Bitaxe Pool: solo mining from Frankfurt with 0 % fee, SOLO groups and Stratum V2

Once a Bitaxe has Wi-Fi and a Bitcoin address, exactly one decision determines everything that follows: the pool. Over two years of support we have talked this decision through with customers hundreds of times – and at some point decided to run the pool we could recommend with a clear conscience ourselves. The result is the Bitaxe Pool: a ckpool-based solo mining pool with its server in Frankfurt, no fee, no account – and, since 8 September 2026, Stratum V2. This article explains what the pool does differently from Public Pool and Solo CKPool, who it suits, how to set it up in three minutes, and what SOLO groups and Stratum V2 are about.

What the Bitaxe Pool is – and what it is not

A solo pool does the work for your miner that a Bitcoin node at home would otherwise have to do: it keeps the blockchain current, builds block templates from the mempool and distributes them to the connected devices via stratum. The decisive difference from a regular pool sits inside the block template itself: it already contains your Bitcoin address as the recipient of the coinbase transaction. If your miner finds a valid block, the block writes the entire reward – currently 3.125 BTC plus transaction fees – straight to that address. The pool never holds a balance, there is no payout threshold, no account and nothing that could be lost.

What the Bitaxe Pool is not: a pool with a steady trickle of micro-payouts. If you would rather collect a few satoshis a day with a Bitaxe, OCEAN or Braiins are the places to go – why that stays below your electricity cost at 1 to 5 TH/s is worked out in Choosing a Bitaxe mining pool. Solo mining is the choice for everyone who wants the full chance at the whole block, and that is exactly what the pool is built for. As of 8 September 2026, 54 addresses with 68 workers and around 110 TH/s in total are mining on it.

Six reasons we run the pool ourselves

• 0 % fee. Solo CKPool keeps 2 % of a found block – at 3.3 BTC that is more than 0.06 BTC. On the Bitaxe Pool the coinbase transaction goes entirely to your address. Only SOLO groups cost 1 %, because the shared payout needs operation and bookkeeping.
• Server in Frankfurt. From Germany the latency is around 35 ms instead of 100 ms and more across the Atlantic. Less latency means your miner works less often on a block template that is already stale, and fewer shares get rejected.
• Start difficulty 1,000 with automatic adjustment. A single Bitaxe Gamma submits its first shares within seconds and immediately sees that it is running. On pools with a high start difficulty the dashboard sits at zero for minutes and beginners go looking for a fault that does not exist.
• Statistics without a login. Enter your address, done: hash rate, workers, shares and best difficulty per device, plus a leaderboard for the current month and all time. It works on a phone just as well as on a desktop.
• SOLO groups. Play for a block with friends, family or the community under a shared #tag – the same coinbase transaction splits the payout proportionally, without anyone holding other people’s coins.
• Support from people who know the devices. If something does not work, the same support team that sets up Bitaxe, Nerdaxe and NerdQaxe every day helps – with the troubleshooter as the first step.

New since 8 September 2026: Stratum V2

Stratum is the protocol miners and pools use to talk to each other. The first version dates from 2012 and sends everything across the network as readable text: block templates, shares, your address. Anyone sitting on the path – in the Wi-Fi, in the router, at the provider – can read along and in principle interfere. The best-known attack is hash rate hijacking: a man-in-the-middle swaps the template, and your miner works for a stranger’s address without you seeing it in the dashboard.

Stratum V2 closes exactly this gap. The connection is encrypted with the Noise protocol, and the pool identifies itself with its authority public key: when connecting, your miner verifies that it is really talking to the Bitaxe Pool and not to someone who has inserted themselves in between. On top of that the protocol is binary rather than text-based, so it needs less bandwidth, and job distribution is defined more cleanly than in V1. Stratum V2 changes nothing about your chance of a block – it is about the security and cleanliness of the connection, not about more hash rate.

Two things we deliberately do not offer: with us the pool builds the block templates, not the miner (“job declaration”). If you want your own templates, your own node serves you better – that is what it is for, and Connecting a Bitaxe to your own Bitcoin node shows how. And Stratum V1 remains available in parallel: if you do not want to change anything, you do not have to.

The prerequisite is firmware that speaks V2: AxeOS 2.14.0 or newer (June 2026) on all Bitaxe devices, the NerdQ firmware 1.0.37 or newer (May 2026) on NerdQaxe, NerdQaxe+, NerdQaxe++, NerdOctaxe and Nerdaxe Gamma. An older device is brought up to date in the browser with the Bitaxe Flasher; how an update runs safely is covered in AxeOS firmware update. The values side by side:

In AxeOS, set the protocol in the pool settings to SV2, enter host, port 3336 and the authority public key, and leave the channel on extended. Save, restart – within two minutes at most the pool status turns green. Address, worker name and SOLO groups work over V2 exactly as over V1. A sensible layout is V2 as the primary pool and V1 on port 3333 as the fallback pool in the second slot: AxeOS then switches on its own if a connection fails. The pool configurator produces the complete data set including the finished V2 URL in step 3.

