Fake Bitaxe? How to Spot a Bad Clone

A clone Bitaxe is not illegal. Bitaxe is open hardware under CERN-OHL-S, so anyone may build one and sell it. What buyers call a fake is really three separate problems: a licence breach, an invented model number, or a cheaper bill of materials. Only the third costs you hashrate, and it is the easiest to verify.

The confusion is understandable, and it is made worse by sellers who benefit from it. If you believe that unofficial means counterfeit, you buy from whoever shouts loudest about being genuine. This guide separates the three problems so you can check each one on its own terms.

Key takeaways

• Cloning is the design goal, not the offence. Bitaxe hardware is CERN-OHL-S-2.0 and the firmware GPL-3.0. Manufacturing and reselling is explicitly permitted.
• Section 4.1 of the CERN licence gives you a one-question test: a seller conveying a product must hand you the Complete Source or tell you where it lives. If they cannot, that is a licence failure regardless of build quality.
• The official series are 10x, 20x, 30x, 40x, 60x, 65x, 70x and 80x, each tied to a named repository in bitaxeorg/foss-miner-list. There is no 50x, and 90x does not exist.
• ESP-Miner only supports the ESP32-S3-WROOM-1 in the N16R8 variant, 16 MB flash with 8 MB octal SPI PSRAM. The part number is printed on the metal can, so this is a visual check that takes five seconds.
• A firmware version ending in -dirty means the seller built that binary from uncommitted local changes. It is documented in the wild: TinyChipHub issue 20 records a Supra Hex 703 shipping with v2.11.1-dirty.
• AxeOS 2.13.0 added a coinbase parser, contributed in pull request 1391, that checks whether your own address appears in the block template. Closed firmware cannot offer that assurance.

Why can clones exist at all if Bitaxe is open source?

Because that is the design goal, not a loophole.

The Bitaxe hardware files are published under the CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2, Strongly Reciprocal, and the ESP-Miner firmware under GPL-3.0. Both are listed on the project repositories at github.com/bitaxeorg (read 7 August 2026). The licence exists so that a device securing Bitcoin cannot be controlled by one manufacturer.

So the word “counterfeit” almost never applies. What people are actually reporting falls into three buckets, and mixing them up is why forum threads on this topic go nowhere.

Only the third one changes what your device does on your desk. The first is an ethical and legal matter that a buyer cannot fix after the fact. The second is mostly a symptom that lets you detect the third.

A clean counter-example is worth knowing. The repository kuenrg153/bitshoka describes itself as a complete copy of the Bitaxe Gamma with different artwork, and publishes its files. That is a clone doing everything right: replicating the design, not pretending to be something it is not, and keeping the source open.

What are the real Bitaxe model numbers?

This is the single most useful reference for spotting an invented product, and it sits in a repository with almost no visibility: bitaxeorg/foss-miner-list, which tracks the upstream source for every open miner in the family.

Sources: bitaxeorg/foss-miner-list for the 10x to 80x rows, and the bitaxeorg/BitaxeGammaHex repository for the 1300, both read 7 August 2026. Note that the 1300 does not appear in foss-miner-list itself, which is a good illustration of why the index is a starting point rather than a complete answer.

Three things follow from this table that are worth internalising.

Gamma revisions run 600, 601, 602 and 603, plus the Gamma Duo 650. The 603 tag was published on the bitaxeGamma releases page, so any guide claiming the Gamma stops at 602 is out of date rather than authoritative.

The Hex family is genuinely confusing, and not because of clones. The Ultra Hex is a 30x board with six BM1366 chips and its repository still carries an unfinished warning. The Supra Hex and Gamma Hex are both 70x, both maintained by TinyChipHub. Two very different products share a series prefix.

There is no 50x series and no 90x series. A listing offering either is describing something that does not exist upstream. The 1300 is the exception that proves the method: it is real, it is published by bitaxeorg under CERN-OHL-S-2.0, and it simply post-dates the index. Check the repository, not just the list.

So is a Supra Hex 703 fake?

No, and the answer is more interesting than the question.

TinyChipHub assign 7xx board numbers to the Supra Hex, and 703 is one of theirs. Their own ESP-Miner-TCH release notes flag the resulting collision directly, telling anyone using OSMU’s Gamma Hex that the 7xx range is already in use for the Supra Hex. Two maintainers, one number range.

The practical consequence is a firmware trap. TinyChipHub state that the Hex, Supra Hex and Zyber boards are incompatible with the OSMU firmware ecosystem and that flashing stock AxeOS onto them risks failures or hardware damage. Issue 20 on their repository records a user who received a 703, pressed update in the web interface, landed on v2.12.2 and broke several sensors, because no 703 build exists in the repository.

If you own a 70x Hex, the correct firmware is the TinyChipHub fork, not the one from bitaxeorg. That is not a clone problem. It is a fragmentation problem, and it is exactly the kind of thing a seller ought to tell you and often does not.

The four-layer check

Work outward from cheapest to most conclusive. Most bad boards fail at layer two.

Layer 1 — the listing

Ask one question before anything else: where is the source for this board? Section 4.1 of the CERN-OHL requires a seller conveying a product either to provide the Complete Source or to notify you of its Source Location, and where the notice specifies it, to display that location on the product, packaging or documentation. A seller who cannot answer has told you something useful.

Then read the specification for internal contradictions. A Gamma is one BM1370 at roughly 1.0 to 1.2 TH/s around 18 to 21 W. A listing claiming several terahash from a single-chip board is describing an overclock, a different board, or nothing real.

Watch for prototype numbering sold as production. Solo Satoshi documented a Bitaxe GT listing marked with an 800xxx label that corresponded to an unreleased prototype rather than a finished miner. The same pattern of verify-the-seller-first applies across the home mining market, as our Fluminer T3 guide documents for a different product entirely.

