Goldshell: the company, the BOX series and altcoin miners

Goldshell is a brand of compact miners for altcoins. It took a niche that large manufacturers avoided for a long time: ASICs you can put in a home or an office, and coins nobody builds data centers for. The format took shape in 2020 and 2021 and got the name BOX: a case the size of a thick book, weight from two to four kilograms, rated noise up to 35 dB.

Since February 2024 Goldshell is no longer an independent company. The brand belongs to the public Intchains Group Limited, which trades on Nasdaq under the ticker ICG. The deal closed on 28 February 2024, the brand assets cost the buyer 550 thousand dollars, and the seller was the Singaporean entity Goldshell Pte. Ltd. Intchains itself was founded in December 2017 in Shanghai and works on the fabless model, designing chips and outsourcing production.

First about the weak point, because it defines everything else. In power consumption Goldshell lags behind specialized competitors by a wide margin. On Scrypt the miners of this brand deliver from 0.53 to 1.27 J/MH, while the best models from ElphaPex and Bitmain fit into roughly 0.2. On Kaspa Goldshell has 339 and 375 J/TH, while the top Antminer of the KS series is around 77. That is a threefold and a fivefold gap.

In return you get what competitors do not offer, an ASIC from two kilograms that fits on a shelf and plugs into an ordinary room. You pay for that with efficiency. We look separately at the state of the coins the brand was built for. Some of them make no sense today, and the KD line was orphaned in October 2025.

The history of the brand fits into less than ten years and splits in two, first an independent brand that released a few new miners a year, then an asset of a public chip company.

• 2017Intchains, the future Intchains Group Limited, is founded in Shanghai. At that point it has nothing to do with miners: it is a chip developer.
• 2018First tape-out of its own ASIC on the 22 nm node.
• 2020HS1 Plus arrives, a Handshake miner at 115 watts weighing 450 grams with a rated 34 dB. That is where the format the brand is bought for started.
• 2021Seven new miners in one year. CK5 and KD5 in March, KD-BOX in May, Mini-DOGE and CK-BOX in July, LT5 Pro in August, CK6 in December. The BOX format finally takes shape as a series.
• 2021In December an independent researcher publishes a security review of the HS-BOX and KD-BOX firmware: a weak root password, a debug page without authorization and device requests to an external domain every three seconds. This is not a backdoor and not hidden mining but poor hygiene, typical for cheap ASICs of that period.
• 2022CK Lite, KD6, Mini-DOGE Pro, LT Lite, then CK6-SE and CK-BOX II. An intermediate Lite class appears: more power than BOX, noise of 55 dB instead of 80.
• 2023Mini-DOGE II. In April the company itself warns about fraudulent clones of its site, and there really are many of them in search results. In December Intchains announces the purchase of the brand.
• 2024On 28 February the deal closes and Goldshell moves to Intchains. KA-BOX for Kaspa arrives in March, AL-BOX for Alephium and KA-BOX Pro in May, AL-BOX II Plus in August, E-DG1M in September. The tape-out on the 12 nm node was completed in the first quarter of the same year.
• 2025In March BYTE is presented: a desktop unit with two slots and hot-swap cards for different coins. In October the Kadena foundation ceases operations, the coin collapses, and three models of the KD series lose their purpose.
• 2026The owner's report for 2025: revenue of 31.6 million dollars, minus 21.6 percent, a net loss of 7.4 million, gross margin of 7.2 percent. Cost of sales rose because of a write-down of altcoin miner inventory. The company has promised new models for the second half of 2026, the half year that is running now.

Goldshell lines are split not by generation but by algorithm, and in most groups there is a compact BOX version and a larger one, while under Blake3 and kHeavyHash there are only compact ones. The order of the groups is the same as in our catalog.

The asic.es catalog lists 20 Goldshell models across five algorithms, and not a single one for bitcoin. Power draw runs from 180 to 3300 watts, and half of the ASICs, ten out of twenty, stay within 500 watts.

