Ledger Stax – A New E-Ink-based Hardware Crypto Wallet

6 Dec
2022

When we are talking about hardware crypto wallets for storing Bitcoin and other popular crypto coins Ledger is usually the name that comes to mind first and their Nano and Nano X wallets are probably the most used solutions for self-custody of crypto nowadays. Well, Ledger just announced a new hardware crypto wallet called Ledger Stax and this one has been designed by Tony Fadell, the designer of the Apple’s iPod. The new device comes with a large curved E-Ink display and a touchscreen and larger smartphone-like design and is indeed quite cool looking in terms of design and Ledger Stax should start shipping end of March 2023 it is already available for pre-order on the official website of Ledger already for $279 USD.

The new Ledger Stax claims support for over 5000 crypto coins as well as NFT support. Compact in size and modern in terms of design and features with USB-C support and Bluetooth along with wireless charging, a visual and easy to use interface to make it even more attractive for the normal user and not only for advanced users. Ledger apparently will try to do with Stax for Crypto what iPod did for Music, and they may be on the right track and that goes not only for employing “the right designer”. Ledger claims to have sold over 5 million Nano and Nano X devices so far and for sure they do hope to sell much more of the new Stax (yes you can stack these wallets indeed apparently) in the coming years with a larger adoption of crypto.

Ledger Stax Technical Specifications:
– Finish: Aluminum and plastic with embedded magnets for stackability
– Color: Black
– Secure Element Chip: ST33K1M5, Chip Certification: CC EAL5+
– Power & Battery: Built-in rechargeable lithium-ion battery with 200 mAh (milliampere/hour)
– Stays on for several months when left unused and at full charge**
– Qi wireless charging
– Size & Weight: Credit card-sized
– Dimensions: 85mm x 54mm x 6mm
– Weight: 45.2g
– Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.2 to connect to a smartphone, USB type C
– System requirements: 64-bits desktop computer (Windows 10+, macOS 12+, Ubuntu LTS 20.04+) excluding ARM Processors.
– Compatible with smartphones: iOS 13+ or Android 9+
– Not compatible with Chromebooks!
– Display: A black and white E Ink curved touch screen
– Display size: 3.7 inch
– Resolution: 400×672 pixels
– Display colors: 16 scales of gray
– Digital asset support: 500+ different crypto & tokens supported on the Ledger Live app
– Ethereum and Polygon NFTs supported on the Ledger Live app
– More than 5000 crypto, tokens, and NFTs supported when using a third-party wallet

The timing of the new announcement is also quite right with the recent crypto market developments and more and more people taking their crypto off exchanges into self-custody wallets. A good hardware crypto wallet should be not only for storing your coins securely, but also for easily doing so and it should go not only as a cold storage solution, but as an actually easy to use wallet for quick and payments as well. Is Ledger Stax going to deliver on all of these expectations… it is still early to say, but it sure does look promising at the moment, so we would love to see and play around with it when it comes out next year.

– For more information about the upcoming Ledger Stax hardware crypto wallet…

New lolMiner 1.64 For Further Optimized Kaspa (KAS) Mining Performance

5 Dec
2022

The just updated lolMiner 1.64 is a dream come true (more performance with less power used) for everyone that is currently mining Kaspa (KAS) with their Nvidia GPUs, not only because of the further improved performance that the update brings but also because of the new features it gives access to the miner for optimizing their GPUs. We did a quick test and the results are great and you should head on to your mining rigs and update and start tweaking the miners some more for additional hashrate and even lower power usage, so a win-win situation for sure.

According to the author of the miner the new version brings about 8-8.5% on Nvidia Pascal GPUs, 4.5-5% on Nvidia Turing and Ampere GPUs and 3-4% on AMD Navi and Big Navi GPUs in terms of improved performance. And thanks to the addition of the extra tweaking features and most notably the Core Offset (--coff parameter) we can not only get a boost in the performance with the same settings we were mining with version 1.63, but also get it with reduced power by just adding the extra option with a value between 250 and 350 (depending on how much your GPUs can handle stable). The --no-oc-reset might also be helpful if you do not wish to reset the settings you have applied to the GPUs when the miner is stopped.

The new beta options may require a video driver update, depending on how old Nvidia video driver you are using. The description says you need version 520 or higher, though we have them working successfully on older 512 driver, but you should probably just update if using older drivers anyway. The other new command line options added for the miner might also help to further optimize things a bit more, though they will require additional tweaking.

lolMiner 1.64 Latest Changelog:

Changes
– Improved Kaspa only mining performance. Speed increase is about 8-8.5% on Nvidia Pascal GPUs, 4.5-5% on Nvidia Turing and Ampere GPUs and 3-4% on AMD Navi and Big Navi GPUs
– Beta feature: added options to set core clock offset (--coff), memory clock offset (--moff), power limit (--pl) and a fixed fan speed (--fan) on common Nvidia GPUs. Required are admin privileges and Nvidia drivers 520 or higher!
– The syntax is the same as with --cclk and --mclk – if a single value is given then it will be applied to all compatible GPUs, else a coma separated list of values can be given using a * character to skip over GPUs. (1)
– Added a new parameter --no-oc-reset to turn off the reset of overclock settings when ending the miner.
– Windows: Added a beta gui to generate overclock settings strings / .bat files for the miner. Also the tool can apply the chosen settings directly.

(1) Note: No responsibility taken for the values set. Please use with care. If your mining os had build in functions to set these settings we recommend using them instead of the miner settings.

Fixes
– Fixing a bug with ETHV1 (nicehash) stratum mode that may cause the worker name to be appended twice when it was given by –user . (the use of –worker did not have this issue).

