the historical need to bridge assets to secondary blockchains or rely on centralized third-party custodians.

Stratum V2 is an open-source mining protocol developed with broad, industry-wide contributor backing. Beyond security enhancements and reduced data latencies, its primary structural objective is the redistribution of transaction-selection authority back to independent miners, reinforcing the censorship resistance of the underlying network.

“A miner just mined the first Stratum V2 block to power their own product end to end,” said Alejandro De La Torre, CEO and co-founder of DMND. “GoMining declared the template and included their GoBTC Pay payments with no pool in the way. We built DMND for exactly this.”

Industry advocates anticipate that the production milestone will catalyze wider adoption of Stratum V2 across the global mining infrastructure layout.

The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2026, subject to customary closing conditions, including approval by Heartsciences shareholders. After closing, the combined company is expected to operate under the Fortitude brand.

Fortitude CEO Andrea Childs is expected to lead the combined company, while current Heartsciences CEO Andrew Simpson is slated to continue leading the healthcare business unit. Heartsciences already trades on Nasdaq under the symbol HSCS.

DCG’s Zcash Mining Bet Moves Toward Nasdaq

Fortitude is currently wholly owned by Digital Currency Group, known as DCG, and describes itself as a vertically integrated digital asset mining platform anchored in zcash (ZEC). Under the deal terms, DCG is expected to own about 95% of the combined company on a fully diluted basis at closing.

The company disclosed it believes Fortitude would become the first publicly traded venture mining platform with a track record of identifying early-stage proof-of-work opportunities. Its core strategy centers on ZEC, the native asset of the Zcash network.

Zcash launched in 2016 from Bitcoin’s codebase and carries a fixed 21 million coin supply. The network combines proof-of-work ( PoW) mining with optional privacy features through shielded transactions, an area DCG founder and CEO Barry Silbert has repeatedly framed as increasingly relevant as more finance moves onchain.

“Zcash is a clear example of Fortitude’s venture mining model in action: early conviction in an important protocol, paired with the infrastructure required to support and scale it,” Silbert said.

366 ZEC Per Day and a 1,000% Return

Fortitude began mining ZEC in 2019 and said it has scaled annualized production to 157,000 ZEC, or about 366 ZEC per day, as of May 31, 2026. The company said ZEC delivered a trailing 12-month return of more than 1,000% as of June 15, 2026.

That price performance gives the transaction a sharper market angle than a standard mining merger. For traders, the deal creates a potential public-equity proxy tied to Zcash mining economics, ZEC price action, network hashrate, power costs, and Fortitude’s ability to keep production costs below market value.

Fortitude said its model combines hardware procurement, infrastructure deployment, research and development, and a long-term Zcash position. It also owns and operates data center capacity backed by competitive long-term power contracts.

“Our business model is designed to allow us to move quickly when we see promising opportunities,” Childs remarked on Tuesday. She added that public-company status could provide “flexibility and access to capital” to accelerate the company’s venture mining platform.

What It Means for the Industry

Zcash mining operates on the Equihash proof-of-work algorithm, with a target block time of about 75 seconds. As of June 2026, the block reward is 1.5625 ZEC, with the next halving expected in late 2028, cutting that reward to 0.78125 ZEC.

Recent Zcash network hashrate estimates stood around 17.22 GS/s, with Equihash ASICs dominating production. That means Fortitude’s public-market story will likely be judged against ZEC price trends, difficulty, energy costs and the company’s daily output.

Heartsciences said Fortitude stood out after it reviewed multiple potential transactions during 2025. Simpson said the combination gives shareholders continued ownership in a scaled business while allowing the company to keep advancing Myovista Insights and its artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled ECG technology.

Canaccord Genuity and Ducera Partners are advising Fortitude, with Ropes & Gray serving as its legal counsel. Foley Shechter Ablovatskiy is legal counsel to Heartsciences, while Houlihan Capital acted as special financial adviser to Heartsciences.

This article first appeared in The Energy Mag. The original article can be viewed here. The Energy Mag (formerly The Miner Mag) provides news, data, and insights on the energy–compute–markets nexus.

The proposed settlement, filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern (NYSE: SO) District of New York, would resolve claims on behalf of investors who purchased or acquired Hut 8 securities in the U.S. or on a U.S.-based exchange between Feb. 13, 2023, and Jan. 18, 2024. The settlement still requires preliminary and final approval from U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero.

This article first appeared in The Energy Mag. The original article can be viewed here. The Energy Mag (formerly The Miner Mag) provides news, data, and insights on the energy–compute–markets nexus.