Welcome back! This is Canaan's weekly update on bitcoin mining, energy, and compute infrastructure.

For most of the last decade, mining hardware was sold one way: a sealed box, with the chip, the hash board, the power supply, and the enclosure as a single purchase. Now, a small but growing number of large operators just want the chip and the hash board, and they'll build everything else themselves.

Block's Proto team and Core Scientific tried this in 2024: Block supplied the 3nm chip, with ePIC Blockchain co-designing the rig for Core's needs. That was roughly 15 EH/s of capacity, structured as a chip-plus-platform deal. However, progress since the announcement has not been very clear.

And this week Canaan and Tether added another data point. After a 2025 proof-of-concept at one of Tether's European facilities, Canaan secured a follow-on order for custom-developed hash board modules to be deployed in South America. Canaan provides the modules; Tether designs the control boards and immersion tanks around them. Paolo Ardoino's framing is the giveaway: the approach lets Tether "tailor infrastructure to our needs, particularly for immersion-cooled systems where efficiency, reliability, and ease of operation are critical."

These deals still represent a relatively limited portion of the broader market. But they seem to be pointing towards a trend. And they are testing a version of the same thesis: that compute is a building block, and the operator integrates it. If that thesis holds, mining hardware could begin to look a lot more like the data center industry it has always been adjacent to.

In 2014, Canaan shipped a Bitcoin miner the size of a USB stick.

The original Avalon Nano was a single A3233 chip on a tiny board, drawing about 1 watt and producing roughly 3.6 GH/s of SHA-256 hashrate. That was enough to out-hash most graphics cards of the era by a factor of three or four.

The Nano was Canaan's gesture toward the everyone-can-mine philosophy that defined early Bitcoin: a small device that let a curious developer plug into a stratum pool and be a miner, in the same year that rackmount Avalons were being trucked into the first industrial farms. Hobbyists chained dozens of them together through powered USB hubs to build hand-made rigs.

The Nano line never really died. The DNA traveled forward — through Nano 2 in 2015, and now Nano 3S, a 6 TH/s home miner that doubles as a space heater. A decade on, the form factor that started as a curiosity is the architecture under Canaan's home mining business.