Here is a quick overview of what improvements we are getting with the new version on RTX 3070, 3080 and 3090:

GeForce RTX 3070:
lolminer 1.63: 564 MH/s – 120W – 1710/810
lolminer 1.64: 596 MH/s – 95W plus the extra option --coff 300

GeForce RTX 3080:
lolminer 1.63: 877 MH/s – 190W – 1800/810
lolminer 1.64: 919 MH/s – 160W plus the extra option --coff 250

GeForce RTX 3090:
lolminer 1.63: 1031 MH/s – 200W – 1800/807
lolminer 1.64: 1079 MH/s – 160W plus the extra option --coff 350

Here is an example you can use for RTX 3070, just replace YOUR_KAS_WALLET with your actual wallet:

lolMiner --algo KASPA --pool stratum+tcp://pool.eu.woolypooly.com --port 3112 --user YOUR_KAS_WALLET --watchdog exit --cclk 1710 --mclk 810 --coff 300

You can try to play around with the core offset setting, though 250 to 350 MHz should be safe for most GPUs, some may require lower setting to function stable or can take up higher offset for even greater power savings. As for the memory clocks and settings with example command lines, you can take a look at the post where we talk about Optimizing Nvidia GPUs for Performance with Lower Power Usage for Kaspa (KAS) Mining. Just use these examples for the specific GPUs discussed there and add the Clock Offset parameter to them as a good starting point and see how your power usage drops while you get extra hashrate after the update.

– To download and try the latest release of the lolMiner 1.64 mining software…

Optimizing Nvidia GPUs for Lower Power Usage for Radiant (RXD) Mining

3 Dec
2022

Radiant (RXD) is another project that is quickly catching up with crypto miners, so we are going to be sharing some tips on how you can optimize Nvidia GPUs for better performance with lower power usage for mining RXD with the Bzminer software. Radiant uses the SHA512256d algorithm, another GPU-intensive algorithm, so you can go as low as possible with the video memory and higher on the GPU clock to get better performance with lower power usage for this one. AMD GPU miners interested in mining Radiant (RXD) should go for the SRBMiner-MULTI CPU & AMD GPU Miner 1.1.3 software, however it does not come with so advanced GPU clocking features, so you might need to use different tools in trying to optimize the hardware. Here we’ll be focusing on Nvidia GPUs only and Bzminer.

We are going to be using the latest Bzminer v12.1.1 as mining software for the examples below and cover some of the popular Nvidia GPUs fo rmining with settings and expected hashrate and power usage. Obviously, we are going to be setting the GPU clock to a higher fixed frequency (oc_lock_core_clock) and the memory clock (oc_lock_memory_clock) to the lowest possible fixed frequency and we’ll add in the core offset (oc_core_clock_offset) to further lower the power usage by lowering the voltage of the core. In the examples below do not forget to change the pool if you want and also set your Radian wallet address in the place of the YOUR_RXD_WALLET, also do not forget that you need to run Bzminer as administrator in order to for the OC settings to function!

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 GPU running at 1.53 GH/s hashrate with around 170W of power usage:

bzminer -a radiant -p stratum+tcp://stratum-eu.rplant.xyz:7086 -w YOUR_RXD_WALLET --oc_lock_core_clock 1800 --oc_lock_memory_clock 807 --oc_core_clock_offset 350 --nc 1

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 GPU running at 1.21 GH/s hashrate with around 130W of power usage:

bzminer -a radiant -p stratum+tcp://stratum-eu.rplant.xyz:7086 -w YOUR_RXD_WALLET --oc_lock_core_clock 1410 --oc_lock_memory_clock 807 --oc_core_clock_offset 350 --nc 1

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 GPU running at 1.23 GH/s hashrate with around 145W of power usage:

bzminer -a radiant -p stratum+tcp://stratum-eu.rplant.xyz:7086 -w YOUR_RXD_WALLET --oc_lock_core_clock 1750 --oc_lock_memory_clock 810 --oc_core_clock_offset 250 --nc 1

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 GPU running at 1.00 GH/s hashrate with around 115W of power usage:

bzminer -a radiant -p stratum+tcp://stratum-eu.rplant.xyz:7086 -w YOUR_RXD_WALLET --oc_lock_core_clock 1425 --oc_lock_memory_clock 810 --oc_core_clock_offset 250 --nc 1

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti GPU running at 0.85 GH/s hashrate with around 130W of power usage:

bzminer -a radiant -p stratum+tcp://stratum-eu.rplant.xyz:7086 -w 1YOUR_RXD_WALLET --oc_lock_core_clock 1710 --oc_lock_memory_clock 810 --oc_core_clock_offset 350 --nc 1

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 GPU running at 0.815 GH/s hashrate with around 90W of power usage:

bzminer -a radiant -p stratum+tcp://stratum-eu.rplant.xyz:7086 -w YOUR_RXD_WALLET --oc_lock_core_clock 1710 --oc_lock_memory_clock 810 --oc_core_clock_offset 350 --nc 1

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GPU running at 0.565 GH/s hashrate with around 100W of power usage:

bzminer -a radiant -p stratum+tcp://stratum-eu.rplant.xyz:7086 -w YOUR_RXD_WALLET --oc_lock_core_clock 1550 --oc_lock_memory_clock 810 --oc_core_clock_offset 250 --nc 1

Some more useful tips for anyone that wants to experiment with these settings above. We have provided good starting point in terms of frequency and offset that should be stable on most GPUs, however depending on your specific hardware and conditions you might be able to go up a bit for extra performance or power savings or you might need to go lower for attaining good stability. If Bzminer crashes or restarts you might want to start by lowering the setting of the oc_core_clock_offset parameter, that would lead to slightly higher power usage. If lowering the offset does not help, then keep its value and try lowering the GPU clock a bit. The video memory setting is already at the minimum level, so there is no need to play with the clocks there.

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