Parallax for Bitcoiners

Everything Bitcoin fixed, Parallax keeps: 21 million coins, proof-of-work, ten-minute blocks, a launch with no premine. What it adds is the half Bitcoin deliberately left out — contracts that settle in the scarce asset itself. Here is exactly what changed, and what it cost.

What is identical

Bitcoin's monetary constitution, adopted whole. These are constants, not policies.

21,000,000 coins, halving schedule and all
A 50 LAX subsidy halves every 210,000 blocks, converging on 21 million — Bitcoin's schedule to the coin. The schedule is the entire monetary history, past and future. It does not respond to adoption, to crisis, or to argument.
Proof-of-work at ten-minute blocks
Nakamoto consensus with a 600-second target. At ten minutes, propagation is a negligible fraction of the interval, proximity advantages approach zero, and a modest machine on a residential connection verifies the chain as authoritatively as any industrial operation.
A fair launch you can check
Source code public before launch, launch date announced in advance, supply at genesis: zero. The genesis block embeds a launch-day newspaper headline, exactly as Bitcoin's did — the chain could not have been constructed before the news.
100-block coinbase maturity
Newly mined coins are spendable only after 100 more blocks are built on top of them. A miner's revenue is bound to the permanence of the chain they extend — honesty by arithmetic, not ethics.
Fees to miners, nothing burned
A first-price auction, paid to the miner in full. Fee revenue is the network's entire security budget once the subsidy decays; a protocol that burns fees is purchasing present scarcity with its future defense.

What is different — and why

Four deliberate departures, each with its reasoning on record.

The EVM, complete through Paris
Credit, exchange, escrow — every instrument historically built atop scarce money can be built here without a custodian, a wrapper, or a peg. Contracts hold, move, and settle the base asset directly: agreements that execute exactly as written, against money that cannot be diluted.
Accounts instead of UTXOs
Balances live under secp256k1 keys with Ethereum-style addresses, so existing key infrastructure — hardware signers included — operates unchanged. The trade-off is candidly stated: the account model makes address reuse the path of least resistance, and reuse links activity. Treat addresses as disposable where privacy matters.
ASERT difficulty, adjusted every block
Parallax launched with Bitcoin's 2016-block retarget. Under a severe hashrate decline the window proved manipulable, and the network migrated to ASERT at block 17,560. Both the flaw and its repair are recorded on-chain — a protocol that hides its scars is asking to be trusted. Parallax asks only to be verified.
XHash instead of SHA-256
Memory-hard and Ethash-derived, altered precisely so the existing stock of Ethash ASICs cannot be reused. A proof-of-work network is most fragile in its early years; XHash ensures security in those years is supplied by widely held GPUs rather than by whoever owns the residue of another chain's arms race.

What you should be skeptical about

The honest ledger of a young chain. Verify everything; discount anything we cannot show you.

It is young
Mainnet launched October 28, 2025. Hashrate, node count, and liquidity are a fraction of Bitcoin's, and reorganizations are correspondingly cheaper — wait more confirmations for large amounts. Time is the filter, and Parallax has not yet passed through much of it.
Provenance, stated plainly
Consensus, mining, and difficulty adjustment are original, clean-room work. The EVM execution layer is reused from go-ethereum — deliberately: a battle-tested interpreter over a novel one. Anyone claiming Parallax shares no code with other chains would be wrong, so we do not claim it.
Not a Bitcoin replacement
Parallax regards Bitcoin as the ultimate form of digital sound money. This is a complementary experiment — extending Bitcoin's monetary discipline into a programmable environment — with its own risks. If what you want is money at rest, Bitcoin already exists.
Verify the claims on-chainCompare feature by feature