As Bitcoin miners increasingly turn to ever more specialized chips in pursuit of greater speed and energy efficiency, hardware maker FutureBit says it has tested a markedly different approach: using a simulated fruit fly brain to perform mining calculations in an ordinary web browser.

The move toward specialization has unfolded over generations: mining hardware has progressed from the ordinary processors found in early personal computers to graphics cards, field-programmable gate array devices, and eventually chips engineered for no purpose other than hashing. Against that backdrop, FutureBit's demonstration, called HashFly, runs on conventional hardware and is not competitive with an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miner. It simulates activity across 2,914 neural pathways drawn from MaleCNS v1.0, a connectome, or digital wiring diagram, of an adult male fruit fly's brain and central nerve cord.

FutureBit said on X that it is now working to simulate all of the neurons in the dataset with SHA-256 and plans to publish its findings—a step beyond the 2,914 neural pathways simulated in the current demonstration.

“Fun fact if this could be scaled on real organic neurons, it would hash at ~ 1 watt per terahash...10x the efficiency of the best silicon 3nm ASICs!” the company wrote.

Introducing HashFly...the first organic neuron bitcoin miner based on the fly brain. Fun fact if this could be scaled on real organic neurons, it would hash at ~ 1 watt per terahash...10x the efficiency of the best silicon 3nm ASICs! pic.twitter.com/T2qxBb7XQR

— FutureBit (@FutureBit) September 13, 2026

By the company own estimate, if the concept could ever be scaled to real organic neurons, a mining system built from them would perform one trillion calculations per second—equal to one terahash—while consuming about one watt of electricity, roughly 10 times the efficiency of today's leading 3-nanometer ASIC miners. FutureBit's estimate applies a fruit fly's total power consumption to a hypothetical system in which every neuron mines Bitcoin continuously. That efficiency—the ratio of hashing output to electricity consumed—is the benchmark on which mining hardware is typically judged, since power is among the largest recurring costs in industrial-scale operations.

In practice, however, HashFly runs on conventional computer hardware and lacks the hash rate and difficulty required to compete with real Bitcoin miners. In Bitcoin mining, participants compete to add new transaction blocks by repeatedly running SHA-256 calculations, with the network's hash rate measuring the total number of attempts per second; the network periodically recalibrates its difficulty to keep new blocks arriving roughly every ten minutes regardless of how much hash rate joins or leaves. HashFly lets users adjust the target, but it operates at only a fraction of Bitcoin's current network difficulty; by comparison, FutureBit says its own five-inch Apollo III ASIC miner reaches 18 terahashes per second.

A separate project, FlyMiner, takes a related approach: it uses a digital map of 139,255 fruit fly neurons and 16.8 million connections to decide when a standard Bitcoin mining program runs. When simulated signals from the fly's movement-control neurons reach a set threshold, the program tests possible solutions to a mining problem supplied by solo mining pool CKPool, at speeds of up to 700,000 attempts per second.

The fruit fly projects are only the latest in a long line of unconventional Bitcoin mining experiments. In March 2021, an IT security researcher converted a 1989 Nintendo Game Boy into a miner that produced about 0.8 hashes per second. A Brooklyn bathhouse said in June 2023 that it was routing heat from its mining equipment into its pools, while Utah-based Nodal Power raised $13 million in August 2023 to expand facilities that generate electricity from landfill methane and use some of that power to mine Bitcoin. What links these projects is a search for an edge outside the mainstream mining industry's ASIC arms race, whether through unlikely hardware, reused heat, or alternative power sources—an effort FutureBit's planned findings will extend with data on how a brain-inspired simulation performs at full scale.