Canaan: the company, its chips and Avalon miners

Canaan is the company that was the first in the world to mass produce ASIC miners for bitcoin. Its hardware brand is called Avalon. The project started at the end of 2012 as a forum thread, the first batch went out to buyers in January 2013, and the company itself was founded in that same year. Before that bitcoin was hashed on graphics cards and on FPGAs, and the arrival of a dedicated chip changed the economics of mining completely.

The founder, chairman of the board and chief executive is Nangeng Zhang, known in the industry as N.G. Zhang. Legally the holding is registered in the Cayman Islands. The head office is now in Singapore. Before that it sat in Hangzhou, and the move shows up in the filings and press releases of 2022 and 2023. The company owns no plant for producing dies: the chips are designed in house and manufactured by outside foundries. The 2019 stock exchange filing names TSMC and Samsung among the partners, while recent reports no longer disclose the foundries.

Canaan has an extremely narrow range by algorithm and an extremely broad one by format. Over its whole history there has been exactly one algorithm: SHA-256, that is bitcoin and its forks. The formats, on the other hand, run from the desktop Avalon Nano 3 at 4 TH/s and 140 watts to the industrial A16XP at 300 TH/s and 3850 watts, plus immersion and hydro versions. Neither Bitmain nor MicroBT has a home line like this.

Canaan holds third place in the market, a long way behind the first two. According to the Cambridge industry report published in April 2025 on the basis of a survey of miners, Bitmain has 82 percent of the installed base, MicroBT about 15 and Canaan about 2. Industry reviews from 2026, which count the share not in the installed fleet but in current sales, give Canaan from 5 to 10 percent. Both figures are correct. They simply measure different things: industrial data centers hold few Avalon ASICs, while in the home and small scale segment they are very much present.

The history of Canaan is longer than that of any other miner manufacturer, and it is also the most uneven: from inventing an entire class of devices to losses and the threat of delisting. These dates are a handy way to work out the age of an ASIC on the secondary market.

• 2012The Avalon project is announced in a forum thread. It claims something impossible at the time: a dedicated chip that hashes bitcoin only and nothing else.
• 2013The world's first production batch of bitcoin ASIC miners is shipped to buyers. The company is founded. Graphics cards disappear from bitcoin mining in practically a single season.
• 2014Avalon 3 on the A3233 chip, with a declared 40 nm process. The same chip sits in the first desktop USB miner Avalon Nano, so home hardware has been part of the brand from the very beginning.
• 2016An attempt to go public in China through a reverse takeover fails. Meanwhile the main competitor is consolidating its position in the market.
• 2018The industry's first mining chip built on a 7 nm process is announced. This is the company's own statement, no independent confirmation of it could be found. A listing application in Hong Kong is filed and left to lapse.
• 2019On 21 November the company goes to Nasdaq under the ticker CAN at 9 dollars per ADS, raising about 90 million. Canaan becomes the first large miner manufacturer on the public market. The AvalonMiner 1047 and 1066 on the A3205 chip are released.
• 2021A record year: according to the company's report, revenue is 782.5 million dollars and net profit 313.9 million. In June the company launches its own mining, the first site in Kazakhstan, and by December it holds more than ten thousand ASICs.
• 2022The aftermath of the previous year's mining ban in China and a bear market. The head office moves to Singapore. In October the A13 generation arrives: the A1346 at 110 TH/s and the A1366 at 130 TH/s.
• 2023The worst year in the company's history: revenue 211.5 million, net loss 414.2 million, an inventory write down of 190.2 million. In September, for the tenth anniversary of the company, the A14 series is shown with the A1466 at 150 TH/s.
• 2024The A15 series and the immersion A1566I. Separately the Avalon Nano 3 arrives: 4 TH/s at 140 watts, a miner the size of a small speaker. Contracts with public North American miners for thousands of ASICs.
• 2025In June the company fully closes its AI chip division and concentrates on bitcoin. In October the A16 series is announced with the A16XP at 300 TH/s and 12.83 J/TH. Shipments for the year reach 36.5 EH/s, a record for the company, revenue grows almost twofold to 529.7 million, but the net loss is still 210.3 million.
• 2026In January the exchange sends a notice of non compliance with the minimum price rule, and from 1 July the stock is moved to the Nasdaq Capital Market, and the ticker stays the same. Revenue is falling: 62.7 million for the first quarter versus 196.3 for the fourth quarter of 2025, hardware sales in the first quarter 42.9 million. The company's own fleet is growing at the same time: by June the installed hashrate of its own sites exceeds 10 EH/s.

