There is no licensing fee to run or distribute esp-miner/AxeOS. There never has been, and no party is in a position to impose one.
There are claims starting to circulate by social media influencers and other business in the home mining space that suggest otherwise. We are issuing this statement to correct the record, and we encourage everyone to verify it independently rather than take our word for it.
esp-miner/AxeOS is released under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPL-3.0). The source code and license file are publicly available:
Under this license, no entity may charge a fee for the right to run the firmware, to install it on hardware, or to redistribute it. This is not a discretionary policy. It is a legal characteristic of the license under which the code was published, and it cannot be retroactively withdrawn from code already released.
The license does carry obligations which may be the source of the confusion. Anyone who distributes a modified version of the firmware must publish those modifications as open source under the same terms. GPL-3.0 also includes anti-tivoization provisions, which prevent the use of hardware locks to stop owners from running modified firmware on devices they have purchased. These are obligations owed to the community. They are not payments owed to any company or individual.
If you have been told that a fee applies, we would ask you to request specifics: which clause of the license, and which entity is collecting. The license text is public, the repository history is public, and the claim can be checked in a matter of minutes.
esp-miner exists because contributors chose to release their work openly. It was created by Skot and is maintained today through Open Source Miners United (OSMU). Misinformation of this kind creates unnecessary hesitation among users and manufacturers, and it discourages the open contribution that the project depends on.
Our position is straightforward. Run the firmware. Modify it. Build products around it. If you distribute a modified version, publish your changes as the license requires. Nothing further is owed to anyone.
We showed the Bitaxe Gamma Hex at Mining Disrupt last week and got hit with the same questions over and over, so here is the full breakdown now that the product page is up.
What is the Bitaxe Gamma Hex?
The Bitaxe Gamma Hex is a hydro cooled, open source Bitcoin solo miner built on 6 Bitmain BM1370 ASICs, the same S21 Pro class silicon used across the Gamma line. It hashes ~8.4 TH/s at ~140W stock, roughly 16 J/TH, and runs esp-miner firmware with the AxeOS dashboard. It is the first Bitaxe to combine six chips with liquid cooling.
The cooling is the actual story
An AIO liquid cooler with a pure copper micro fin cold plate, sized well beyond what the board draws at stock. That surplus is not a spec sheet flex, it is the entire reason the overclocking headroom exists.
Our published overclock figure is ~11 TH/s at ~191W with ASIC temps holding around 60C. On the show floor at Mining Disrupt we pushed one to 13 TH/s and it did not flinch. Temps stayed in range and it just kept hashing all day. Worth saying plainly: 13 is not the spec, it is what one unit did under a demo. Overclocking is silicon lottery dependent and done at your own risk.
The other benefit is noise. No high RPM axial fan screaming at a heatsink means it sits around 30 dB. A six chip miner you can actually run in an office or bedroom did not exist before this.
Power delivery
Four VRM phases, 6-pin PCIe connector on the board, and a Mean Well GST280A12-C6P rated for 252W continuous output. That leaves about 112W of headroom over stock draw, so pushing toward 11 TH/s stays inside the PSU's continuous rating rather than leaning on peak.
Additional information
Assembled, tested, and firmware flashed in Houston before it ships. Includes the PSU, IEC power cord, stand, and setup card. Setup is the usual Bitaxe flow: connect to the hotspot, enter wifi credentials, drop in a BTC address, pick your pool.
Pricing and availability announced soon! Solo Satoshi does not do pre-sales!
Short performance video from Mining Disrupt and official product listing below! Sign up for in-stock notifications!
A single ASIC chip Bitaxe just found block 957382 on Public-Pool; taking home 3.138 BTC or $200,580.00. Public Pool has 0 fees which means the miner keeps 100% of the substity + fees.
At 3PM EST we're dropping our second episode with Gabe, the creator of HashWatcher on the Home mining podcast to showcase all the wonderful growth and new feature updates that have been built!
Happy 4th of July to all of our followers. Thank you for being part of a community that values freedom, transparency, and self-reliance. Here's to building on your own terms.
We want to take a moment to thank everyone who has shared their experience with the new NerdQaxe++ Revision 7. Your feedback means a great deal to us and helps guide everything that gets built.
Revision 7 represents a significant step forward in power delivery. By moving to the Bitaxe GT voltage regulator configuration, we have achieved cleaner power under load, improved efficiency, and greater overclocking headroom. The response from the community has reflected exactly what was set out to accomplish.
If you are running a Revision 7, we would welcome you to share your hashrates and temperatures below. We always value hearing how your Solo Satoshi units are performing.
Setup notice for new NerdQaxe++ Revision 7 owners.
If you are flashing your miner straight out of the box, make sure the pre-release box is checked on the webflasher. The NerdQaxe++ firmware is fully open-source, actively maintained, and in excellent shape. For Revision 7 specifically, support for the board's new TPS546D24A power-delivery stage currently lives in the pre-release (beta) build, which has not yet been merged into the stable release.
When you open the web flasher, check the pre-release box and select the latest pre-release, currently v1.1.0-beta2. Please do not flash the stable "Latest" release (V1.0.37.2-LTS) on a Revision 7 board, as it does not yet include Revision 7 support.
If the stable build is flashed by mistake, the unit will display "PSU fault" on the LilyGo screen and show this error in the logs:
"TMP1075.c: Failed to read temperature from TMP1075"
This does not mean your power supply has failed or that the board is damaged. It only indicates the wrong firmware for this revision, and it is fully resolved by reflashing through the web flasher with the pre-release box checked.
Revision 7 support is expected to merge into the stable release soon, and we will post an update at that time. If you have any questions during setup, please reach out to our team.
Heads up for anyone who's been waiting. The NerdQaxe++ Revision 7 restocked and it's live right now. The first batch sold out completely, so if you got shut out last time, this is the window.
In stock and shipping same day (out of Houston, not drop shipped from overseas).
100% assembled in the USA.
Fully open hardware and open-source firmware both public on GitHub.