Layer 2 — the board in your hands

Four checks, in order of how much they tell you.

1. The ESP32 module. ESP-Miner supports only the ESP32-S3-WROOM-1 in the N16R8 variant, 16 MB flash and 8 MB octal SPI PSRAM, and the readme states the part number should be visible on the module. Modules without PSRAM or with quad SPI PSRAM will not run normal firmware. This is documented as issue 826 in the ESP-Miner repository. A board with the wrong module is not a fake Bitaxe — it is a Bitaxe that will stop receiving firmware updates. If your board is already failing at boot with PSRAM errors, our troubleshooting guide walks the full diagnosis, since a wrong module is only one of five possible causes.
2. The regulator. The Gamma 600 release notes describe the board lineage precisely: based on the Supra 402 hardware but with the BM1370, moving to the TPS546 with integrated switches, and removing both the INA260 power meter and the DS4432U+ current DAC. A board claiming to be a Gamma while carrying the parts that were deliberately removed is not built from the published design.
3. The power connector. An undersized barrel jack for the board’s real draw is a genuine hazard, not an aesthetic complaint. Solo Satoshi flagged a Hydro-class clone shipping with an 8 A connector alongside sloppy internal wiring.
4. The safety marks. Excessive certification logos are a warning rather than a reassurance. The marks on cheap boards are frequently self-declared at the factory, with the underlying testing never performed.

Layer 3 — the firmware

Once the board is on your network, the AxeOS API tells you what the firmware believes it is running on.

curl http://YOUR-BITAXE-IP/api/system/info
curl http://YOUR-BITAXE-IP/api/system/asic
curl http://YOUR-BITAXE-IP/api/system/logs

Read the version string first. A version ending in -dirty means the binary was compiled from a working tree with uncommitted modifications. It is the clearest signal available that you are running something other than a published release, and it appears in the wild: the Supra Hex 703 in TinyChipHub issue 20 arrived on v2.11.1-dirty.

Then compare the reported board version against the series table above. Factory images are named for the board they target, in the pattern esp-miner-factory-401-v2.4.2.bin, paired with a matching config-401.cvs. If your device reports a number that has no corresponding config file anywhere upstream, the seller invented it.

Be honest about the limit here. The ESP-Miner documentation describes config-custom.cvs for custom board versions, so the board string lives in flash and a seller can write whatever they want into it. The firmware-reported version proves what the seller typed, not what is soldered to the PCB. This is why layer two matters and why the logs, which show what the firmware actually enumerated on the serial bus, are more informative than the config.

Layer 4 — the network

The device advertises itself over mDNS with an instance name in the form Bitaxe [family] [board] ([mac_suffix]), for example Bitaxe Gamma 601, plus TXT records carrying board, family, asic, asic_count and fw_version.

avahi-browse _axeos._sub._http._tcp

Two sources of truth that disagree are more informative than either alone.

The check that matters most for solo miners

Everything above is about whether the hardware is what it claims. There is a second question that is bigger: is the device mining for you?

AxeOS 2.13.0 shipped a coinbase transaction parser, contributed by developer mutatrum in pull request 1391. It decodes the coinbase outputs in the pool’s mining.notify message and matches them against your configured Stratum User address. When none matches, the dashboard warns you that you do not have a share in the coinbase reward.

That check only exists because the firmware is open. It was found by community members, proved publicly and fixed by volunteers. A device running unauditable firmware cannot give you the same assurance, and the amount at stake is an entire block reward paid to an address you cannot sign for.

The honest caveat is that the warning has known false positives. Documented triggers include hash-donation pools, testnet address prefixes the parser does not recognise, worker names appended to the address, and Stratum V2 standard channels where the coinbase cannot be decoded at all. Treat the banner as a prompt to investigate rather than proof of theft.

For what to check on a pool once the hardware is settled, our Bitaxe solo mining guide walks through the configuration, and how to choose a solo mining pool covers verifiable payouts as a criterion.

Three myths worth killing

Recycled chips mean it is fake. They do not. Bitmain does not sell the BM1370 separately, and the official bitaxeGamma repository says the best place to get one is out of an S21 Pro. An S21 Pro carries 195 chips across three hashboards, which is where the supply comes from. Harvested is the norm. Re-marked dies are the real risk, and they are a different problem: the chip is relabelled to look like a higher bin than it is. Our ASIC chip evolution guide covers how to read the part numbers.

Not on the vendor list means counterfeit. It does not. The bitaxeorg/legitlist repository, which generates the list at bitaxe.org/buy, describes itself as community-reviewed and maintainer-approved, with inclusion at maintainer discretion. Absence can mean a seller never opened a pull request. The list is a positive signal, not a blocklist. Its real value is that it is a git repository: you can read the commit history and see exactly when a vendor was added or removed, which no marketplace badge lets you do.

Cheap means fake. Price alone proves nothing. A legitimate small assembler with low overheads can undercut a large one. What price does predict is where the corners were cut, and the checks above tell you where to look.

What to do if you already bought one

Do not assume it is worthless. Run layers two, three and four before deciding anything.

If the board hashes at nameplate and takes firmware updates, you have a working miner. If it carries the wrong ESP32 module, you have a device frozen at whatever firmware it shipped with, which means no coinbase parser and no future fixes. That is a real loss, and it is worth knowing before you buy a second one.

If the seller cannot tell you where the design source lives, report it. The legitlist repository accepts vendor reports through its issue tracker, and every removal is handled in the open.

Whatever hardware you end up with, the mathematics does not change: your odds scale with hashrate and nothing else. See can a Bitaxe find a block for the real numbers, and the NerdQAxe++ guide if you are weighing a multi-chip board instead.