Canaan's numbering is confusing. The marketing name of a generation is A13, A14, A15, A16, while a four digit index such as A1466 or A1566 is the designation of the board and the bin. The same ASIC can sit in shops as an A1566 and in the manufacturer's official catalog as an A15-185T. There are nine groups, from the home Nano to the industrial A16.

The asic.es catalog lists 22 Avalon models, all of them on SHA-256. The spread is huge: from the desktop Nano 3 at 4 TH/s and 140 watts to the industrial A16XP at 300 TH/s and 3850 watts. Efficiency runs from 12.83 to 157.53 J/TH, so the gap between the best and the worst ASIC in the catalog is a factor of about 12.

Every row leads to a profitability page where you can plug in your own electricity rate. Sorted by efficiency, best to worst.

There is almost nothing to list here, and that is a deliberate choice by the company. In thirteen years Canaan has not released a single miner for any other algorithm.

With a single algorithm the coin list is short as well. Any of the 22 models in the catalog handles all three coins, the only difference is speed.

Little is known about modern Avalon chips. Canaan published die designations and process nodes only for the early generations. For the A13, A14, A15 and A16 the press releases give neither a chip name nor a manufacturing node. The designations of the modern dies are known only from service workshop data, and on the A16 independent reviews say outright that the hash board and chip specifications are not publicly available.

What Avalon does have is an architectural feature its competitors lack. The miner is built around a dedicated MM control module: the host handles the network and the pool connection, while the MM sitting next to the boards hands out work to the chips and collects telemetry. Every die carries temperature and voltage sensors, and all of it is visible from the outside over the network.

Control boards

The power supplies are separate units and are replaced as a whole. The A16 series uses the PSU3900-01 with a physical power switch, the A14 uses the PSU3400-01 and its Plus version, and the 10xx, 11xx and 12xx generations share the PSU3300-03 Plus rated at 3300 watts. One common unit across three generations is convenient, so a spare unit fits any of the three.

An Avalon is easier to diagnose than most competitors. The ASIC returns a detailed report over the network: the number of active chips, target and actual hashrate, temperature and voltage for every die, bus error counters and the power supply status. Those fields let you localize a fault without opening the chassis. On hundreds of miners that saves weeks.

The flip side of that same architecture is repair. The voltage and frequency tables are encrypted and tied to hardware fuses inside the die, so a repaired board cannot simply be tuned by hand. On top of that Canaan, unlike Bitmain, does not publish continuity and point voltage tables, so service workshops have to work by comparison and with a thermal camera.

Canaan has all three cooling schemes, but our catalog covers them unevenly. Air runs through every generation, immersion is one model, and hydro exists only at the manufacturer.

The factory firmware on industrial Avalon miners is the MM control module working together with a mining daemon. Updates are distributed as packages with the aup extension, and official images are issued by serial number on the support site. The web interface runs on the ordinary port 80, and the initial setup mode is reachable at 192.168.168.168. For fleets there are the manufacturer's management software and a command line, plus Canaan itself has published a fleet management system and its API documentation openly.

The home Nano series is locked down harder: the images are signed, the device verifies the signature and rejects modified versions by design. And yet it is exactly this series that was cracked in 2026: enthusiasts reverse engineered the A3197S die and published an independent build for the Nano 3S with manual frequency and voltage control. This is a one off community project, not a real firmware scene, and it affects the warranty exactly the same way any unauthorized firmware does.

Overclocking and undervolting do exist on Avalon, but only as factory modes. The A1466 has three: normal, high performance and economy, and the firmware itself lowers the frequency as it approaches 40 degrees and raises the power supply voltage in the cold. The Mini 3 additionally has mining, heating and night modes.

