$349K Bitcoin Block Reward: How One Individual Miner Outsmarted the Odds

On July 3, 2025, a solo miner pulled off what most would call impossible: processing an entire Bitcoin block and bagging nearly $350,000 in BTC block rewards.

Lone Wolf Bitcoin Miner Strikes Digital Gold

As first flagged on X by journalist Pete Rizzo, block 903,883 was processed by an individual miner — something that rarely happens. According to Rizzo, the anonymous miner “beat incredible odds” on Thursday to mine the whole block

Dr CK, who is the administrator of the Solo.ckpool, a pool for independent miners and where this particular block was mined, congratulated the lucky miner, noting that they used just 2.3 petahashes to mine it.

“A miner of this size has about a 1 in 2,800 chance of solving a block every day, or once every 8 years on average,” the software engineer of the CK Miner pool postulated

According to Mempool Space, the miner bagged a big payout of 3.125 BTC, as well as 0.048 BTC in fees. That’s a grand total of ‎3.173 BTC. At Bitcoin’s price of about $108,700 per coin at the time of the block win, that adds up to a reward of around $349,028.

Bitcoin miners, who process blocks on the top crypto’s network, are given newly minted coins: a 3.125 BTC fixed reward, along with the transaction fees paid by those using the payment system within that specific block window

The energy-intensive and expensive nature of Bitcoin mining usually leads to industrial-sized mining setups scoring the vast majority of block rewards. Many of these are public companies trading on U.S. stock exchanges.

But every so often, a solo miner may get lucky and solve a block. The chances of doing this, though, are quite slim, and it has become akin to winning the lottery.

In March, a lone miner struck it big on block 888,737, which also yielded the 3.125 Bitcoin block reward and 0.032 BTC transaction fee — a payday of $266,000 at the time

Another solo miner hit the jackpot in early June, successfully mining block 899,826, earning a total reward worth $326,739. However, this miner reportedly rented additional hash rate to better their odds amid record-high network difficulty.