NerdAxe Gaia: One 3nm Chip, 2.4 TH/s, 25 Watts

One chip. 2.4 terahashes per second. Twenty-five watts. The NerdAxe Gaia takes the same 3nm BM1373 silicon that powers Bitmain’s Antminer S23 and puts a single one of them on a desktop board that draws about as much power as a bright light bulb — and less than the laptop you are probably reading this on.

In brief: The NerdAxe Gaia is an open-source Bitcoin solo miner designed by BitMaker around a single Bitmain BM1373 3nm ASIC. It produces about 2.4 TH/s at roughly 25 watts — near 10.4 J/TH — and runs the ESP-Miner NerdQAxePlus firmware, where BM1373 support currently lives in the 1.1.0 pre-release line.

It is the smallest and cheapest way into the current generation of mining hardware, which makes it interesting. It is also sold at prices that differ by nearly $200 for the same device, which makes it confusing. This guide covers both, with every figure verified as of late August 2026: what the machine is, what firmware it runs and whether Stratum V2 works on it, why the price varies so much, and what 2.4 TH/s honestly means when you point it at Bitcoin alone.

Key takeaways

• Single BM1373 at around 2.4 TH/s and 25 W — approximately 10 to 11 J/TH, the newest generation of home mining silicon in its smallest form.
• Double the hashrate of a Bitaxe Gamma 602 for roughly 40% more power, because the chip is a generation newer rather than merely clocked higher.
• Runs the NerdQAxePlus firmware family, not Bitaxe AxeOS — a distinction that matters when you go to flash it.
• BM1373 support lives in the firmware’s 1.1.0 pre-release line as of August 2026 — the stable LTS predates the chip. Stratum V2 travels with those same builds: encryption, pool authentication and per-pool protocol selection.
• Prices range from about $201 to $399.99 for the same board, depending on vendor, bundle and lead time — the single most consequential thing to check before buying.
• About $2.16 a month to run at $0.12/kWh, which is genuinely trivial compared to almost anything else in a home.

What is the NerdAxe Gaia?

The NerdAxe line descends from the NerdMiner, and is a custom adaptation of the open-source Bitaxe project maintained by the developer known as BitMaker, with Bitronics as the principal store. The Gaia is the most powerful entry in that line to date, announced in mid-2026 after what its developer described as roughly three months of development, reverse engineering, and several hardware redesigns before the chip’s full capability was unlocked.

The reason it took that work is the chip. The BM1373 is Bitmain’s 3nm part built for the Antminer S23 generation, with eight hashing domains per chip, and it was not designed with hobbyist boards in mind. Getting a single one to run properly on a desktop board — correct power delivery, correct thermal behaviour, all domains active — is not a matter of dropping it into an existing layout. Our BM1373 era article covers what this generation changed across the whole category.

A single BM1373 delivers roughly 2.5 TH/s at about 25 watts at its nominal operating point, which is the 10 J/TH figure the chip exists to achieve. The Gaia sits essentially at that point — vendor figures cluster around 2.4 TH/s and 25 W, with efficiency quoted between 10 and 11 J/TH depending on who is doing the quoting.

Specifications

Figures below are as published by Bitronics and Bitcoin Merch, both read 26 August 2026. Note that both retailers state their product imagery is a mock-up approximating prototypes — the board was announced ahead of production.

How does the Gaia compare to other BM1373 miners?

Two rows tell the whole generational story.

Against its own predecessor, the NerdAxe Gamma: double the hashrate for roughly 47% more power. Same board family, same form factor, same firmware — the entire gain comes from the chip.

Against the Bitaxe GT 801: identical 2.4 TH/s, at 25 watts instead of 42. That is the same work for 40% less electricity, and it is the cleanest available illustration of what a process-node jump buys you. The GT 801 reaches 2.4 TH/s by driving a BM1370 hard; the Gaia gets there with one BM1373 running near its comfortable point.

And against the Bitaxe Naja Duo, the honest answer is that the two-chip board wins on both raw output and efficiency — 4.4 TH/s at 9.5 J/TH. The Gaia’s argument is different: smaller, lower power, usually cheaper, and it introduces one chip’s worth of complexity rather than two. For a first board, or for someone who would rather run three small miners in different rooms than one larger one, that is a real advantage.

