What is BTX?

BTX is a fork of Bitcoin, built to survive quantum computers. Bitcoin signs every transaction with ECDSA, a classical elliptic-curve scheme that a large enough quantum computer would be able to break. BTX replaces it with post-quantum signatures, which is why a BTX address looks different from a Bitcoin one: BTX addresses start with btx1z.

Everything else is deliberately Bitcoin-shaped:

• A fixed supply of 21,000,000 coins, and no way to mint more.
• No premine. Coins come into existence only as a mining reward, block by block.
• Proof-of-work mining, with no permission to ask for and no gatekeeper to pass.
• Self-custody. There are no accounts, no custodian, and no sign-up. You hold the keys, and the keys hold the coins.

The chain is young. Block 0 is stamped 19 March 2026, and the first block was actually mined on 23 March 2026. At the time of writing BTX is about five months old.

Bitcoin miners search for hashes. BTX miners multiply matrices, the same dense arithmetic that modern AI accelerators are built to do. That is what "matmul" means when you see it in BTX documentation: matrix multiplication, used as the work that secures the chain.

The practical effect is that a GPU is the natural machine for BTX, and that the work is a real numerical computation rather than a hash lottery. Whether that computation is useful to anybody other than the network is a fair question, and one we tried to answer honestly by reading BTX's own specification and its shipped node:

• Does BTX's matrix proof-of-work do anything useful?

This is the single most important thing to understand about BTX mining today, because most older guides on the internet describe the chain as it was before 10 August 2026.

At block 185,000, BTX switched its mining algorithm to MatMul v4.7. The change was not a tuning pass. It changed what one mining attempt means.

Before the fork, one attempt was one nonce: a 512 by 512 matrix multiply, repeated millions of times per second. Miners reported speed in millions of nonces per second, and a healthy machine showed a large, fast-moving number.

After the fork, one attempt is a single episode: four sequential rounds through sixteen layers, on matrices 4,096 wide. One episode takes roughly 30 to 40 seconds. Speeds are now counted in episodes per minute, so the old readouts in N/s, KN/s and MN/s no longer describe anything that current builds do.

Two consequences follow, and both surprise people.

The first is that the hardware question changed. An attempt now needs far more memory and far more arithmetic than it did before, so what can mine is not what could mine in July. easyBTX handles this by measuring your machine rather than checking it against a list of chip names.

The second is that accepted shares became rare. On a Mac, expect roughly one accepted share per 40 episodes on a pool's beginner difficulty, and around one per 212 once the pool's variable difficulty settles on your machine. A miner that looks like it is doing nothing is usually just working on a long attempt. Both figures come from one Mac on Byron Bay in August 2026, the only run of its kind we have.

The full technical account, including what we measured on a private test chain before activation, is here:

• BTX changes its proof-of-work at block 185,000: what MatMul v4.7 actually does

• 19 March 2026, block 0. The genesis block is stamped. The first block is actually mined four days later, on 23 March 2026.
• Early June 2026, around block 123,000. The v0.31.0 consensus fork activates.
• 8 June 2026, block 125,000. The shielded sunset. Consensus stops accepting new shielded deposits. BTX launched with a shielded transaction pool, and its genesis message names it, but from this height what remains is the ability to view existing shielded balances and move that value back out to transparent addresses. Treat BTX as a transparent chain today.
• Mid June 2026, around block 130,500. Mining seeds are bound to the parent block, closing a shortcut where a template built against one parent could be replayed against another. The work function itself is unchanged.
• Mid June 2026, around block 132,000. A node upgrade follows.
• 10 August 2026, block 185,000. MatMul v4.7 activates and one mining attempt becomes a 30 to 40 second episode. What MatMul v4.7 actually does
• 17 August 2026, block 191,690. The chain wedges. It recovers the same day: BTX Core v0.33.3 sets a hard difficulty floor that takes effect at block 191,714, so a stalled period can no longer unwind difficulty to nothing. Nodes still running older builds park at 191,713 until they are updated. The week the chain froze, and the day it came back
• 22 August 2026, past block 197,000. The chain is producing blocks normally. Of 58 community nodes we could see, 29 were running v0.33.3, so the upgrade is well along rather than finished.

If you ever see a node whose height has stopped moving, it is worth knowing that this means two opposite things and that one number tells them apart:

• Why nodes get stuck, and how to tell if yours is

Every block pays 20 BTX to whoever mined it. That reward halves every 525,000 blocks, on the same shape of schedule Bitcoin uses, until issuance stops for good at 21,000,000 coins.

No halving has happened yet. The first one is still ahead.