Comparing efficiency across algorithms is pointless. A joule per terahash on Kaspa is not the same quantity as a joule per terahash on Nervos. The only meaningful comparison is inside one group, so the table is sorted by algorithm and then by efficiency.

Five algorithms across twenty models. Bitmain has eleven algorithms, but almost its whole catalog is SHA-256, so among the brands without bitcoin the coverage of Goldshell in our shop is the widest. The flip side is that each miner handles one algorithm and you cannot move it to a coin from another network.

Not a single Goldshell miner mines bitcoin, and that is the main difference from Bitmain, MicroBT, Canaan and Bitdeer. The whole risk profile follows from it. Instead of the largest network you are betting on one specific small project.

Less is known about Goldshell internals than about any other brand in our catalog. Official product pages simply contain no chip row: no die marking, no process node, no chip count per board.

What is known reliably concerns the brand owner. Intchains works on a fabless model. It designs the ASIC itself and orders wafers from an outside manufacturer whose name it does not disclose even in its exchange filings. Two process nodes of the platform have been named publicly: 22 nm since 2018 and 12 nm since the first quarter of 2024. The only die marking that has reached the open market is the ICT560 from the LT5 Pro.

Control boards

Power on the BOX series is arranged differently from an ordinary ASIC. The miner takes 12 volts of direct current through a six-pin connector, so it does not plug into a wall socket directly. It needs an external power supply, sold separately or in a bundle. The manufacturer specifically requires a cable no thinner than 16 AWG and warns that a thinner one overheats.

There are also models with an ordinary alternating current input from 100 to 240 volts, the E-DG1M for example. For the Spanish 230 volt grid this works without adapters.

Official operating conditions for the BOX series are stricter than for industrial miners of other brands: air temperature from 10 to 35 degrees according to the manufacturer's manual, while seller listings show a range from 0 to 35 and humidity no higher than 65 percent. For coastal Spain it is the humidity that gets in the way, since 65 percent is exceeded there regularly.

Goldshell has no hydro and no immersion. All miners are air cooled. But within air cooling the brand keeps three different classes, and the E-DG1M with an ordinary alternating current input stands apart from them. The difference between the classes decides where the ASIC can be placed.

Goldshell publishes firmware openly in a public repository, but only as binary files, with no source code and no formal description of the changes. The web interface opens at the address of the ASIC on the local network, and the brand's own discovery service helps to find that address. The factory password is the same on all miners and widely known. Change it at the first power on.

For a fleet there is a cloud platform from the manufacturer: group pool setup, scheduling of power modes, firmware updates, offline notifications and an automatic restart if hashrate stays below a tenth of nominal for longer than half an hour. There is also a mobile app and a desktop monitoring utility.

Two particulars show up only after the purchase. First, the firmware uses its own dialect of the pool protocol, and when connected to a pool that does not implement it the miner just sits there doing nothing. The dashboard shows zeros or a message that the pool is not ready, while giving no errors. Choose a pool from those confirmed to work with the brand, and recheck it after every firmware update.

Second, a firmware update on these miners carries a real risk. Owners describe a wave of failures in the bug tracker after a run of builds, especially when updating over a wireless network, and the whole BOX series was affected. Recovery is done by writing an image to a memory card, but the manufacturer does not publish the images themselves. They are requested by email to support, and the reply arrives within one to three days. Update only over cable and only when there is a reason, not for the sake of the version number.

The spare parts picture is mixed. Among repair items the manufacturer itself publicly sells only power supplies and has no catalog of boards, fans or chips. The secondary market meanwhile covers control boards, including for the BOX format, from 130 to 140 dollars. But BOX hash boards and chips of almost all series are not on the open market.

Repairability on Goldshell is limited, but the reason is not only technical. A control board costs from 130 to 140 dollars, while miners of the brand in the manufacturer's store run from 234 dollars for the simplest BOX up to fifteen hundred for the industrial ones. On a cheap ASIC the board eats up more than half its price, and with shipping both ways the repair loses its point. On a miner at seven hundred dollars and above the repair makes sense. For comparison, new Bitmain and MicroBT ASICs cost from a thousand dollars upwards, and repairs on those almost always pay off.