The Gaia is also not alone in the single-chip BM1373 niche. The Zyber Blanc from TinyChipHub — the same supplier that provides sealed BM1373 reels to several board builders — targets the same one-chip formula with a screenless RGB design and its own firmware, quoting 2.4 to over 3.3 TH/s. The Hammer Thor X1 (also sold as BC01 Pro) takes a third angle: USB-C power delivery and a closed vendor firmware, at $279. Competition in this slot arrived within weeks of the chip itself, and at least three vendors imply “first single-chip BM1373” status in their marketing — none of which is independently verifiable, so treat every superlative in this category as advertising until a unit on a desk confirms it.

A note on reading efficiency claims across that table: most headline J/TH figures are vendor bench numbers measured at a favourable operating point. The only honest baseline is the derived figure — rated power divided by rated hashrate — which for the Gaia works out to 10.42 J/TH (25 W over 2.4 TH/s). Vendors quoting anything under 10 for a BM1373 board are describing a downclocked sweet spot, not the machine as you will run it.

One behaviour every BM1373 owner should know before touching a setting: the chip restarts when its operating mode changes. BM1370 boards adjust frequency on the fly; a BM1373 drops its hashrate to zero for a moment and climbs back as the new operating point takes hold. It looks alarming on the dashboard and it is completely normal — knowing it in advance saves the standard panic of assuming a save just killed the board.

Which firmware does the NerdAxe Gaia run?

This deserves its own section, because the mistake it prevents is expensive.

The NerdAxe does not run Bitaxe AxeOS. It runs the ESP-Miner NerdQAxePlus firmware — originally forked from Bitaxe’s ESP-Miner, then developed separately by the creator of the NerdQAxe boards, and now shared across the NerdAxe, NerdQAxe, NerdOctAxe and related devices.

Both projects run on ESP32-S3 microcontrollers and both present a web dashboard that people casually call AxeOS. But the firmware is hardware-specific: different ASICs, different voltage regulators, different pin assignments. Flashing the Bitaxe build onto a NerdAxe can leave the board unusable, and the community flashers warn about exactly this.

The rule is simple. Check Settings → Device Model in your dashboard, and flash only the firmware that matches. Two official projects serve this whole hardware category — ESP-Miner for Bitaxe devices, ESP-Miner-NerdQAxePlus for the Nerd family — and picking the wrong one is the single most common way to brick an otherwise healthy board.

Stratum V2 on the Gaia

The NerdQAxePlus firmware family gained native Stratum V2 support in version 1.0.37. The implementation is thorough: Noise-protocol encryption, authority-key verification of the pool, both standard and extended channels, and independent protocol selection for primary and fallback pools — so you can run V2 as primary with a V1 backup. It is also written to be board-agnostic, which means it travels with the firmware rather than depending on which ASIC sits on the board.

The honest caveat is not about V2 — it is about firmware maturity, and it is worth stating precisely because getting it wrong bricks expectations if not boards. As of August 2026:

• The stable LTS release (1.0.37.2, June 2026) predates BM1373 support entirely. It is a bugfix-only build for the established BM1370 boards. Flashing it onto a Gaia gains you nothing.
• BM1373 support landed in the 1.1.0 pre-release line of the shufps/ESP-Miner-NerdQAxePlus repository — first appearing in a June 2026 alpha and carried through the beta and release-candidate builds since. That same line contains the dedicated BM1373 initialisation sequence that handles the chip’s restart-on-mode-change behaviour cleanly.
• The community web flasher lists Gaia firmware automatically as soon as builds are published — its own documentation says exactly that — so the flasher, not a forum thread, is the authoritative place to check what is available for this board today.

The practical sequence, then:

1. Open the dashboard and check the firmware version. A Gaia shipping in September 2026 will carry a 1.1.0-series build; note which one.
2. Open pool settings and look for the protocol selector offering Stratum V2.
3. If the option is there, configure it. If not, check the web flasher for a newer 1.1.0 build for your exact board model, and update.

If V2 is available, the settings look like this:

Stratum Host          eu-btc.solofury.com
Stratum Port          3333
Stratum Protocol      Stratum V2
User                  bc1qYourAddress.gaia
Password              x
SV2 Authority Pubkey  9cLif4sCxvAz7FBP7GPvYG8Mv586ZhdgNbn3f4PsrM56gboSZEp

Substitute whichever of the nine regional endpoints is nearest you. The Start wizard measures latency, picks the closest, and calculates a sensible starting difficulty for a 2.4 TH/s device — which is worth using, because a board this size can otherwise wait a long while for vardiff to settle.

Do not skip the authority public key. It is what proves the endpoint answering is genuinely the pool and not something that intercepted your DNS — the same trust model as an SSH host key. Leave it blank and most implementations still connect, in trust-on-first-use mode: encrypted, apparently normal, and silently unauthenticated. Our Stratum V2 solo mining guide covers the full picture, including extended channels and reading the coinbase from the miner itself.

