Midstate (MDS) — desktop wallet released, and MDS is now on SafeTradeTwo things since the announcement, plus a few details about how the chain works that haven't been spelled out in this thread before.
1. The desktop wallet is outA native application that runs a full node in-process. No webview, no browser extension, no npm — a single binary that talks to the network itself instead of trusting a server somewhere.
- Mining. Start it from the wallet and rewards arrive at an address in that same wallet. It runs a local pool under the hood, so you can point it at any remote pool instead if you prefer. Live hashrate, share of network, expected time to a block.
- Send and receive with coin control. Every UTXO on Midstate is a power of two, so the wallet shows you exactly which coins it's spending and what it's making as change.
- Public chat over the P2P layer. Messages carry a proof-of-work, so posting costs CPU rather than needing a moderator.
- Payment channels (Q-Bolt v2) — unidirectional, with HTLC routing through hubs for multi-hop payments.
- Cross-chain swaps with Base, atomic, either over a channel for speed or as a plain on-chain HTLC.
2. MDS/USDT is live on SafeTradehttps://safetrade.com/exchange/MDS-USDT?type=basicNo presale, no premine, no dev fund. Everything in circulation was mined.
And that's provable rather than promised — which brings me to the part I've never actually posted here.
Genesis is anchored to a Bitcoin blockMidstate's genesis state is derived from Bitcoin block
938,708:
000000000000000000018f5ad5625d43356136c2e50c6dc18967a90a18f0af2e
2026-02-28 10:32 UTC
The chain could not have existed before that hash did. There is no "we mined quietly for six months first" — the timestamp is borrowed from Bitcoin's own proof-of-work.
The genesis coinbase carries an inscription, in the manner of the Times headline, written as plaintext into the address and salt fields:
Harvest Now, Decrypt Later: The Quantum Era's Encryption Challenge (Published Feb 24, 2026, by RBC Disruptors)
Because those fields hold ASCII rather than the hash of any public key, the genesis reward is
mathematically unspendable. The message is the burn.
Signatures are hash-based, not elliptic curveNo secp256k1 anywhere. Midstate uses WOTS one-time signatures, with MSS Merkle trees for addresses you want to reuse. Both rest on hash preimage resistance — nothing Shor's algorithm touches. That's the "harvest now, decrypt later" problem the inscription names: traffic captured today against a curve that breaks in twenty years.
The cost is that a WOTS key signs exactly once, and the chain enforces that with teeth.
Sign twice with the same key and anyone who spots it can prove the reuse and burn the coins. Two signatures over different messages leak enough to forge, so rather than let a thief use that, the protocol lets any observer claim it as a bounty. Uncomfortable, but it's the honest consequence of one-time signatures, and it's why the wallet tracks key use so carefully.
Chain statusBlock ~240,000. 60-second targets. Sequential BLAKE3 proof-of-work.
Mining is GPU-friendly and no ASIC exists. A Raspberry Pi runs at roughly 1:17,600 against the whole network; the equivalent figure for a hobbyist on Bitcoin is about 1:1.2 billion. Worth being straight about what that is: an economic gap, not a cryptographic guarantee. Nobody has built a chip for Midstate because it isn't yet worth building one. Earlier project material called it a provable ceiling against parallel hardware. That was wrong, I'm retracting it, and the website now says so properly.
Mining: solo or pooledBlocks come every 60 seconds, so solo mining is viable but lumpy — if you hold a thousandth of the network you'll average a block a day, and "average" hides a lot of variance. A pool smooths that into a steady share of every block the pool finds.
Either way you mine with the same binary. Point it at a pool:
midstate miner \
--pool-url stratum+tcp://rpc.cypherpunk.gold:3333 \
--payout-address YOUR_ADDRESS \
--worker rig1 \
--threads 0
uses every core.
--worker is just a label so you can tell your rigs apart on the pool's dashboard — payouts go per address, not per worker.
The desktop wallet does all of this for you, including running a pool locally if you'd rather not depend on anyone else's. Same protocol either way, so a third-party miner can point at your own machine just as easily.
One thing to get right: your payout addressUse an MSS address for mining payouts, not a WOTS one. This matters more on Midstate than on other chains and it is worth thirty seconds of your attention.
A WOTS key signs exactly once. Mining piles up hundreds of coinbase outputs at your payout address over time. Coins sharing an address can all be spent together in a
single transaction safely — they sign the same commitment, so it's one signature. But spend
some of them now and the rest later, and that's two signatures with one key over two different commitments. The chain treats that as key reuse and the remaining coins are burned.
An MSS address is a Merkle tree of about a million one-time keys, so it can receive and spend repeatedly with no such constraint. The desktop wallet generates one automatically when you start mining. If you're mining from the CLI to an address you made yourself, make sure it's MSS.
Network poolsOfficialCommunityRunning a Midstate pool? Post in this thread and I'll add it to the list.
