{"id":27799,"date":"2026-06-08T19:35:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-08T17:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bitshopper.de\/?p=27799"},"modified":"2026-06-09T10:20:44","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T08:20:44","slug":"canaan-a3197s-reverse-engineering-nikos-tna-os","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bitshopper.de\/en\/blog\/canaan-a3197s-reverse-engineering-nikos-tna-os\/","title":{"rendered":"Canaan’s cage cracked: Nikos publishes the first public Canaan A3197S reverse engineering \u2014 TNA-OS arrives"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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TL;DR for readers in a hurry<\/strong>: On 5 June 2026<\/strong>, Nikos<\/strong> (@MolonLabeVC<\/a> \/ Molon Labe Holdings<\/a>) released what is, to his knowledge, the first public Canaan A3197S reverse engineering<\/strong> \u2014 fully tracing the host-to-chip protocol of the Bitcoin mining ASIC inside the Canaan Avalon Nano 3s<\/strong>. The accompanying independent custom firmware TNA-OS<\/strong> drives the twelve A3197S chips directly: any pool, user-adjustable frequency and core voltage, modern Stratum V2 over an encrypted transport, dynamic vardiff \u2014 0 % dev fee<\/strong> and zero phone-home telemetry<\/strong>. Another closed-source ASIC wall falls, and Avalon Nano 3s operators get their hardware out of the manufacturer’s cage. <\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

What Nikos made public \u2014 and why it breaks with the status quo<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Until 5 June 2026, Canaan’s A3197S<\/strong> was a black box in the strict sense: closed silicon, an undocumented host-to-chip protocol, an encrypted real-time firmware on a second RISC-V core<\/strong> that Linux intentionally never sees, and no published material describing how the chip is brought up, calibrated, fed work, or read out. Every Avalon Nano 3s in the wild ran \u2014 and still runs \u2014 exclusively on Canaan’s own sealed stack. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nikos states it plainly in the published reverse-engineering report:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201eThis study cracked that wall: the complete A3197S serial mining protocol was recovered \u2014 chain enumeration, per-chip configuration and calibration, the high-speed bus bring-up, work dispatch, version-rolling (AsicBoost) setup, and the nonce-report format the chip returns. With the protocol understood, a branch of firmware (TNA-OS) was written to drive the chips directly, independently of any vendor software.” <\/p>\n\u2014 Nikos, Canaan Avalon Nano 3s \u2014 A3197S Reverse Engineering Report<\/a>, 5 June 2026<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The report lives in the new GitHub repository CryptoIceMLH\/Nano3S<\/a>, announced the same day in an X post by @MolonLabeVC<\/a>. The work fits squarely into Nikos’ existing portfolio of sovereign Bitcoin tooling \u2014 ESP-Miner-LAN<\/a> (Ethernet mod for Bitaxe \/ NerdQAxe), BitSatRelay<\/a> (Nostr-over-satellite), ImmergeAxe<\/a> (immersion cooling), and others. The throughline is clear: pull Bitcoin infrastructure out of the manufacturer’s cage<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For context: Nikos worked exclusively on his own<\/strong> hardware on his own<\/strong> bench and network. He did not touch vendor systems, and he deliberately withheld the reproducible low-level specifics from the published report. The report is meant to inform<\/strong>, not to ship a ready-made exploit recipe. Responsible disclosure done right. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Key facts of the Canaan A3197S Reverse Engineering breakthrough<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Aspect<\/th>Detail<\/th><\/tr><\/thead>
Publication date<\/strong><\/td>5 June 2026<\/td><\/tr>
Author<\/strong><\/td>Nikos \u00b7 @MolonLabeVC<\/a> \u00b7 GitHub CryptoIceMLH<\/a> \u00b7 Molon Labe Holdings<\/a><\/td><\/tr>
Reverse-engineering target<\/strong><\/td>Canaan A3197S \u2014 SHA-256 mining ASIC, 10 hash engines per chip<\/td><\/tr>
Host device<\/strong><\/td>Canaan Avalon Nano 3s \u2014 12 \u00d7 A3197S, Kendryte K230D dual-core RISC-V<\/td><\/tr>
What was recovered<\/strong><\/td>Chain enumeration, high-speed bus bring-up (115,200 \u2192 4.8 Mbaud), per-chip configuration & factory calibration, work dispatch, AsicBoost setup, nonce-report format<\/td><\/tr>
Custom firmware<\/strong><\/td>TNA-OS<\/strong> \u2014 host daemon in Rust (statically linked), real-time-core application on the second RISC-V core, Angular web UI. 0 % dev fee. No phone-home. <\/strong> Source code currently not public \u2014 see source-status section below<\/td><\/tr>
Stock components preserved<\/strong><\/td>Bootloaders (SPL + main, A\/B), real-time-core image (SHA-256-fenced at build time), Linux kernel \u2014 surgical, not radical<\/td><\/tr>
Pool protocols<\/strong><\/td>Stratum V1 and<\/strong> Stratum V2 over an encrypted Noise transport (ChaCha20-Poly1305, secp256k1\/ElligatorSwift)<\/td><\/tr>
Mining proof<\/strong><\/td>12 \/ 12 chips active, ~3.55 TH\/s confirmed at the pool, zero<\/strong> rejected shares, dynamic vardiff tracking verified<\/td><\/tr>
Privacy upside<\/strong><\/td>No<\/strong> third-party telemetry \u2014 stock firmware reports operational data to external endpoints; TNA-OS speaks only to the operator’s configured pool<\/td><\/tr>
Operator control<\/strong><\/td>User-adjustable frequency and core voltage, up to 8 pools with failover, fleet mode “Army” for multi-device setups<\/td><\/tr>
Dev fee<\/strong><\/td>0 %<\/strong> \u2014 no hashrate tribute to the firmware author<\/td><\/tr>
Publication<\/strong><\/td>Reverse-engineering report public on GitHub \u2014 reproducible low-level details intentionally withheld. TNA-OS source code currently not public (see source-status section) <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table>