SOLO groups: playing for the block together

A single Bitaxe is a lottery ticket with a full payout – and some people would rather share several tickets with others. That is exactly what SOLO groups are: you append a #groupname to your worker name, for example bc1q….gamma1#friends. All miners with the same tag automatically form a group, with no registration and without anyone having to know the others’ addresses. If a member finds a block, the coinbase transaction contains one output per member, proportional to the work submitted, plus 1 % for the pool. The payout stays on-chain and non-custodial; nobody holds other people’s coins in between.

Up to 50 wallets fit in one group. Public groups appear in the list on pool.bitaxe.de so that others can join; if you want to stay among yourselves, append .hidden – #family.hidden is fully functional but appears in no list. Your own devices can be bundled the same way: three Bitaxe and one NerdQaxe under one tag count their work together. Calculated honestly, a group does not change the expected value – minus the one percent it stays the same – but it makes hits more frequent and smaller. For many that is the more pleasant way to take part.

Bitaxe Pool, Public Pool, Solo CKPool or your own node?

All four routes are real solo mining with payout via the coinbase transaction. They differ in fee, location, features and what you have to run yourself. Stratum V2 is no longer a unique selling point – Public Pool and Solo CKPool now offer it as well.

Public Pool is the pool preconfigured in AxeOS from the factory and technically a solid solo pool – the difference to us lies in location, groups and support. Solo CKPool has the longest block history of all solo pools but takes 2 % of a find. Your own node is the route for everyone who wants maximum independence and is prepared to take responsibility for storage, updates and uptime – whether that is worth it is covered in Running your own Bitcoin node. A tip for node operators: enter the Bitaxe Pool in AxeOS as the fallback pool. When the node reindexes, needs an update or the NAS is asleep, the miner keeps hashing instead of waiting for hours.

Three steps onto the Bitaxe Pool

1. Open AxeOS. The IP address of your miner is on the display or in your router’s device list. Open it in the browser, Settings tab.
2. Enter the pool. Stratum URL stratum.bitaxe.de (without stratum+tcp://, AxeOS adds that itself), stratum port 3333, stratum user your Bitcoin address with an optional worker name, for example bc1q….gamma1, password x.
3. Save and check. Save, restart. After one to two minutes the dashboard shows accepted shares and “Best Difficulty” starts climbing. On pool.bitaxe.de, enter your address in the search field and you will see the worker with its hash rate.

Several devices each get their own worker name after the dot and still run on one address; the statistics keep them apart, a found block pays to the same wallet. Large ASICs such as Antminer or Whatsminer belong on the high-difficulty port 4334 (V2: 4336), because the standard difficulty would be too low for their output. If the miner runs but delivers no shares, the troubleshooter gets you to the cause in three clicks; the most common cases are explained in Bitaxe connected to Wi-Fi but not mining. The complete first-time setup from unboxing to the first share is described in Setting up the Bitaxe Gamma.

Three more sentences on the address, because this is where the most expensive mistakes happen: use an address from a wallet whose keys you control yourself – not an exchange address that may be invalid tomorrow, and not a Lightning address, because the coinbase pays on-chain. Copy the address, never type it; one character off and you are mining for a stranger. And allow for freshly mined coins only becoming spendable after 100 blocks, a good 16 hours – that is a rule of the Bitcoin protocol, not of the pool.

Which miner suits the Bitaxe Pool?

Any SHA-256 miner with stratum. For getting started, the Bitaxe Gamma is the right choice: 1.2 TH/s at 17 W as measured, practically inaudible, runs on the included 5 V power supply. If you want more tickets per wall socket, take the NerdQaxe++ with four BM1370 or go straight to the NerdOctaxe with eight – both speak Stratum V2 with the NerdQ firmware from 1.0.37. Prices are live on the product pages; the table pulls them from the catalogue.

How big the chance really is per model, the mining calculator works out with the current difficulty, and Finding a block with a Bitaxe explains why the answer is “decades on average” and solo miners still hit every year. The miner comparison shows all devices side by side, the buying guide puts them in context.

Calculated honestly: what the pool promises – and what it does not

A solo pool promises no blocks. It promises that every hash of your miner is a real chance at the whole block, and that a hit lands with you completely, verifiably and without detours. The chance itself depends solely on your hash rate and the network difficulty – no pool in the world can raise it, and anyone who claims otherwise is selling something else. What makes solo mining real all the same: in 2026 alone, solo miners worldwide have found around 20 blocks, several of them with open-source hardware. The figures come live from mempool.space and are shown on the pool’s front page, just like the blocks of the Bitaxe Pool itself – nothing appears there that the blockchain does not confirm.

So if you buy a Bitaxe, buy it for what it is: a quiet, frugal full participant in the Bitcoin network with a lottery ticket that never expires. The Bitaxe Pool makes sure that ticket runs in your name. The values are above – or ready to copy in the pool configurator.