The target spacing is one block every 90 seconds. In practice the chain has run faster than target over its lifetime, averaging somewhere around 66 to 81 seconds depending on which window you measure, so treat 90 seconds as the target rather than as an observation.

As of 22 August 2026 the chain was past block 197,000. That is roughly 3.96 million BTX issued, just under 19 percent of the cap. Those figures move every minute or two, so read them as a snapshot:

• Live BTX stats for current network numbers
• btxscan.io to look up any block, address or transaction yourself

We also wrote up how BTX's fast early issuance and Bitcoin's slow late issuance are the same hard-money design at different ages, which is the usual source of the "is BTX inflationary" question:

• Is BTX inflationary? BTX and Bitcoin are one hard-money design at different ages

No. BTX has a fixed 21 million supply, no premine, and coins are created only by mining. It is a Bitcoin-derived chain with no token layer, so there is no way to issue a fake token or counterfeit coins without breaking the rules every node enforces. Every coin is traceable, block by block, back to a mining reward.

We wrote a full study of what is and is not possible, the real risks (like 51% attacks), and how to verify authenticity yourself:

• Can BTX be faked? Authenticity, supply and anti-counterfeiting - the research study, plus a long FAQ

Nobody, in the sense people usually mean. There is no operator you can call and no server that holds the ledger. BTX is a public proof-of-work network: the rules are enforced independently by every node that runs the software, and blocks are produced by whoever is mining. A change to the rules only takes effect when node operators run the build that contains it, which is exactly what happened at block 185,000 and again at block 191,714.

You can see that network for yourself. As of 22 August 2026 our census found 65 reachable nodes across 16 countries, 30 of them right at the chain tip, and 12 of them serving verified attestation archives:

• Live node map - every reachable node, verified with a real handshake

easyBTX is not BTX. It is an independent, for-fun project that makes mining and holding BTX simpler. The chain would run exactly the same without it.

Mine it. easyBTX is a mining app for Mac, Windows and Linux. It joins a mining pool, so payouts arrive in small regular amounts rather than depending on your machine finding a whole block. Start at the install guide, or read how mining actually works first.

Verify it. easyNode for BTX runs a full BTX node on your own machine, so you validate every block yourself instead of trusting anyone's word about the chain. There is a step-by-step guide, a lighter pruned option called Keeper if you do not want the full chain on disk, and a free watchdog called Guardian that tells you whether a quiet node is stuck or whether the whole network is simply waiting.

Hold it. BTX is self-custodial, so a wallet is just a key you control. easyBTX has one built in, and you can also point your payouts at a wallet somewhere else entirely. The wallet page walks through the options.

• btx.dev - the official BTX project site
• btxscan.io - the block explorer, plus a public chain API at api.btxscan.io
• Live node map - the public network, node by node
• Live stats - height, issuance and network numbers

A note on pools, because this changed recently. easyBTX connects to a pool rather than mining alone, and its default on every platform is Byron Bay. A second pool, BTX Pool, is selectable on every platform, on macOS from easyBTX 0.22.1. mineBTX is paused at the time of writing, and its explorer is offline, so use btxscan.io for chain lookups.

easyBTX makes software for BTX: a miner, a node app, and some free tools. It is not the BTX core team. The chain's consensus software is written and released by the BTX project, which easyBTX has no part in and no authority over. We read their source and their releases like anyone else can.

So nothing on this page is an announcement or a promise on the chain's behalf. It is an independent reading of public sources, written so that you can check it, which is why the research archive shows its working and dates its corrections.

Two disclosures, because the alternative is letting you assume something friendlier than the truth. easyBTX has an interest in BTX doing well and takes a fee from mining, which the features page states in full. And the projects linked above are not all arms-length from us: btx.best and btxscan.io are built by easyBTX and say so in their own footers, and PQ Wallet, the bonuz wallet and qID share people with easyBTX. The chain itself, the pools and postquantum.wiki are not ours, and that first separation is the one that matters most.

BTX is very early. There is no exchange price and no guarantee that what you mine will ever be worth anything. Mine it because you find the technology interesting, not as an investment. Nothing on this site is financial advice.

Everything on this page, plus a closing directory of every address worth keeping, as a printable handbook. Useful for handing to someone who is not going to read a website.

• Read the BTX Handbook here - page by page, in your browser
• Download the PDF - English, first edition

Also in German, French, Spanish and Simplified Chinese, each with its own PDF.

We publish our own measurements rather than summaries of other people's. The archive covers the fork, the August network incidents, node health, mining economics, GPU behaviour and who actually holds BTX:

• The research archive