There are no failure statistics for Goldshell: no return rate, no mean time between failures. The brand owner does not publish them, and neither does any other miner manufacturer. What does exist is an open firmware bug tracker, where real owner reports are visible, and a handful of user measurements.

Hashrate in those measurements is confirmed. In a user review the Mini-DOGE showed around 187 MH/s against the rated 185, while consumption came out at 222 watts against the rated 233. On the KA-BOX Pro consumption goes the other way, higher than rated, around 625 watts against 600. All three deviations fall inside the plus or minus five percent tolerance the manufacturer allows.

The weak spot is a different one, temperature. An independent review of the KA-BOX Pro records 75 degrees at 25 degrees in the room, and the manufacturer's open bug tracker holds separate reports of overheating on this same miner and on the AL-BOX II. The manufacturer's official hardware error threshold is five percent, and cases of exceeding this threshold also appear in the reports.

On noise, the very thing the brand is mostly bought for, there are no instrument measurements in the public domain. The manufacturer rates them at up to 35 dB, and third-party catalogs list 35 dB for the KA-BOX in one place and 55 in another. We quote the rated figures, but there is no independent check on them.

Efficiency cannot be compared across algorithms, so the ranges are given inside each group. The comparison with competitors goes in a separate section, and for this brand it is not flattering.

Inside Scrypt the spread is wide. Between the best miner of the group and the worst the difference is almost two and a half times. Model age matters more here than the case format.

On Scrypt the best Goldshell miner gives 0.53 J/MH, while the best competitor miners are around 0.2, a gap of roughly three times. On Kaspa Goldshell has 339 and 375 J/TH against about 77 for the top Bitmain ASIC, almost five times.

If electricity is expensive for you and space is available, Goldshell will almost certainly lose on money. If there is no space and noise is critical, the brand has no direct competitors, but you will pay for that in efficiency.

Calculate the profit of a specific model →

We compare against three competitors with different profiles: Bitmain as the all-rounder, ElphaPex as the Scrypt specialist, IceRiver as the Kaspa specialist.

Goldshell wins on two points, suitability for the home and coverage of altcoin algorithms. It loses on efficiency, spare parts, repair, firmware and warranty. The brand is niche. Buy it with open eyes.

If the task is to earn money per kilowatt, look at the competitors. If the task is to put a miner where an ordinary ASIC cannot go, and you accept that you pay for it in consumption, Goldshell does what nobody else does.

The coin matters more than the miner. The main risk of this brand is not in the hardware. In October 2025 the Kadena foundation ceased operations, the coin collapsed, and three models of the KD series turned into furniture: Blake2s chips physically cannot switch to other coins. Before buying, look at the trading volume of the coin and at the state of the network. The specifications of the ASIC matter less here.

Coin liquidity. The price of a coin means nothing if there is nobody to sell it to. Handshake daily volume is measured in thousands of dollars, Alephium in hundreds of thousands. You can mine it, but you cannot cash out without losses.

Falling reward. The Kaspa block reward drops every month, roughly by half over a year, and by the middle of 2026 about 95 percent of the whole emission has been mined. On Nervos the halving is expected in November 2027. Payback has to be calculated with the decline in mind, not on today's figures.

Overheating in a compact case. Power density in the BOX format is high and the case volume is small. Owner reports in the bug tracker mention temperatures above 80 degrees at an ordinary room temperature. Do not put the miner in a cabinet, an alcove or behind furniture. Leave a gap of at least twenty centimeters.

The power connector. The most common mechanical failure. A six-pin connector that is not fully seated, or a cable thinner than 16 AWG, heats up and melts. Check that it seats with a click.

Firmware updates. Updating these miners carries a real risk of failure, especially over a wireless network. The recovery image is not published publicly and has to be requested by email. Update over a cable and only when there is a reason.

