Midstate MDS
Purely hash-based electronic cash — no elliptic curves anywhere: sequential-BLAKE3 PoW (1M compression cycles per header), WOTS+/MSS hash signatures, power-of-2 UTXOs with native CoinJoin. Solo Rust dev, Bitcoin-anchored fair launch, and a Raspberry-Pi-first mining story.
About Midstate
sources: official materials · verified 2026-10-13Midstate (MDS) is a post-quantum L1 written solo in Rust around a single thesis: in a world after Shor's algorithm, the only battle-tested primitive is the hash function — so everything is BLAKE3. Mining is sequential hashing (one million compression cycles per block header, every nonce an independent chain); signatures are WOTS+ one-time keys (576 bytes) grouped into MSS Merkle trees (~1,024 spends per address); addresses are quantum-safe by construction. Privacy comes from structure rather than ring signatures: UTXOs exist only in power-of-2 denominations (uniform amounts break tracing), a two-phase commit-reveal mempool resists MEV and spam, CoinJoin (2–16 parties, ephemeral libp2p coordinators) and Dandelion++ routing are native. On top sits a deliberately non-Turing-complete smart-contract stack — Midscript with covenants and eUTXO-style State Threads (AMMs, limit orders, HTLCs) — plus the Q-Bolt Layer 2 (Spilman channels, submarine swaps to Base) and a research MimbleWimble sidechain (Midwimble) that anchors checkpoints back into Midstate. Launched 2026-02-24 with the genesis anchored to Bitcoin block 938,708 and genesis coins burned via text inscription; the repo was public two weeks before launch. The dev calls it 'not a speculative asset' — yet MDS trades on SafeTrade and pumped +126% on our capture day. Units: 1 gMDS = 2^30 base units — always multiply the exchange's raw quote by 1,073,741,824 before comparing prices.
How it works
- Network
- Midstate — own genesis (2026-02-24, anchored to BTC block 938,708, genesis-burn inscription), Rust, GPL-3.0, solo dev 'Nick' (@phraudsta; BTT: ciphernom)
- Consensus
- PoW sequential BLAKE3 (1,000,000 compression cycles/header) · 60s blocks · ASERT difficulty (4h half-life, 16.16 fixed-point) · Bayesian finality estimator (≤1e-6 reorg risk)
- Mining algorithm
- BLAKE3 sequential (CPU AVX2/NEON + WGSL GPU miner; edge-first: Raspberry Pi class)
- Launched
- 2026-02-24
- Hardware
- BOTH
Insights / Thesis
pow.family researchThe ciphernom interview: no elliptic curves anywhere, a failed Fiat-Shamir shortcut kept public, a working zkSTARK path deleted, Bayesian finality, and a $25 hardware floor.
2026-10-19Where each tracked PQ coin sits on the Q-day map: the NIST toolbox, three migration architectures, and the collapsing qubit clock.
2026-10-19Quick start
tested 2026-10-16~30 min · ~$0.35 to test on a rentalSolo-mine MDS on any CPU (a Raspberry Pi works)
miner: midstate node (embedded miner + local pool)- 1
# 1. Download the latest release (v4.2.0+) for your OS from github.com/ciphernom/midstate/releases
↳ 10 binary assets per release — Linux/macOS/Windows incl. ARM. MidstateAxe is a ready Buildroot OS image for Pi Zero 2 W / 3 / 4.
- 2
./midstate node --data-dir ./data --port 9333 --rpc-port 8545 --mine --threads 3
↳ The node embeds a local pool under the hood and serves its own explorer at http://localhost:8545 (plus /axe dashboard on appliance images). You can also point it at any remote pool.
- 3
# 3. Generate an MSS address for payouts, then import mined rewards:
↳ midstate wallet generate-mss --height 10 → use this for ANY pool payout (WOTS single-use addresses are the only other type — never reuse one, it exposes your key). Import mined coins: midstate wallet import-rewards --coinbase-file ./data/coinbase_seeds.jsonl
- 4
# 4. Income reality check (2026-10-16):
↳ 1 gMDS/block × 1,440 blocks/day ≈ $2.4k/day across the whole network (~1.7M nonces/s). A Pi 5 does ~100 nonces/s → ~$0.14/day illustrative. Treat mining as a lottery ticket on a $0.5M micro-cap, not income.
Pitfalls we hit
- Hash-only PQ is the most conservative post-quantum bet in this meta (vs SOQ's lattice ML-DSA, vs BNT's unbacked claim) — but WOTS+/MSS means single-use receiving addresses and 576-byte signatures; UX costs are real and visible in the wallet design.
- The dev's own framing: 'This project is not designed to make anyone money… a lifeboat and a proof-of-concept.' Take the disclaimer seriously alongside the pump.