If V2 is not yet exposed for your board, V1 works perfectly well and loses you nothing but the encryption and verification layer — point it at the standard endpoint and mine while you wait for a firmware update.

How do you set up the NerdAxe Gaia?

First boot takes a few minutes and needs only a browser.

1. Connect the included 12V/5A supply. Use the supplied unit — under-rated or low-quality power is the most common cause of instability on boards this size.
2. Join the setup portal. The board broadcasts its own Wi-Fi network on first boot. Connect from a phone or laptop and the configuration page opens.
3. Enter your home Wi-Fi credentials — 2.4 GHz only. The board restarts and shows its new IP on the 1.9″ display.
4. Open that IP in a browser to reach the dashboard.
5. Enter your Bitcoin address as the stratum user, optionally with a worker name after a dot. A bech32 address starting bc1q is the sensible default.
6. Configure the pool, save, and watch the display for your first accepted share.

One Wi-Fi note that saves a surprising amount of frustration: ESP32-based miners are sensitive to routers running the 2.4 GHz band on automatic channel selection with 40 MHz width. If the board disconnects every few minutes with beacon timeouts, fix it at the router — pin the channel to 1, 6 or 11 and force 20 MHz. Our troubleshooting bible has the full diagnostic tree.

Why does the Gaia price vary so much between vendors?

This is the part that confuses people, and it is worth addressing directly because the spread is unusually wide.

Bitronics, the Barcelona store that works alongside the board’s designer, listed it at $201 on sale against a $224 regular price. Bitcoin Merch in the United States lists the same board at $399.99 as a pre-order with a six-to-eight-week lead time. Both read 26 August 2026. Same board. Nearly double.

Neither price is a scam. Several things legitimately differ:

The practical advice: before comparing two numbers, check what is included, when it actually ships, and who handles it if it fails. A cheaper board that arrives in two months without a power supply may cost more than the expensive one. And note that at least one listing carries a candid disclaimer that its product image is a mock-up approximating prototype photos — a reminder that this is a very new board and some vendors are selling ahead of physical stock.

Our AliExpress versus official vendors article works through the same trade-off in depth, including the checks worth running on any board that arrives from an unfamiliar channel.

What are the odds of finding a block with 2.4 TH/s?

Bitcoin’s network hashrate is measured in hundreds of exahashes per second, and an exahash is a million terahashes. Your 2.4 TH/s is therefore a very small slice of a very large number. The honest expected time to find a block at this hashrate runs to tens of thousands of years.

That number is real and it deserves stating plainly, because a lot of marketing in this category avoids it. But it is also less bleak than it first reads, for a reason worth understanding properly: hashing is memoryless. There is no progress bar. No accumulated credit. No sense in which a machine running for two years is “closer” than one switched on this morning. Every single hash carries exactly the same probability as the first one the board ever computed — which is precisely why a block could land tonight, and why home miners considerably smaller than the Gaia have found them.

Our odds page gives you the real numbers for any hashrate, and the Poisson mathematics behind mining variance explains why the distribution behaves the way it does. Neither softens it.

So frame the purchase correctly. At roughly $2.16 a month in electricity, the Gaia is one of the cheapest ways to hold a genuine ticket in the world’s largest lottery while learning how Bitcoin’s consensus actually works from the inside. If you buy it expecting income, arithmetic will eventually explain the mistake. If you buy it to participate, to learn, and to have a small quiet machine on your desk doing real work on a real network — it is an excellent purchase, and our lottery mining explainer makes the case in full.

One thing worth knowing: on a non-custodial solo pool the block reward is paid by the network’s coinbase directly to your address. The pool never holds it. Whatever the odds, the payout path is as short as it can be.

Who should buy the NerdAxe Gaia?

The honest summary

The Gaia’s achievement is not raw performance — 2.4 TH/s is a modest number in absolute terms. It is that a single next-generation chip now runs properly on a hobbyist desktop board, at an efficiency that would have required industrial hardware two years ago, in a package that costs less than a decent monitor and draws less power than one.

Getting there took months of reverse engineering and several board revisions, which is a reminder that “just put the new chip on it” is never actually just that. The result is the cheapest entry point into current-generation mining silicon, and one of the quietest.

Check the firmware, verify your Stratum V2 option rather than assuming it, compare vendor bundles rather than headline prices, and point it at something non-custodial. Then let it run, and stop watching it — the machine does not know how long it has been waiting, and neither should you.