Aegis: A Post-Quantum Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash SystemOctober 30, 2026
I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.
The main properties:- Double-spending is prevented with a peer-to-peer network.
- No mint or other trusted parties. New downloads begin at the onion door in start.cmd.
- Tor hides the path address from the node that is called. It does not make a person impossible to identify.
- New coins are made from Argon2id style proof-of-work.
- The proof-of-work for new coin generation also powers the network to prevent double-spending.
Classical elliptic-curve signatures face exposure to quantum computation, and broadcasting over clearnet IP addresses exposes the physical topology of nodes. Aegis addresses these issues directly in a standalone implementation written in Rust.
Design details:- Network transport is strictly Tor v3 onion-native via an embedded Arti engine. Nodes communicate exclusively over .onion circuits without exchanging IP addresses or requiring router port forwarding; the public coin port stays closed, and the status page is the separate page in usage note 4. Peer discovery is handled via a local 512-slot onion address book (data\peers.txt) and optional puzzle-free seed nodes (--seed).
- Proof-of-work uses memory-hard Argon2id (1 pass, 1 lane, 256 MiB scratchpad per puzzle instance). Public mining uses up to 4 worker threads running independently across CPU cores (~1 GiB total working memory) to return block production to consumer hardware.
- Signatures use NIST-standardised lattice cryptography (ML-DSA-44) from genesis, with public transactions domain-bound (AEGIS/public|) to the genesis hash (3628a26e7ad2487acab970add22b5f9adf6496082994d8792c0e63e75c120d28). Elliptic-curve cryptography is omitted entirely.
- Difficulty adjusts continuously at every block via ASERT with a 300-second target spacing.
- Total circulation will be 21,000,000 coins (1 AEGIS = 100,000,000 QUA). Block 0 pays nothing; Block 1 and onward distribute 25 AEGIS per block, halving every 420,000 blocks (~4 years).
- Storage and wire messages use compact binary serialisation (Bincode). On the public network, the ledger separates the append-only block log (blocks.app), the Merkle state index with a rolling 1,024-block undo window (leaves.idx), and registered 1,312-byte public keys (keys.dat). Because public keys are stored on disk after an account's initial transaction, subsequent transfers omit the key and reference the sender address directly.
- Ordinary P2P frames are capped at 250 KB. Blocks up to 4 MB are relayed via compact 32-byte transaction ID lists (Names / GetTxs), and full block bodies are gated until the header's Argon2id proof-of-work is verified first.
- aegis-wallet new writes nothing to disk and opens no network port (generating keys on the same machine is not an air gap; use a separate offline system if isolation is required). You can generate your 24-word BIP39 seed with aegis-wallet new (Argon2id KDF, 32 MiB, salt AEGIS-KDF-v3). On first startup with mining enabled, the program asks once for the 24 words, saves only the public payout address (data\miner.hex), and wipes the phrase from its own memory (note that the terminal window may still display the typed line until closed).
The software is still beta, but the core consensus rules are set in stone.
Download (Windows x64 binaries aegis.exe & aegis-wallet.exe, Cargo.toml & full source):Archive (aegis-windows.zip | 6,728,330 bytes):
https://drive.proton.me/urls/M5RE6FQ0M0#YkZ4BmmUXLWA
aegis-windows.zip: 6,728,330 bytes
SHA-256: eca7bd1caaee070a49f128ddb28c04a89e5bea4483f49ddf4f299bc9477d6add
aegis.exe: 13,156,352 bytes
SHA-256: 96bb98cfcbbb5f01269b941b3b81e7960fed918aacc8d79cde6c793692c8ac38
1. Extract aegis-windows.zip into an empty folder and double-click start.cmd (do not launch aegis.exe without arguments, as that defaults to the local lab network).
2. On first launch, enter your 24 English words separated by spaces. The words are not saved to disk; data\miner.hex stores only the public receiving address for future runs, though the console window itself may continue to show the typed line. Double-clicking aegis-wallet.exe before a book exists closes the window at once. Open a command prompt in the folder and run aegis-wallet.exe new.
3. start.cmd automatically dials the initial public onion door. Initial Tor circuit bootstrap can remain quiet for several minutes; once data\mesh.name is written, mining and onion peering begin automatically.
4. With start.cmd, the read-only status dashboard opens on all network interfaces of the machine; on the machine itself, the address remains
http://127.0.0.1:8080. Keep port 8080 closed on your router. If "home dashboard bind failed (os error 10048)" appears, port 8080 is already held by another process or a previous instance; close the old aegis.exe in Task Manager (note: background P2P and mining continue even if port 8080 is occupied).
5. While standalone Core Temp is open in the background, the dashboard automatically reads CPU core temperatures and package power from CoreTempMappingObjectEx.
