Author: 798.eth

Preface:

Yesterday I published an article about replicating the PoW protocol, and today the browser mining project on the eth main chain has also come, using the v4 hook to guard the entrance to the creation of the pool.

The few projects I have seen before use hooks for economic engine design. UPEG uses hooks to stitch ERC-20 and NFTs together. SATO takes over the pricing curve with hooks. SLOP uses hooks to automatically use swap fees to buy and destroy floor NFTs. All of these treat hooks as the design of the economic engine.

Today I looked at something called HASH, and the logic is completely different. It is essentially a PoW token, with a cap of 21M, difficulty adjustment, halving, a whole set that copies BTC. Mining uses a browser to run keccak256. Hooks do not participate in the mining logic, only doing two things. The first thing is to guard the entrance to the creation of the pool; it must wait until the genesis sale is over before allowing anyone to adjust the seedPool to trigger the creation of the pool, and the parameters must also match. The second thing is to collect 1% from each swap in both directions into the protocol treasury.

In other words, hooks are infrastructure in this project. They are not the economic engine, but the gatekeeper at the moment of launch, plus an additional layer of protocol fee channel beyond the LP fee.

0% team, 0% VC, 0% airdrop, the entire supply goes through public sale plus PoW. The ability to make a fair launch this thorough relies on hooks moving the pool creation process from the hands of the developers to the contract.

This is not investment advice.

Only looking for places with innovation.

Below is the original text of the article:

In 5 days, 5 independent builders went through the history of cypherpunk. The first one is RPOW.

Bitcoin did not appear out of nowhere.

There is a lineage of cypherpunk before it: Adam Back's Hashcash in 1997, Wei Dai's b-money and Nick Szabo's Bit Gold in 1998, and Hal Finney's RPOW in 2004. Each of these proposals solved part of the problem of "using PoW as electronic cash." Hashcash provides the primitives, b-money gives a prototype of decentralized settlement, Bit Gold presents a prototype of circulating value, and RPOW makes PoW into a reusable token. In 2008, Satoshi connected this lineage and wrote the Bitcoin white paper.

22 years later, in the first 5 days of May 2026, this lineage was collectively re-implemented by a group of people on X and GitHub, with the first protocol replicated being RPOW.

What is RPOW

In 2004, Finney released RPOW on the cypherpunk mailing list, the first electronic currency based on PoW. Centralized, running on a single server. But this server is equipped with an IBM 4758, a FIPS 140 certified hardware cryptographic coprocessor, which can hash and sign a remote proof of the code running internally. Any user can take this proof and verify that the server is running Finney's publicly available source code, unchanged, centralized but auditable. This is the fundamental problem that RPOW's entire design solves.

In 2009, Bitcoin launched, providing another answer to the same problem: decentralized consensus. It cut off the path of trustworthy hardware; no machine needs to be trusted. Finney was the first person to receive a transfer from Satoshi and passed away in 2014 due to ALS.

Timeline jumps to May 7, 2026

On that day, Fred Krueger registered rpow2.com and deployed it online.

Let me briefly introduce Krueger. From the 1980s to 1990s, he worked as a Wall Street trader at Salomon Brothers and RBS Greenwich Capital. In the 1990s to 2000s, he founded TagWorld, iWin, Traffic Marketplace, and Adconion Media Group. According to his own statement in 2018, he exited nine times, accumulating $500 million. In 2017 he entered the crypto space to work on WorkCoin. In 2022 he initiated Libre Chain, claiming to be the first decentralized lending market on Bitcoin. In 2025 he co-authored The Big Bitcoin Book and Bitcoin One Million with Ben Sigman, and the same year he initiated 2718.fund, a Bitcoin fund that produces an annualized cash flow of 10% by mortgaging BTC to borrow stablecoins, with 2718 derived from Euler's number e. He has 244,000 followers on X, is a Bitcoin maximalist, anti-Ethereum, and has publicly predicted BTC's terminal value to be between $4.5 million and $10 million.

I pulled up the webpage from May 7; it was written like this:

No IBM 4758 — Ed25519 signatures, magic-link auth, Postgres ledger. Still centralized. Still no supply cap. Still no difficulty adjustment. Faithful by design.

No Bitcoin characteristics. Krueger at that time chose to faithfully replicate Finney, replacing IBM 4758 with Ed25519 plus Postgres, and copied everything else.

