Author: 798.eth
Preface:
Yesterday, I published an article about replicating a PoW protocol; today, a browser mining project on the Ethereum mainnet has also launched, using the v4 hook to secure the pool entry point.
Previous projects I’ve seen have used hooks to design economic engines. UPEG uses hooks to stitch together ERC-20 and NFTs. SATO uses hooks to take control of the pricing curve. SLOP uses hooks to automatically use swap fees to buy and burn floor NFTs. All of these treat hooks as economic engines.
Today I looked at HASH, which has a completely different logic. It is fundamentally a PoW token with a 21M supply cap, difficulty adjustment, and halving—all copied from BTC. Mining runs in the browser using keccak256. The hook does not participate in mining logic; it only does two things. First, it guards the pool creation entry point, allowing anyone to call seedPool to trigger pool creation only after the genesis sale is complete, and only if the parameters match. Second, it collects a 1% fee on each side of every swap into the protocol treasury.
In other words, the hook is infrastructure within this project—not an economic engine, but a gatekeeper at launch, plus a protocol fee channel beyond the LP fee.
0% team, 0% VC, 0% airdrop—all supply goes to public sale plus PoW. Achieving such a彻底 fair launch is made possible by using a hook to move the pool creation process from the developers’ hands into the contract.
Not investment advice.
Look only for areas with innovation.
Below is the original article:
Five days, five independent builders, digging into the prehistory of cypherpunk. The first was RPOW.
Bitcoin did not appear out of thin air.
There was a cypherpunk lineage preceding 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 addressed a part of the problem of using PoW as electronic cash. Hashcash provided the primitive, b-money introduced the雏形 of decentralized settlement, Bit Gold offered the雏形 of tradable value, and RPOW turned PoW into a reusable token. Satoshi connected this lineage in 2008 with the Bitcoin whitepaper.
Twenty-two years later, over five days in early May 2026, a group of people collectively reimplemented this lineage on X and GitHub, with the RPOW protocol being the first to be replicated.
What is RPOW?
In 2004, Finney released RPOW on the cypherpunk mailing list, the first proof-of-work-based electronic currency. It was centralized, running on a single server, but that server was equipped with an IBM 4758, a FIPS 140-certified hardware cryptographic coprocessor capable of hashing and signing a remote attestation of its own running code. Any user could verify that the server was running Finney’s publicly available source code and had not been tampered with—centralized, yet auditable. This was the core problem RPOW was designed to solve.
In 2009, Bitcoin launched with another answer to the same problem: decentralized consensus. It eliminated the need for trusted hardware—no single machine needed to be trusted. Finney was the first person to receive a transaction from Satoshi and passed away in 2014 due to ALS.
Jump to May 7, 2026
On that day, Fred Krueger registered rpow2.com and deployed it live.
Krueger began his career as a Wall Street trader at Salomon Brothers and RBS Greenwich Capital during the 1980s and 1990s. From the 1990s to the 2000s, he co-founded TagWorld, iWin, Traffic Marketplace, and Adconion Media Group, claiming in 2018 that his nine exits generated a cumulative $500 million. In 2017, he entered the crypto space with WorkCoin. In 2022, he launched Libre Chain, claiming it 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同年 launched 2718.fund, a Bitcoin fund that generates an annualized 10% cash flow by collateralizing BTC to borrow stablecoins—2718 referencing Euler’s number e. He has 244,000 followers on X, identifies as a Bitcoin maxi, opposes Ethereum, and has publicly predicted Bitcoin’s terminal value between $4.5 million and $10 million.
I pulled up the webpage from May 7th, and it said this:
No IBM 4758 — Ed25519 signatures, magic-link authentication, Postgres ledger. Still centralized. Still no supply cap. Still no difficulty adjustment. Faithful by design.
No Bitcoin characteristics. Krueger at the time chose to faithfully replicate Finney, replacing the IBM 4758 with Ed25519 and Postgres, and copying everything else.
In the next 48 hours
On May 8, developer cryptonaut420 (Nick Rathman) registered rpow4.com, directly copying Bitcoin’s full parameters: a halving every 210,000 blocks, an initial reward of 50 RPOW, transaction fees, and a treasury.
On May 9, GitHub user ImMike launched rpowmarket.com, creating a BTC price prediction market in the style of Polymarket, integrating rpow2/3/4 as tokens.
On May 10, EmblemVault CSO Adam McBride launched rpow2swap.com.
5 days, 3 forks, one prediction market, and one DEX.
Krueger didn't sit back and watch
Between May 9 and 10, he updated the about page for 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.
"Faithful by design" is gone.
The next section 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.
Added a 21M supply cap, difficulty adjustments, and casually reserved 1.1 million founder pre-mine. Linear vesting over one year on Solana, named Satoshi Tribute.
Satoshi's most defining characteristic is no pre-mine. Anyone who wants BTC must mine it themselves. Calling the 5.24% founder pre-mine a "Satoshi tribute" is somewhat ironic.
Return to the most critical sentence on the webpage.
No IBM 4758 — Ed25519 signatures.
Ed25519 can prove that the party holding the private key signed this transaction, but it cannot prove what code that party ran. That’s exactly the gap in Finney’s entire engineering contribution.
Krueger copied the parts that make Bitcoin look like Bitcoin: the 21M cap, halving, scarcity narrative, and the term "satoshi." He did not copy the parts that make Bitcoin truly Bitcoin: decentralized consensus, trustless remote attestation, and fair launch.
Story overflows RPOW
On May 10 at approximately 06:30 UTC, Mike In Space deployed b-money.replit.app on Replit, honoring Wei Dai’s 1998 proposal for electronic cash.
Small scale: 5 accounts, 107.5 total supply, 16 transactions. The code includes an activeContracts field, corresponding to the contracts concept in Wei Dai's original paper.
Mike In Space is not an outsider. He is the founder of the Bitcoin Stamps protocol, the author of the SRC-20 protocol, and a contributor to Bitcoin Magazine. One of the key figures behind this wave of on-chain inscriptions on Bitcoin.
Wei Dai’s b-money predates Hal Finney’s RPOW by six years. It was never actually implemented, as Wei Dai himself explicitly stated in his proposal, "I don’t know if this will work." Mike’s version is clearly prototypical, but it pushes the replication of cypherpunk ideals back to an even earlier origin than RPOW.
The next logical step is Bit Gold (Nick Szabo, 1998), followed by DigiCash or Chaum’s eCash from the 1980s. This archaeological path is already 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—all belong to the same lineage of Bitcoin veterans, Counterparty, Ordinals, and NFT archaeology. The Bitcoin Stamps protocol created by Mike In Space is precisely the type of asset packaged by Adam McBride on EmblemVault. This isn’t five unrelated individuals independently forking; it’s a collective response within the same subculture to the same meme over five days.
Currently, the RPOW FDV on rpow2swap is $0.68M; let's see how it develops. Fundamentally, RPOW is centralized—once the server shuts down, nothing remains.
But the replicated line is still quite interesting.
Disclaimer
This article is for event documentation and engineering analysis only and does not constitute any form of investment advice. All projects mentioned herein are explicitly labeled by their respective authors as experimental, tributory, or for entertainment purposes.
The original webpage of rpow2 states:
This is a centralized system. The ledger resides in a Postgres database managed 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.
rpowmarket's disclaimer reads: parody · no value · for fun
b-money.replit.app is a freely hosted prototype.
Not investment advice.