// blog · · by Nathan Baldwin
// v1.12 opens the public leaderboard to free-tier users and adds a real monthly prize draw. Per Bitaxe model: #1 wins a free month of Pro, places 2-5 get a 20%-off coupon. Verified email is all it takes.
v1.12.0 shipped today. The headline is one sentence: the public leaderboard is now free to enter, and the top miner in each Bitaxe model wins a free month of Pro every month.
In v1.11 the leaderboard was gated behind a Pro license. That was the wrong call. A leaderboard is a community feature; locking it behind the paid tier limited it to the people who needed it least. v1.12 inverts that: any user — free or Pro — can opt in from the Pro modal’s Public leaderboard section. Pro users still authenticate with their license key. Free users authenticate with a locally-generated install_uuid plus a verified email address, which is also where the prize lands if you win.
The free tier stays fully free, as always. The leaderboard is purely additive. Nothing you had on Tuesday gets paywalled on Wednesday.
The draw runs the last day of each month at 23:00 UTC. It runs per Bitaxe model — Gamma, Supra (when supported), Ultra (when supported) — so a small Supra fleet doesn’t have to outrun the global Gamma population to place.
For each model with at least 3 eligible entries:
Both arrive by email automatically. There is no claim process, no DM thread, no “reply to this tweet by midnight.” You sign up, you mine, the cron runs, you get an email.
The 30-day Pro license is tagged tier='pro-monthly' on the license server — same activation rules as a paid license (5 machines), same feature set, same auto-update behavior. It is not a watered-down trial.
Five filters, all transparent. The leaderboard page lists them next to the prize callout so nobody has to guess.
You need a verified email. Unverified accounts can still climb the board — the ranking is fair regardless — but won’t win prizes. Verification is a one-click link emailed on first-time submission. The token expires after 7 days; if you miss it, request another from the same submission flow.
You need at least 24 hours of polled activity. A best-share that lands the minute you sign up doesn’t count. This is the simplest possible filter for “is this a real miner who actually runs the rig” and it cuts out the most obvious gaming attempts without penalizing anyone who’s been mining for, well, a day.
You can’t be flagged by the abuse detector or banned by moderation. More on both of these below.
Your email can’t have won a prize in the last 90 days. This is the “no dominators” rule. The leaderboard ranking is honest — if you’re the top Gamma three months running, the board shows that — but the prize bumps to second place so the same email doesn’t sweep the bounty forever. If you’re consistently winning, the right outcome for everyone else is that someone new gets a shot.
Public leaderboards attract people who treat them as puzzles. v1.12 ships with enough guardrails that the puzzle isn’t worth the time.
Submission throttle. A single IP can register at most 10 distinct MAC addresses per day. This kills the “spin up 200 install UUIDs from one machine” attack outright without bothering anyone running a legitimate fleet of 10 miners at home.
Auto-detection. A daily job flags rows that match any of three patterns: more than 3 MAC addresses from a single IP within 7 days, a hashrate above 50 TH/s on a single device (the highest-end Gamma tops out around 1.2 TH/s — anything north of 50 TH/s is a typo or a lie), or a best-share within 1% of an older entry (someone copying a real submission). Flagged rows are hidden from the public board until an admin clears them.
Moderation. v1.12 ships a new /admin panel with per-row Remove / Ban / Flag actions, plus filters for flagged-only and unverified-only views. Bans block the offending install_uuid + email + IP simultaneously so the same actor can’t immediately re-submit from a slightly different angle.
None of this is designed to make submission feel adversarial. The defaults are “you submit, you appear, you race.” The flagging only fires on patterns that don’t show up in normal use. If you’re running 2 Gammas in your basement, you will never trip a rule.
The submit endpoint records the connecting IP. That is the only IP capture the leaderboard does, and it exists for the abuse moderation rules above — specifically the per-IP submit throttle and the IP-burst flag.
What that IP is not used for: marketing, analytics segmentation, ad targeting, sharing with third parties, building a profile, or being correlated with anything you do on the dashboard. The privacy policy at bitaxeballer.com/privacy.html has been updated to spell this out. IPs are auto-purged 30 days after the last activity on the associated submission. The email is treated the same way — used to deliver verification links and prize emails, never added to a marketing list.
Free tier remains 100% phone-home-free in the app itself. The leaderboard submission is an explicit opt-in inside the Pro modal — it’s a network call you choose to make, not one the app makes for you in the background.
A few things if you’ve visited before.
The prize callout now sits at the top of the page with a live countdown to the next monthly draw. The countdown ticks against the next 23:00 UTC of the month’s last day, in your local timezone, so there’s no math.
Every row now carries a badge: PRO for license-key-authenticated submissions, FREE for verified free-tier submissions, unverified for the in-between state. The unverified badge isn’t a punishment — it just tells you (and the rest of the board) that this row is ranking but not winning.
A new Past winners section shows the last 3 months of #1s per model. This is partly fun, partly social proof that the prize actually pays out. The first winner emails go out at 23:00 UTC on May 31, 2026.
If you’re already running v1.11 or v1.12 on Mac or Windows, click the Pro indicator in the dashboard header to open the Pro modal. Scroll to the Public leaderboard section, hit Opt in, enter a display name and an email. Check the email, click the verification link, you’re in. Your best-share from that point onward gets included in the daily roll-up.
If you’re new — download for Mac or download for Windows, run the network scan, opt into the leaderboard from the Pro modal, verify your email. The 24-hour polled activity requirement starts the moment your miner appears in the dashboard.
You can also browse the live board at bitaxeballer.com/leaderboard without signing up — just to see who’s running what.
Two reasons, both honest.
The first is that a leaderboard is more interesting when more people are on it. A board of paying subscribers is by definition a board of people who already chose us — that’s a steering wheel that’s not pointing anywhere new. Opening it up means the ranking actually reflects the broader Bitaxe community.
The second is that the most useful thing Pro can do for the project right now isn’t be priced as a wall. It’s be priced as the right answer for fleet owners, and serve as a recurring monthly reward for being the best miner in the room. A free month of Pro every month, going to a different person every month, is a better long-term marketing channel than any ad we could buy with the same money.
Free tier stays free. Pro pays the bills. The leaderboard makes both better. We keep building.
Try it yourself: Bitaxe Baller is a free desktop app for Mac and Windows for monitoring and tuning Bitaxe home miners. v1.12.0 is live on GitHub Releases. The leaderboard lives at bitaxeballer.com/leaderboard.
