These boards cost just $30 and mine faster than an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X

There are products that make even a journalist do a double take at first, and the ESP32 Solo Miner LCD also brings back a bit of nostalgia. Around 2010, mining was still a niche topic and mostly ran on CPUs rather than on hardware specifically optimized for it. In the years that followed, dedicated hardware, especially ASICs, took over. Even in 2026, though, new mining products are still emerging. 

Case in point, Elecrow now offers the ESP32 Solo Miner as a compact miner. It is advertised with a hash rate of up to 1,000 KH/s, which means the board can run an algorithm up to 1 million times per second that, in the best-case scenario, could generate a new Bitcoin, though with an extremely low probability. In practice, it is effectively a lottery, which NMMiner also describes it as. The system is compatible with NMMiner. As a rule, these small boards are faster than the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X in this very specific use case, though that comes down to a technical feature rather than raw performance, since the ESP32 includes SHA256 acceleration.

Mining on a system like this is not likely to be worthwhile in practice, and it is better viewed as a kind of novelty or entertainment use. At the same time, the ESP32 Solo Miner is also a genuinely useful development board with a display, along with Wi-Fi connectivity and a screen. This TN display has a resolution of 320 × 240 pixels. It is a touchscreen. Interfaces can be created manually, additional sensors can be connected, and GPIO, I2C, UART, and a memory card slot are all included. A two-pack is available from Elecrow for $30.