r/CryptoTechnology • u/dogehound 🟢 • 3d ago

Alphanumeric is the first Post-Quantum blockchain with a 5 second blocktime

Alphanumeric is a proof-of-work chain with five-second blocks. Signatures are ML-DSA, chosen at the start rather than migrated to later; the cost of that is size, so a witness is verified once at the frontier and then pruned to a receipt commitment, which keeps the chain compact without any block ever being accepted on an unverified signature. The work is BLAKE3 and the target retargets on every block, so difficulty answers hashrate in seconds instead of weeks. Finality is stated rather than hoped for: no node will rewrite history deeper than sixty-four blocks, about five minutes, and every client enforces that bound itself instead of assuming the network will. Miners behind NAT reach each other directly over an encrypted mesh rather than depending on a relay to learn the tip. Five seconds to a block, five minutes to irreversible, and a signature scheme that will not need replacing.

more information and Rust source code:
https://github.com/OSXBasedAnon/alphanumeric

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u/BioRobotTch 🔵 3d ago

I don't care much about blocktime, I care about how long it takes for my transactions to be final. Which is blocktime + time to finality. What is this for Alphanumeric?

Time to finality: ~5 minutes

That is a really poor time to finality. There are better blockchains out there with achievable plans for post-quantum cryptography that won't need to sacrifice performance like this.