Canaan Avalon Nano 3

You want a Bitcoin miner that turns on and just runs, with no firmware to flash and no soldering iron in sight. The Canaan Avalon Nano 3 is exactly that, a sealed 4 TH/s box from a publicly listed manufacturer. It’s a solid little machine, and I’ve had one running on a shelf long enough to know where the marketing ends and the reality starts. The catch is that Canaan built a better one, called it the 3S, and priced it close enough that the plain Nano 3 has a hard time making its case.

The straight take

Think of the Nano 3 as the sealed-box answer to a Bitaxe, the same pitch as the 3S: an app, a box, and hashrate that just works. Where it stumbles is against its own sequel. The 3S runs the same 140W but pulls 6 TH/s to the Nano 3’s 4 (newer 4nm silicon, so about a 50 percent uplift for the same wall draw), which means better efficiency and more lottery tickets for a step up in price that’s usually small. The 3S also quietly fixed the one hardware gripe that bothered me most, which I’ll get to. So the Nano 3 lives or dies on the price tag. Find it going noticeably cheaper than a 3S and it’s a fair buy for someone who wants zero fuss. Pay near-3S money for it and you’re choosing the slower box for no good reason. It’s closed firmware either way, so this isn’t the one for tinkerers.

Three modes, and “quiet” is only one of them

This is the bit the spec sheet buries. The Nano 3 doesn’t run at one setting, it runs at three, and they’re worlds apart. On Low it sips around 60 to 70W for roughly 3 TH/s and it really is close to silent, the fan a soft hush you forget is there. Medium sits about 90 to 100W. High is where the marketing photo and the actual object part company: the full 140W, the full 4 TH/s, and a fan that ramps up to fight the heat. That advertised 33 to 36 dB is the Low number, and it’s honest as far as it goes. On High I measure it up in the 45 to 50 dB range, which is a gaming laptop under load, fine in the corner of a utility room and very much not fine next to your head on a call. Quiet isn’t the state this thing lives in, it’s a mode you choose by giving up a third of your hashrate.

What the numbers actually mean

35 J/TH is the number that tells the story, and it’s not a flattering one. That’s markedly worse than the 17 J/TH of the small Bitaxe boards and worse than the 3S too (which lands nearer 23 at the same 140W), so you’re burning more watts per unit of work. At 140W it draws real power for a home miner, and Canaan sells it as a winter space heater, which is where I’d gently push back: 140 watts of draw is 140 watts of heat, about two old incandescent bulbs’ worth. The exhaust comes out the back at roughly 40 to 50C on High, warm enough to take the chill off your hands or a tiny cupboard of a room, nowhere near enough to heat a lounge the way a 1,500W heater does. Price per TH is where it can still make sense: get it cheap and 4 TH/s of plug-and-play hashrate for the money isn’t silly. At 4 TH/s solo, the odds are a long lottery, same as everything this size.

Setup, the app, and pointing it at solo

Setup is genuinely the easy part, and it’s the reason I’d still hand one of these to someone taking their first swing at mining. Power it, open the Avalon app on your phone (there’s a browser UI too once you’ve found the box’s IP on your network), join it to Wi-Fi and you’re hashing inside a few minutes. Two things worth knowing before you do. First, it’s 2.4GHz Wi-Fi only, no Ethernet port, and if your router hiccups the miner drops offline until it reconnects, which matters more than it sounds if you’re solo mining and chasing 24/7 uptime. The 3S added a wired port precisely because people complained about this. Second, out of the box it points at Braiins Pool on a default account that skims an FPPS fee, so it’s quietly earning for someone else until you change it. Log into the web UI or the app, drop in solo.ckpool.org with your own address in solo:ADDRESS.WORKER form, and it’s a real ASIC pointing real hashrate at a solo shot. It’s a standard SHA-256 unit, so it’ll happily talk to any pool you like. What you can’t do is tune it, there’s no undervolt, no custom clocks, no open firmware, you get Canaan’s three profiles and that’s the menu.

The power supply, the thing to check on a used one

Here’s the wrinkle I’d want a buyer to know about. The Nano 3 is fed over USB-C, PD at 28V and 5A to make its 140W, which is an ambitious thing to ask of a consumer connector running flat out around the clock. The early Indiegogo batches shipped with power bricks that couldn’t reliably hold it: switch to High and the unit would shut down and refuse to hash, and in the worst reports the USB-C cable cooked itself into the socket. Plenty of owners ended up swapping the stock supply for a decent 140W GaN laptop charger and being done with it. If you’re buying new from a proper vendor this is likely behind us, but if you’re buying used, ask which batch it is and whether it’s had its High mode run for an hour without dropping. It’s the single most common failure I’d watch for.

Who should get one - and who shouldn’t

Get one if you spot it cheap and you want a sealed miner you never have to think about. If the price gap to a 3S is real, and you like the idea of a box that runs itself and warms a corner of the desk, the Nano 3 does the job without drama, and the low-power mode makes it an easy thing to live with.

Don’t get one at anything close to 3S money. That’s the entire argument: same watts, less hashrate, worse efficiency, no wired port, so pay the small premium and get the better box. Skip it too if open firmware is part of the appeal for you, because the whole Nano line is sealed by design. Right idea, wrong generation, unless the discount says otherwise.