// blog · · by Nathan Baldwin
// v1.16 adds a full-screen block-found celebration (free for everyone), email alerts for Pro, and a pool-detector fix for DigiByte and eCash. We shipped it this morning and a Bitaxe found a DigiByte block hours later.
Some features you build hoping they’ll fire. v1.16 shipped this morning with a block-found celebration overlay, and a Bitaxe set it off the same day — a real DigiByte block at height 17,623,815. You could not script better timing. Here’s everything in the release.
Bitaxe firmware exposes a blockFound counter that increments every time a device actually solves a network block. The dashboard now watches it on every 5-second poll, and the instant it ticks up, the whole viewport erupts in confetti.
This was a deliberate design choice, not a coincidence of CSS: the confetti rains continuously and never auto-fades. When you find a block — possibly the only one your miner ever finds — the screen doesn’t quietly reset after three seconds. It keeps celebrating until you click “Frame it.” You earned the moment; the app makes you sit in it.
A few details that matter:
block_finds.json in the app’s data directory). Your wins are kept.Free for everyone. This is delight, not a Pro hook — finding a block is the whole point of solo mining, and nobody should hit a paywall at the best moment of the hobby.
Pro users have had Discord webhook alerts since v1.8 — offline devices, VR temp, ASIC temp. v1.16 adds email as a second channel for the same triggers. Add an address in the Pro modal’s alerts section and the desktop app forwards alerts through bitaxeballer.com/api/alerts/email, which validates your license and sends via Resend.
Two things worth knowing. First, the sending credentials stay server-side — the Resend API key never touches your machine, so there’s no secret to leak from a desktop install. Second, there’s a rate limit of 20 messages per hour per license as a spam defense, which is far more than a healthy fleet should ever trip.
And yes — block-found events fire through this pipeline too. The subject line literally reads “🎉 BLOCK FOUND.” If you’re away from the dashboard when lightning strikes, your inbox will tell you before you’ve even opened the app.
This one’s unglamorous but it directly enabled today’s story. The chain detector that powers coin-aware Solo Block Probability was matching DigiByte only on URL needles like dgb. and digibyte — so a Bitaxe pointed at us1.letsmine.it for DGB was getting silently grouped with Bitcoin and shown the wrong odds.
v1.16 widens the net: letsmine, digihash, dgbpool, and weminemore now resolve to DigiByte, and xeggex and viabtc to eCash. We also added bech32 worker-address detection for DigiByte — a dgb1... address is unambiguous, so it’s a reliable signal. (Legacy base58 D... addresses collide with Dogecoin, so we deliberately don’t read those.) A new regression-test fixture guards against the detector drifting back out of sync as pools come and go.
The result: point a board at a DigiByte pool and Bitaxe Baller now correctly identifies the chain, shows DGB’s real difficulty and odds, and — as of this morning — knows exactly what it’s looking at when one of those long shots comes home.
v1.16 is live now for Mac, Windows, and Umbrel. Pro users on Mac and Windows get the in-place auto-update on next launch; everyone else gets the update banner with the download link. The block-found celebration is on by default and free — so if you’re solo mining, make sure you’re on v1.16 before your number comes up.
Try it yourself: Bitaxe Baller is a free, open-source desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Umbrel — live monitoring, tuning, and now a block-found celebration that does the moment justice. Pro ($29/year, 5 machines) adds email + Discord alerts, bulk tuning, auto-tune sweeps, and 90 days of history. GitHub.