There is no mass market of third party firmware for industrial Avalon ASICs, and the reason is simple: the installed base of the brand is an order of magnitude smaller than that of the main competitor, and development for it does not pay off. Our AsicBoost firmware is built for Antminer only and does not install on Avalon. Canaan's terms name unauthorized and overclocking firmware directly as grounds for refusing warranty service.

Spare parts for Avalon are harder to find in Europe than Antminer parts, and that follows directly from market share: there are fewer donor units on the secondary market. Specialist suppliers keep control boards and chips for generations from 10xx through A15 in stock, but their catalogs are noticeably narrower than for the main competitor.

Repairability on Avalon differs a lot from one component to the next. Everything that is replaced as a whole unit is easy. Everything that needs soldering and calibration runs into the manufacturer's secrecy.

There are no public failure statistics for Avalon. Canaan discloses neither mean time between failures nor return rates, and no comparable independent data on the brand is publicly available either. The only real numbers here are the official tolerances and the estimates of service workshops.

From the official side: the manufacturer states a tolerance of plus or minus 5 percent on hashrate and plus or minus 10 percent on power drawn from the wall. Its own log reading guide sets normal thresholds, for example a hardware error rate below 0.02 percent. The 360 day warranty period also says something indirectly about the company's own expectations.

From the independent side there is exactly one public bench test: an A1466 in high performance mode reached a stable 150 TH/s in four minutes at 25 degrees and stayed operational at 40 degrees with automatic frequency reduction. That is a single sample, not a set, and it does not work as reliability statistics.

Reference points from service workshops rather than from the manufacturer: an ASIC service life of four to seven years with proper maintenance, a fan life of 40 to 70 thousand hours, and noticeable capacitor degradation in power supplies after two or three years. The general thermal rule: every extra 10 degrees on the die roughly doubles the rate of aging.

Avalon efficiency improved more slowly than it did at Bitmain and MicroBT, and the gap only closed in 2025. From the Avalon 7 to the A16 efficiency went from 157.53 to 12.83 J/TH. In the table the generations run from worst to best, and the home series is placed by its best miner.

The home series is spread wide: the Avalon Q gives 18.6 J/TH, which is A15 level, while the Nano 3 at 35 J/TH loses even to the A13 generation. That is why the series sits so high in the table. Silence and compact size cost little extra.

Anything older than the A13 series makes sense today only with very cheap power or as a heat source. The working range for real earnings starts at A15 and especially at A16.

Put your own electricity rate into the calculator: on a cheap kilowatt hour an old ASIC at half the price sometimes pays back faster than a new one.

Calculate profitability for a specific model →

Ten criteria the choice actually comes down to. Market share figures are analyst estimates, not audited data, and the spread between methodologies is wide.

On peak efficiency Canaan caught up with its competitors only in 2025 and only in the air cooled segment. On spare parts and service in Europe the brand is weaker than both. In exchange it hands you telemetry for every die straight over the network, and it stays the only one of the three brands with a home line.

If the site is industrial and maximum density per rack matters, the choice usually goes to the first two brands. If the task is to put a miner at home, in an office or to reuse the heat, Avalon has almost no competition in that niche.

Hash board dropping out once the miner warms up. A classic on the older generations: the ASIC runs when cold and loses a third of its hashrate half an hour later. Almost always the culprit is not a chip but a cheap unshielded cable to the converter or a connector loosened by vibration. Check the cable before you start thinking about board repair.

Power supply and power terminals. The most frequent serious failure. Prevention is boring: a dedicated line with breaker headroom, adequate cable cross section, balanced phases. Input voltage sags kill a power supply faster than any other cause.

Overheating and throttling. The firmware lowers frequencies by itself as the intake approaches 40 degrees. If the hashrate drifts down smoothly without any chips being lost, look for the problem in the room: hot air is returning to the intake, the exhaust cannot cope, the filters are clogged.

Dried out thermal interface. After a year and a half the thermal paste stops working and the miner lives in permanent throttling. Replacing it takes one evening.

Fan wear. Grinding, clicking, a speed spread of more than 10 percent between fans. Next comes a thermal shutdown. Replace them by sound rather than after they fail, and only with the same size and the same airflow direction.

Corrosion on hydro and immersion miners. A weeping fitting, contaminated coolant, galvanic corrosion at the joint with the cold plate. It responds poorly to treatment and is not covered by the warranty at all.