Within the next 48 hours

On May 8, developer cryptonaut420 (Nick Rathman) registered rpow4.com and directly copied the entire set of Bitcoin parameters: 210,000 blocks for one halving, an initial reward of 50 RPOW, transaction fees, treasury, everything included.

On May 9, GitHub user ImMike launched rpowmarket.com, creating Polymarket-style BTC rise and fall betting markets, integrating rpow2/3/4 as chips.

On May 10, EmblemVault CSO Adam McBride set up rpow2swap.com.

In 5 days, there were 3 forks, one prediction market, and one dex.

Krueger did not sit back and watch

Between May 9 and 10, he modified the about page of rpow2:

Still centralized — but Bitcoin-flavored where it counts: a fixed 21,000,000 supply cap, and a stepped difficulty adjustment that adds one trailing zero bit for every 1,000,000 coins minted.

The sentence "Faithful by design" was removed.

The next paragraph is even more worth reading:

Founder allocation: 1,100,000 SRPOW (5.24% of the 21M cap) was allocated at launch as a "satoshi" tribute, vested linearly over one year via the Streamflow protocol on Solana.

It added a 21M cap, a difficulty adjustment, and casually kept 1.1 million for founder pre-mining. The allocation is named "satoshi tribute" with linear vesting over one year on the Streamflow protocol hosted on Solana.

Satoshi's most distinctive feature is the lack of pre-mining. Anyone wanting BTC has to mine it themselves. Calling 5.24% founder pre-mining a satoshi tribute is somewhat ironic.

Returning to the most crucial sentence on the webpage.

No IBM 4758 — Ed25519 signatures.

Ed25519 can prove that the party holding the private key signed the transaction, but it cannot prove what code the party holding the private key is running. That negates all of Finney's engineering contributions.

Krueger copied the parts that look like Bitcoin from Bitcoin: 21M cap, halving, scarcity narrative, the word satoshi. He did not copy what is Bitcoin: decentralized consensus, trusting substitute for remote proof, fair launch.

The story spills over RPOW

On May 10, around 06:30 UTC, Mike In Space launched b-money.replit.app on Replit, paying tribute to Wei Dai's 1998 electronic cash proposal.

It was a tiny scale: 5 accounts, 107.5 total supply, 16 transactions. There is an activeContracts field in the code corresponding to the contracts concept in Wei Dai's original paper.

Mike In Space is not a bystander. He is the founder of the Bitcoin Stamps protocol, author of the SRC-20 protocol, and a contributor to Bitcoin Magazine. He is one of the core figures marking this wave on the Bitcoin chain.

Wei Dai's b-money is 6 years earlier than Hal Finney's RPOW. No one has ever truly implemented it because Wei Dai himself clearly stated in his proposal, "I don't know if this will work." Mike's version is also clearly a prototype, but it pushes the replication of cypherpunk back to an even earlier source than RPOW.

A reasonable next stop is Bit Gold (Nick Szabo 1998), and the next after that is DigiCash or Chaum's ecash from the 1980s. This archaeological path has already been laid out.

This wave of collective behavior

5 independent builders: Krueger, cryptonaut420, ImMike, Adam McBride, Mike In Space.

There is overlap at the community level. They all belong to the Bitcoin veteran / Counterparty / Ordinals / NFT archaeology lineage. The Bitcoin Stamps protocol that Mike In Space created is precisely the asset type packaged by Adam McBride at EmblemVault. This is not five mutually unacquainted individuals independently forking, but a collective response within the same subculture to the same meme over the course of 5 days.

Currently, the rpow2swap shows an rpow fdv of 0.68M; we’ll see how it develops later. Essentially, rpow is centralized; if the server goes down, everything is gone.

However, the replication line is still quite interesting.

Disclaimer

This article serves only as an event record and engineering analysis and does not constitute any form of investment advice. All projects mentioned in the article are clearly marked by their respective authors as experimental, tribute, or entertainment in nature.

The original text on the rpow2 website clearly states:

this IS a centralized system. The ledger lives in a Postgres database operated by one person on rented infrastructure. If that server is breached, lost, or seized, your tokens may be lost with it. No warranty, no recovery guarantees.

The disclaimer on rpowmarket states: parody · no value · for fun.

b-money.replit.app is a freely hosted prototype.

No investment advice.

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