Brooklyn-based Futurebit announced Thursday that its Apollo III Full Node will be available at four Micro Center locations starting Friday, Nov. 13. The initial rollout includes stores in Brooklyn, New York; Miami, Florida; Tustin, California; and Austin, Texas, coinciding with the grand opening of Micro Center’s new Austin location. Customers can also reserve machines online for in-store pickup.
The partnership marks Futurebit’s first move into physical retail. Customers can examine mining hardware and learn about bitcoin mining before buying a machine.
“When we started Futurebit, we made weekly trips to the DIY electronics section at the Brooklyn Micro Center to buy parts,” Futurebit founder John Stefanopoulos said in a statement. He added that customers will now be able to buy miners designed near that same store.
Futurebit unveiled the Apollo III in February, introducing a desktop-sized mining system powered by American-engineered 3-nanometer ASIC chips. The machine delivers up to 18 terahash per second (TH/s) in Turbo mode, while its lower-power Eco mode offers efficiency of up to 15 joules per terahash.
The device also includes a full Bitcoin node, built-in solo mining capabilities, an eight-core ARM processor, 8GB of RAM and up to 2TB of storage. Its integrated design lets users independently validate Bitcoin transactions and try to mine blocks without relying on an external mining pool.
More Solo Mining Wins to Come?
The retail expansion comes amid growing attention to solo miners who have found Bitcoin blocks despite extraordinarily unfavorable odds.
Bitcoin.com News reported Wednesday that a solo miner using CKPool discovered block 975427, earning a BTC reward worth approximately $230,000. The discovery was the 38th documented solo-mining victory of 2026.
In late October, a Futurebit Apollo miner was credited with discovering block 973262, the company’s fourth documented solo block from its hardware and its first since March 2025. Another independent miner discovered a block the next day using approximately 16.2 TH/s of computing power.
Other successful miners have used much smaller devices. In July, a hobbyist running a palm-sized Bitaxe machine at approximately 1 TH/s discovered a block worth roughly $200,000 at the time, after operating for just eight hours.
Such victories remain exceptionally rare. With Bitcoin’s network computing power around 1,000 exahash per second, an Apollo III operating at its maximum 18 TH/s accounts for only a tiny fraction of the total network hashrate. Even continuous operation could mean decades or centuries between statistically expected block discoveries.
For Futurebit, though, the retail push is about more than winning mining rewards. The company argues that making independent mining and node operation accessible to ordinary consumers can help distribute Bitcoin’s infrastructure beyond the industrial mining companies and major pools that currently dominate the network.