[ANN] Midstate - Simple and Effective Post-Quantum Cryptocurrency (Rust)The quantum threat is real, and elliptic curves are on their last legs. They will work fine until one day, we will look back and say,
"Oh, that's when it didn't work anymore." Some post-quantum cryptocurrencies have already been developed, but almost all of them rely on Lattice-based cryptography. While currently believed to be quantum-resistant, the mathematical hardness of Lattices in a post-quantum world has not been definitively proven.
If we are going to build a lifeboat, we shouldn't build it out of experimental materials.
The most robust assumption in a post-quantum world is to rely on a single, battle-tested cryptographic primitive: the Hash Function.Midstate is a purely hash-based cryptocurrency built from the ground up in Rust.
⚠️ Disclaimer: Not a Speculative AssetLet me be absolutely clear upfront:
This project is not designed to make anyone money. There is no ICO. There is no premine. There is no dev tax, founder allocation, or VC funding. There is no marketing team.
Midstate is a cypherpunk engineering effort designed to solve a specific, looming cryptographic crisis. It is a lifeboat and a proof-of-concept for how a decentralized network can survive when Shor's algorithm renders traditional public-key cryptography obsolete. If you are looking for "number go up," look elsewhere. If you are interested in post-quantum network resilience, read on.
Live Network & ToolingYou don't have to compile a node to see it working. The network is live, and the browser tooling is entirely serverless (WebRTC).
How Midstate Works (The "Hash Everything" Approach)In Midstate, if you can hash, you can secure a network. There are no elliptic curves. Everything from block mining to transaction signing relies entirely on
BLAKE3, a highly parallelized and blazing-fast hash function.
- Winternitz One-Time Signatures (WOTS): Standard transactions are signed using WOTS. Private keys generate public keys via hashing, and signatures are revealed by exposing preimages. Because they are one-time-use, the wallet architecture automatically handles change and sibling UTXOs to ensure keys are never reused.
- Merkle Signature Scheme (MSS): For users who need a persistent, reusable address, Midstate wraps WOTS keys in a binary Merkle tree. A single 32-byte master public key (the Merkle root) can authorize thousands of signatures safely.
- Sequential Proof of Work: To neutralize parallel ASICs, Midstate uses a VDF-style sequential hash chain. Mining a block requires 1,000,000 strictly sequential BLAKE3 hashes. You cannot divide this math across multiple cores. This guarantees "One CPU, One Vote."
- Commit-Reveal Mempool: To prevent quantum-enabled MEV and front-running, transactions use a two-phase protocol. You first publish a Commit (a hash binding your inputs/outputs with a dynamic anti-spam PoW), and later broadcast the Reveal (the actual signatures).
Trustless WebRTC Browser WalletsThe Midstate web wallet is not a MetaMask clone talking to a centralized Infura server. It is a true Light Client running in your browser.
By utilizing
WebRTC Direct and
WASM SIMD128, the browser connects directly to the P2P swarm. It downloads Golomb-Rice compact block filters (Neutrino-style) to scan for funds without leaking addresses to the node. When you send a transaction or a chat message,
your browser natively mines the Proof-of-Work to submit it to the network.
DeFi on Bitcoin-Style UTXOs (Midscript)Midstate features a Turing-incomplete stack machine with zero gas fees. However, it introduces two powerful concepts:
Covenants (
OP_SUM_TO_ADDR) and
State Threads (
OP_READ_INPUT_STATE).
Using the live
Midscript IDE, you can write, compile, and emulate complex Smart Contracts directly in the browser. Midstate natively supports Constant Product AMMs (Uniswap style), Limit Orders, Atomic Swaps (HTLCs), and DAOs—all without the re-entrancy bugs or state-bloat of the EVM.
Provable Fair LaunchThere is no hidden pre-mine. The genesis block is mathematically anchored to a specific, historical Bitcoin block hash (000000000000000000018f5ad5625d43356136c2e50c6dc18967a90a18f0af2e). Furthermore, the entire genesis block reward (1.07 Billion units) was assigned to a human-readable text string instead of a public key, mathematically burning the entire genesis supply to prove no developer allocation exists.
Additional Features- Power-of-2 UTXOs & CoinJoin: All coins must be strict powers of 2. This identical denomination sizing allows the wallet to automatically coordinate trustless, P2P CoinJoin mixes, fracturing surveillance graphs.
- ASERT Difficulty: Uses the absolute-scheduled ASERT algorithm (16.16 fixed point math) to adjust difficulty on every single block, completely eliminating time-warp and hash-and-flee exploits.
- Q-Bolt L2: Instant, zero-fee Layer-2 payment channels routed over the Midstate P2P Ephemeral Chat bus.
- OOM Defense (Sparse Merkle Trees): Instead of an unbounded LevelDB database for state, UTXOs are aggregated into a 256-level SMT. A full node can sync, validate, and mine concurrently on a $15 Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W with 512MB of RAM.
We know the clock is ticking on ECDSA/secp256k1. Midstate is built for the day the clock strikes zero. Miners, cryptographers, and developers are welcome to join the network and help review the code.
