Can a Fruit Fly Brain Mine Bitcoin? These Companies Are Testing It

In brief

• FutureBit’s HashFly uses 2,914 simulated neural traces to perform simplified Bitcoin hashing.
• The browser experiment runs on conventional hardware and is not competitive with an ASIC miner.
• A separate project, FlyMiner, uses simulated neural activity to decide when a standard hashing engine runs.

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

The HashFly demonstration simulates activity across 2,914 neural pathways taken from MaleCNS v1.0, a digital wiring diagram of an adult male fruit fly’s brain and central nerve cord.

FutureBit said on X that the company is working to simulate all the neurons in the dataset with SHA-256 and plans to publish its findings.

“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.

This means that a mining system made with living neurons could perform one trillion calculations per second while consuming about one watt of electricity—roughly 10 times the efficiency of leading 3-nanometer ASIC miners. The estimate applies a fruit fly’s total power consumption to a hypothetical system in which every neuron mines Bitcoin continuously.