Hey everyone,
An update on Blazecoin (BLZ) from me, the developer. Blazecoin launched on 23 May 2014 as a fast-block (30-second) scrypt proof-of-work fork of the Litecoin 0.8 codebase. Its 413 BLZ block reward is a tribute to Station 413. The chain has been mined continuously ever since, through the loss of its exchanges in 2019, and in 2026 it got a full v2 rebuild. The headline: on 16 September 2026 it hard-forked at block 4,250,000 to add post-quantum signatures, live on mainnet.
Here is what changed, for node operators, miners and anyone interested in the tech.
1. Same chain, modern engineInstead of leaving a 12-year-old codebase to rot, I rebased the node onto Bitcoin Core 28. It's the same chain and the same history, with no new token and no swap.
- Standard Core RPC, so the usual tooling works.
- A new desktop wallet (Windows and macOS) with transaction history export (CSV/JSON/Excel/PDF), wallet encryption with auto-lock, and a built-in CPU miner.
- The desktop wallet imports an original 2014 wallet.dat and migrates it to the modern descriptor format automatically.
- Source: github.com/AMA-CSharp-Code/blazecoin-core
2. Post-quantum signatures (ML-DSA-44)- The scheme: ML-DSA-44, the lattice-based signature standardised by NIST as FIPS 204. The hard fork activated at block 4,250,000 (16 Sep 2026, 20:18 UTC), and the first post-quantum coinbase was block 4,250,880.
- P2PQH (pay to post-quantum key hash): a new address format starting with BQ…. Moving to it is voluntary. Wallet 2.0.9 and later use BQ by default for receive, change and sweeps.
- The size cost: a post-quantum input is about 3.8 KB, against about 150 bytes for a legacy one, so a 1 MB block holds about 260 all-PQ inputs (roughly 750,000 a day at 2,880 blocks). That is ample for this chain's volume.
- Design choices: single signature with no ECDSA hybrid. Algorithm IDs are reserved, so ML-DSA-65/87 can be added later without another address format.
What it means for holders: coins on a legacy B… address are only protected while that address's public key has never appeared on-chain, i.e. you have never spent from it. To be covered, move your coins to a BQ… address.
3. Phoenix-413: per-block difficultySmall scrypt chains often die when a big miner leaves and difficulty stays stuck too high to find the next block. Since block 4,194,000 (26 August 2026), Blazecoin retargets every block with ASERT, the exponential algorithm adapted from Bitcoin Cash, with a half-life of 413 blocks. Difficulty halves for every ~3.4 hours the chain falls behind schedule, so after a sudden hashrate collapse the chain recovers in hours to about a day, not weeks.
4. Light wallets sign on your deviceThe Android and web light wallets generate keys and sign transactions on your device, so your keys never go to the server. They also check a merkle proof against the block's scrypt proof-of-work for the coins they spend, so a server can't feed them fake coins. As with any web wallet, the web version is only as trustworthy as the site that serves it; for the strongest setup, use the desktop wallet with your own full node.
Specs at a glance:Algorithm: Scrypt PoW (N=1024, r=1, p=1)
Block time: 30 s
Retarget: every block (Phoenix-413 ASERT, since 4,194,000)
P2P port: 55414
PQ hard fork: block 4,250,000 (16 Sep 2026)
PQ signatures: ML-DSA-44 (NIST FIPS 204)
PQ addresses: BQ...
Pool: Stratum port 3333, PROP, 1% fee
BLZ is an open-source hobbyist network: anyone can run a node or mine, and more independent nodes and miners are exactly what it needs. Treat it as a technical project, not an investment. I will never ask for your seed phrase or private keys.
Site:
blazecoin.co.ukWhat do you think of retrofitting a 2014 chain with NIST post-quantum standards instead of launching a new token? I'm happy to go into the design: why ML-DSA-44 over Falcon or SLH-DSA, why no hybrid, and how it fits into a 2014 UTXO chain.