Pool incompatibility. The firmware uses its own dialect of the protocol, and with an unsupported pool the miner just sits there doing nothing: no errors, no hashrate either. Pick a pool known to work with the brand and check again after an update.

Humidity. The official limit is 65 percent. On the Spanish coast it is exceeded regularly, so the constraint is a real one. Condensation and corrosion are not covered by the warranty.

Half of these points are specific to this brand. Miners like this most often go into an apartment, so the advice is written for that.

1. Work out the profitability before you buy, not afterAt a typical Spanish tariff most altcoin miners run at a loss in 2026, across every brand at once. Do the math on your own tariff and on a conservative coin price, and take a horizon of no more than a year.
2. Check the state of the coin's networkLook at trading volume, at a living development team and at the schedule of reward reduction. Kadena in October 2025 showed how that ends: an ASIC for a dead coin is a zero.
3. Put the miner in an open placeNot in a cabinet, not in an alcove, not behind furniture. At least twenty centimeters of free space in front of the intake and behind the exhaust. An external fan will not solve the power density problem.
4. Keep the room temperature within limitsThe manufacturer's manual states from 10 to 35 degrees, and seller listings give from 0 to 35. At 35 degrees in the room the ASIC runs at its very limit and may go into emergency shutdown. In a Spanish summer 35 degrees in a room is easy to reach, so it is either air conditioning or a miner standing idle.
5. Watch the humidityThe official limit is 65 percent. In coastal areas it is exceeded regularly, and then you need a dehumidifier or a different room. Otherwise the miner runs with condensation inside.
6. Do not save on the power cableOnly the standard or a suitable power supply, a cable no thinner than 16 AWG, the connector pushed all the way in. A third-party unit voids the warranty, and a poor contact melts the connector.
7. Change the factory password straight awayIt is the same on every ASIC of the brand, and anyone can look it up. After that, keep the miner in a separate segment of your home network. And never forward its port to the outside.
8. Connect by cable, not over a wireless networkEspecially when updating firmware: a wireless connection is named as a typical trigger of failure. And do not connect the miner through a repeater or a powerline adapter instead of the router: that is a separate common cause of lost connectivity.
9. Monitor two numbersThe share of hardware errors and the temperature. The norm for errors is up to five percent, and the hashrate should stay within five percent of the rated figure. Rising errors on an unchanged pool are an early sign of board degradation.
10. Clean it every one to three monthsIn an apartment, dust, pet hair and pollen clog small heatsinks faster than large ones. Only on a powered down miner and only with compressed air.

Figures from our catalog and from the brand owner's public reporting.

• 2020HS1 Plus: a 115 watt miner weighing 450 grams with a rated 34 dB. For the buyer this was the first case where an ASIC could simply be put on a desk.
• 2021The BOX format takes shape as a series and runs across several algorithms at once: seven new miners in one year, from the KD-BOX at 205 watts to the industrial CK6 at 3300. For the buyer that meant a choice of coin inside one case.
• 2022The intermediate Lite class appears: 1200 and 1450 watts at 55 dB instead of 80. Between a shelf in the room and a separate workshop a third option appeared.
• 2024The brand passes to a chip company. For the buyer this means public reporting from the owner: finances and risks became visible from outside, and most miner manufacturers do not offer that.
• 2024KA-BOX for Kaspa and AL-BOX for Alephium. The brand was one of the first to give a compact home format for these networks. On Kaspa it was beaten by IceRiver with the KS0 model, which came out back in 2023.
• 2024E-DG1M: 0.53 J/MH against 1.27 for the previous industrial miner of the brand on the same algorithm. In a single generation the gap to competitors on Scrypt narrowed by almost two and a half times.
• 2025BYTE: a desktop unit with two slots and hot-swap cards for different coins. You change the card without changing the case or the power supply. It is the only answer the brand has to chips that cannot be switched, the thing that killed the KD line.
• 2026Five algorithms in one catalog. No other brand in our shop covers five altcoin algorithms, and for those who mine something other than bitcoin there is often simply no choice.