Sources: Nano3S GitHub repository<\/a>, X post @MolonLabeVC, 5 June 2026<\/a>, Molon Labe Holdings \u2014 project portfolio<\/a>, orca.pet\/nanojb (independent prior work on the Avalon Nano 3 jailbreak by Marcos Del Sol Vives).<\/a><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Why this step matters for the entire home-mining industry<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Bitaxe and NerdQAxe already demonstrated that independent custom-firmware stacks can work \u2014 but both rest on deliberately accessible Bitmain chips<\/strong> (BM1366, BM1370, BM1397) with published data sheets and hobbyist-friendly tooling. Canaan was the holdout<\/strong>: its own silicon lineage, its own undocumented protocols, its own encrypted real-time firmware. Buying an Avalon Nano 3s meant buying a miner whose behaviour the operator could not change, could not audit, and could not bring into an existing custom-firmware infrastructure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nikos’ work changes four things at once:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  1. The A3197S is no longer a black box.<\/strong> The protocol is understood, documented, and proven by a working independent driver. Future custom-firmware stacks (beyond TNA-OS itself) can build on this knowledge. <\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. Privacy becomes the default.<\/strong> Stock firmware reports operational data to external endpoints; TNA-OS cuts that stream entirely. Operators who care about their mining identity and IP privacy have, for the first time, a choice on Canaan hardware. <\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. Modern pool protocols become reachable.<\/strong> Stratum V2 with encrypted transport is unavailable on stock Avalon devices \u2014 TNA-OS delivers it. That opens the Avalon Nano 3s to SV2-only pools (Demand, Braiins SV2). <\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. Closed-source ASICs are not invulnerable.<\/strong> Canaan’s nominally proprietary ASIC ecosystem is reachable with patient reverse-engineering work \u2014 and once the protocol is understood, that knowledge persists. This holds regardless of whether the specific firmware built on top of it is later released openly or stays closed. <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    The movement towards independent custom-firmware stacks that carried cgminer, BFGMiner, Bitaxe, NerdQAxe, BitForge Nano, and ForgeOS from hobbyist territory into mainstream home mining has now reached the last major ASIC vendor too. Congratulations, Nikos. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    What the report actually says \u2014 the most interesting technical findings<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    Three findings from the report deserve to be retold because they show how deep<\/strong> the work went:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The architecture is asymmetric dual-core.<\/strong> The Kendryte K230D has two RISC-V cores. Only one<\/strong> runs Linux and sees itself as “Brought up 1 node, 1 CPU”. The second core is a dedicated real-time controller that exclusively owns the high-speed serial bus to the twelve A3197S chips \u2014 unreachable from Linux directly. All inter-core traffic goes through shared-memory rings<\/strong> plus a message channel on port 201<\/strong>. Miss this model and you never get near the chips. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The bus runs on deliberate drift.<\/strong> At mining speed the host clocks at 24 MHz \/ 5 = 4.8 Mbaud<\/strong>, while the chip TX side runs at 25 MHz \/ 5 \u2248 5.0 Mbaud<\/strong>. The resulting ~4 % per-byte drift sits inside UART receiver tolerance \u2014 and it confused early analysis for hours until the chip’s own clock was pinned down. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Byte order is not wire order.<\/strong> In the work frame, the header fields are not in standard byte order: the chip front-end byte-swaps the words back into canonical SHA-256 input internally. And \u2014 the single most expensive bug class \u2014 if the chip-identity<\/strong> word’s byte order is wrong, the chip partitions its engines incorrectly across the nonce space and silently collapses to a few percent of its rate at every frequency. Look in the wrong place (“the silicon is slow”) and you never find the truth (“the silicon is excellent; the software was misconfigured”). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    That is precisely the central claim of the report:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    \u201eWhat kept it throttled was never the silicon \u2014 it was the undocumented protocol and the vendor’s locked firmware [\u2026]. Once the protocol was cracked, the chip delivered.” <\/p>\n\u2014 Nikos, Reverse Engineering Report \u00a7 4.1<\/a><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

    Translated: the Avalon Nano 3s chips are not<\/strong> mediocre. Stock firmware throttles them deliberately, because the product is positioned as “a heater that mines Bitcoin on the side”. With an own stack there is meaningfully more on the table \u2014 and the operator decides where the balance of hashrate, power draw, and noise should land. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    Historical context \u2014 TNA-OS and the original BraiinsOS of 2018<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    The last comparable break in the ASIC-mining industry’s closed-source wall is nearly eight years old. In 2018<\/strong> the Czech team behind Slush Pool released a fully open-source mining firmware<\/strong> for Antminer S9 devices: the original BraiinsOS<\/strong> (later called the “Community Edition”). Licence: GNU GPLv3<\/strong>. Code: public on github.com\/braiins\/braiins-os<\/a>, including the mining daemon BOSminer<\/strong>. 0 % dev fee<\/strong>. A whole generation of Antminer operators could inspect, modify, and adapt their stack \u2014 and the body of knowledge that emerged then still carries the independent-mining scene today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Since then Braiins’ position has shifted. Today most of the current BraiinsOS code base is closed source<\/strong>, and every device running it carries a mandatory dev fee of roughly 2\u20132.5 % of the hashrate<\/strong> to Braiins. Operationally still an excellent product \u2014 but on two axes notably distanced from the 2018 release. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    It is on exactly those two axes that TNA-OS delivers the break:<\/p>\n\n\n\n