Overclocking beyond the factory modes. On Avalon there is almost nothing to do it with, which is honestly a plus. But if you have found a way, remember: the manufacturer's terms name overclocking firmware directly as grounds for refusing warranty.

Buying without checking the bin. On the 12xx and A13 generations the bin spread is huge: ASICs from 81 to 96 TH/s are sold under the single name 1246. Ask for the exact hashrate, not the model name.

Ten points that head off most of the problems before the purchase and during the first month of operation.

1. Check your electrics before buyingIndustrial Avalon units are designed for 200 volts and above, so the European 230 is fine on voltage. Everything comes down to current: size the breaker and the cable cross section by the rated power of the miner, not by its average. A breaker with headroom, adequate cross section, balanced phases. The home series is simpler: Mini 3 and Avalon Q take 110 to 240 volts from an ordinary socket.
2. Keep the intake temperature within rangeOfficially minus 5 to plus 35 degrees for the current series. On the hydro versions only the coolant inlet is specified, from 35 to 50 degrees. The practical optimum is 15 to 25: thermal headroom remains and the fans do not run at their limit.
3. Watch the humidityThe official manual for the older models gives a range of 5 to 90 percent non condensing. A target of 40 to 60 percent is the compromise between static and the risk of condensation, and a cold ASIC should warm up to room temperature before you switch it on.
4. Record baseline readings on the first dayHashrate, number of active chips, per die temperatures and voltages, fan speeds. On Avalon all of this comes back over the network in a single request. It is the reference against which you later measure deviations.
5. Configure at least three poolsA primary and two backups. Then a pool going down costs you no downtime at all. Keep addresses, worker names and firmware versions in your log.
6. Clean by the calendarOnce a month blow out the grilles and blades, once a quarter open the case for a full inspection, once a year do a deep clean with a thermal paste change. While you blow a fan out, hold the impeller with your hand, otherwise the airflow spins it up and kills the bearing.
7. Do not open a miner that is under warrantyA broken seal and traces of self disassembly are direct grounds for refusal, so on a new ASIC you file a support ticket first and pick up the screwdriver second.
8. Check the shipping dateThe 360 day period in the warranty conditions is counted from shipment, while product pages count it from the date you receive the unit from the seller. The difference can run to months, so ask before you pay.
9. For immersion buy only models with the I indexSubmerging an ordinary air cooled miner in dielectric fluid voids the warranty and usually ends in its death, and a conversion also needs fan emulators: without them the board throws an airflow error.
10. Keep a fleet logSerial number, shipping date, start date, hashrate bin, repair history. On a fleet of twenty miners and up this is the simplest way to understand the cost of ownership.

Figures from our catalog and from the company's public reporting. Where a figure is an estimate, it says so.

• 2013The world's first mass produced batch of ASIC miners for bitcoin. For the buyer it was the move from graphics cards to purpose built hardware: hashing bitcoin on a GPU stopped making sense in about a season.
• 2018Canaan announced the industry's first mining chip on a 7 nm process. This is the company's own claim, there is no independent confirmation of it.
• 2019The first large miner manufacturer to go public. For the buyer this meant mandatory reporting: the company's finances, shipment volumes and risks became visible from the outside.
• 2021A record year: revenue of 782.5 million dollars and net profit of 313.9 million according to the company's report. The company launched self mining the same year and stopped depending on hardware sales alone.
• 2024Avalon Nano 3: 4 TH/s at 140 watts and noise of about 35 dB. For the first time a miner becomes a desktop device, one that requires neither a separate room nor special wiring.
• 2024The third generation immersion A1566I and contracts with public North American miners for thousands of ASICs.
• 2025A16XP: 300 TH/s at 12.83 J/TH. For the first time an air cooled Avalon matched the consumption of the air cooled flagships of its competitors, and shipments for the year grew to a record 36.5 EH/s.
• 2026The company's own fleet as of June 2026 is 10.05 EH/s of installed hashrate and 246.2 megawatts of capacity, plus 4.81 EH/s and 120 megawatts in joint projects, at an energy cost of about 4.3 cents per kilowatt hour. For the buyer this means the manufacturer runs its own hardware at industrial scale.