- The author publishes his own risk list — bus factor 1, liquidity that 'does not exist', a chain with no company behind it in exactly the regulatory family that gets delisted first. Unusually honest engineering, unusually exposed project.
Tokenomics — token & supply
- Ticker
- MDS
- Maximum supply
- ~1.05M gMDS asymptote (yearly bit-shift halvings) + permanent 1-base-unit/block tail after 30 years
- Emission
- 1 gMDS/block (2^30 base units) from genesis 2026-02-24; bit-shift halving every 525,600 blocks (~1 year) — first halving ≈ 2027-02-24. Live: 335,046 gMDS = 31.9% of cap at h=335,046 (2026-10-16, height×reward verified). Units: gMDS=2^30, mMDS=2^20, kMDS=2^10.
- Reward now
- 1 gMDS/block ≈ $1.65 (until ~2027-02-24)
- Halving
- Yearly — bit-shift every 525,600 blocks (30 halvings to the 1-unit tail)
- Premine
- 0%
Analytics
luckypool-stats + cypherpunk · harvester · just nowHardware & miners
full hardware db (971 devices) → P1Exchanges & liquidity
| venue | pair | kyc | note |
|---|---|---|---|
| SafeTrade | MDS/USDT | light kyc | Only venue. Snapshot 2026-10-16: $1.54e-9 per BASE unit (= $1.65/gMDS) · +126.47%/24h · high/low 2.6e-9/0.37e-9 · ~$35.2k/24h volume ≈ 26.2k gMDS (7.8% of supply). Exchange hard-blocks bots — captured via authenticated browser. |
Reference material
cited on this page · links verified 2026-10-13Who to watch
sensors, not shills — verify before actingRisks
Micro-cap float: ≈$554k mcap, one exchange (SafeTrade), $35k/day volume during a +126% pump day with 7× intraday range — price can move violently on hundreds of dollars.
Solo-develop bus factor: one anonymous dev ('Nick'/@phraudsta, BTT ciphernom) ships everything — GPL-3 code and daily cadence mitigate, but an outage stops the project cold. The ANN-era X account (@midstate_dev) is already unreachable.
Usage ≈ zero: 16 transactions per 144 blocks (2026-10-16) — the chain is miner-only today; all value is future optionality on the tech.
Unit trap: SafeTrade quotes in base units (1.54e-9). Always ×2^30 for gMDS (≈$1.65). Also mind the dead MediShares ERC-20 sharing the MDS ticker on aggregators.
Hash-only PQ is the most conservative post-quantum bet in this meta (vs SOQ's lattice ML-DSA, vs BNT's unbacked claim) — but WOTS+/MSS means single-use receiving addresses and 576-byte signatures; UX costs are real and visible in the wallet design.
The dev's own framing: 'This project is not designed to make anyone money… a lifeboat and a proof-of-concept.' Take the disclaimer seriously alongside the pump.
No external audit: the primitives are old (WOTS+, Merkle, BLAKE3) but the composition is new — two-phase transactions, covenants, 576-byte signatures; nothing adversarial has reviewed the assembly yet.
BLAKE3 is not memory-hard — an ASIC would not need to break the design, just out-hash general CPUs. The sequential chain defers that hardware attack, it does not remove it.
The author publishes his own risk list — bus factor 1, liquidity that 'does not exist', a chain with no company behind it in exactly the regulatory family that gets delisted first. Unusually honest engineering, unusually exposed project.
tokenomics
- emission
- 1 gMDS/block (2^30 base units) from genesis 2026-02-24; bit-shift halving every 525,600 blocks (~1 year) — first halving ≈ 2027-02-24. Live: 335,046 gMDS = 31.9% of cap at h=335,046 (2026-10-16, height×reward verified). Units: gMDS=2^30, mMDS=2^20, kMDS=2^10.
- reward now
- 1 gMDS/block ≈ $1.65 (until ~2027-02-24)
- halving
- Yearly — bit-shift every 525,600 blocks (30 halvings to the 1-unit tail)
Don't confuse with
MDS — MediShares (ERC-20): Dead 2018 insurance ICO token on Ethereum (contract 0x6618…3dbE, ~$0.0002, Etherscan/CMC). Shares the MDS ticker — check the chain before comparing any price chart.
MDS — SafeTrade base-unit quote (unit trap): Not a different coin — a display hazard: SafeTrade quotes Midstate in BASE units ($0.0000000015). Multiply ×2^30 (1,073,741,824) to get gMDS, the human unit ≈ $1.65. A raw screenshot makes the coin look a billion times cheaper than it is.
catalysts
Not financial advice. Verify before deploying capital.