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

Hardware manufacturer FutureBit has demonstrated an experimental Bitcoin mining concept called HashFly, which utilizes simulated fruit fly neural pathways to execute basic SHA-256 cryptographic calculations inside a web browser. The demonstration simulates activity across 2,914 neural traces derived from MaleCNS v1.0, a digital connectome of an adult male fruit fly central nervous system. FutureBit highlighted that if computational models could ever be executed on real biological neurons, energy efficiency could theoretically reach roughly 1 watt per terahash, representing a tenfold efficiency improvement over contemporary 3-nanometer silicon ASIC hardware. While HashFly functions purely as a conceptual simulation running on standard computer hardware and lacks the hashing power necessary to compete on the live Bitcoin network, it highlights exploring alternative computational architectures. A similar project, FlyMiner, incorporates 139,255 fruit fly neurons and 16.8 million connections to trigger solo mining attempts at up to 700,000 hashes per second, adding to a growing list of unconventional proofs of concept across the cryptocurrency mining ecosystem.