What actually happens when you hold, send and mine LAX, explained without the jargon and with the real numbers.
01Wallets
No company holds your balance. Your coins sit on a public ledger, and only the holder of one secret number can move them.
Example values
Easy to compute this way. Infeasible to reverse.
A random 256-bit number. Whoever knows it controls the coins. Never share it.
044e3b81af9c2234cad09d679ce6035ed1…277956de
Derived from the private key. Lets anyone check your signatures.
0x2c7536E3605D9C16a7a3D7b1898e529396a65c23
A short fingerprint of the public key. Share it to get paid.
Easy to compute this way. Infeasible to reverse.
Your wallet generates the key on your own device. No signup, no approval, no account that someone can close.
Most wallets write the key out as 12 or 24 words. Lose them and the coins are gone for good; anyone who sees them can take the coins.
Addresses look like Ethereum's 0x… addresses, so existing wallets and hardware signers work. The same key controls the same address on both chains, so check which network you are on before sending.
02Transactions
A payment reaches every node on the network in seconds, then waits for a miner to write it into the chain.
Instant
Your wallet builds the transaction (recipient, amount, fee) and signs it with your private key. The key never leaves your device.
Seconds
The signed transaction goes to a node, which passes it to its peers. Within seconds the whole network has it.
Until mined
Each node checks the signature and the balance, then holds the transaction in its waiting room: the mempool.
~10 minutes on average
A miner picks transactions, highest fee first, and finds a valid proof-of-work. The new block goes out to every node.
+1 per block
Every block built on top adds a confirmation. The deeper a transaction sits, the harder it is to undo.
Blocks average ten minutes but don't arrive like clockwork: some come after one minute, some after twenty. Now and then two miners find a block at the same moment and the network briefly splits. It settles on the branch that gets more work on top, and transactions in the losing block go back to the mempool. Every block stacked on yours makes reversing it more expensive.
10 min
20 min
30 min
40 min
50 min
60 min
Gas price
You choose a gas price. Miners fill blocks with the best-paying transactions first, and the whole fee goes to the miner. There is no base fee and nothing is burned. When blocks have room, a low fee gets in.
Mempool, by gas price
gwei
Into the next block
Waiting for a later block
03Mining
Miners repeat one computation over and over, looking for a rare lucky result. Finding one takes enormous work; checking it takes any node a fraction of a second.
Parallax's proof-of-work. Memory-hard and derived from Ethash, but changed so existing Ethash ASICs can't run it. It runs on ordinary GPUs with Hashwarp, the official miner, or SRBMiner-Multi.
The mining loop
Illustration
Target 0x00000000ffff…
No: change the nonce, try again
Yes: block found, broadcast it
When miners join, blocks come faster; when they leave, slower. After every block, ASERT compares the chain with its ten-minute schedule and re-tunes the difficulty. For every two days the chain runs ahead of schedule, difficulty doubles; for every two days behind, it halves. Small drift gets small corrections, so block times stay near ten minutes whatever the hashrate does.
Hashrate doubles overnight
Illustration
Hashrate
Block time
10-minute target
Blocks speed up for a while, then ASERT raises the difficulty until they are back on schedule.
The winner collects the block subsidy plus every fee in the block, spendable after 100 more blocks.
04Supply
Every LAX in existence was paid to a miner for a block. There was no premine and no sale: supply at genesis was zero.
Issuance schedule
Block height →
As the subsidy shrinks, fees take over. Miners keep every fee in full, so in the long run the network's security is paid for by the people using it, not by new coins.
05Smart contracts
Parallax runs the Ethereum Virtual Machine. A contract is code stored on the chain that can hold LAX and moves it only by its own rules.
Example
An escrow
Every node runs the same code and must get the same result. Nobody can change a deployed contract unless its own code allows it.
Each step of computation costs gas, paid in LAX at the gas price you choose, like any other transaction.
Solidity, Hardhat, Foundry and MetaMask all work. The EVM matches Ethereum's as of the Berlin upgrade.
06Full nodes
A full node downloads every block and re-checks every rule itself. It doesn't trust miners, other nodes, or this website.
Nodes don't vote and miners don't set the rules. Each node follows the valid chain with the most work behind it. A block that breaks a rule is rejected by every node that checks it, no matter how much hashpower produced it. That is why a majority can't change the rules.
The client runs on an ordinary computer.
Incoming block
All pass: added to the chain
Any fail: rejected, however much work went into it
Pick a wallet, add the network and make your first transaction.
Check the genesis block, the supply and the rules with a few commands.
Chain ID 2110, the EVM as of Berlin, and what differs from Ethereum.
The full design, in the protocol's own terms.