Where value is earned.

Four design choices.
No compromise on any of them.

Nothing here is speculative. All four are in the source, on the chain, and verifiable today.

Post-quantum by default

Every signature is ML-DSA-65 (Dilithium-3, NIST FIPS 204). A shelved quantum computer coming online next year doesn't invalidate a single UTXO. No secp256k1, no migration story, no hybrid bridge.

Memory-hard PoW

VeldHash uses a 1 GB dataset, 8 FP registers, and an epoch-rotated seed. ASIC-resistant in the RandomX tradition. Your CPU earns. GPU farms don't dominate — laptop, desktop, home rig, same dataset.

Rewards follow participation

Every block: 50% to the miner, 20% co-mining, 20% vault (stakers), 10% endorsement (validators). Combined multipliers cap at 3.00×. Drive-by extraction earns the floor; the tier ladders only open up when you stay in.

No bridges. No VM. No admin.

No cross-chain trust surface. No smart-contract VM to DoS. No pause switch, no upgrade multisig, no privileged RPC. Governance is the only protocol lever — and it requires an on-chain validator quorum.

Six ways to earn.
All from the same wallet.

Mining, staking, validating, co-mining, governance, and just holding — they all compound.

— 01 MINE

Run the client

Download VeldClient, double-click Start Mining. Your CPU hashes VeldHash (1 GB memory-hard) to find blocks. Winning miner receives a flat 50% of the block reward direct to their address — same dataset on every machine, no gatekeeping, no pool fees.

Block reward: 3.1393 VELD · ~180s cadence
— 02 STAKE

Lock VELD, earn from vault

Lock VELD for 7 / 14 / 30 / 90 days — minimum stake 1,000 VELD, exactly as mainnet will run. Longer lockups earn higher multipliers (1.00× → 1.50×). Every 480 blocks (daily) the vault distributes 90% of that cycle's inflow to all stakers proportionally — the remaining 10% stays as principal so the vault grows monotonically. No validator gate.

Vault fills with: 20% of every block · + 100% of every 100th block · retains 10% per cycle
— 03 VALIDATE

Endorse blocks, sign for rewards

Stake the 10,000 VELD validator bond and register your ML-DSA-65 pubkey. Your daemon signs each new block. Every 480 blocks (daily) the endorsement pool pays validators by endorsement count.

Endorsement pool: 10% of every block reward
— 04 CO-MINE

Get paid for near-misses

Not every hash wins — most are "near-misses" within 4× of the target. Every 100 blocks, the chain runs a uniform lottery over every miner with at least one near-miss that window. A fixed set of winners is drawn — five on small networks, twenty once active miners exceed 1,000 — and each takes an equal share of the co-mining pool. No weighting by near-miss count, no carry-over decay — every eligible miner has an equal shot every cycle. Just keep mining.

Co-mine pool: 20% of every block reward
— 05 PROVIDE

Provide pool liquidity

Pool VELD together with btcVELD (Bitcoin on the Veld chain, backed 1:1) and earn the fee on every swap — 1.00% while the pool is shallow, easing to 0.30% as liquidity deepens. The entire fee accrues to liquidity providers; there is no protocol cut. Withdraw at any time: removing liquidity is never gated, so funds are never trapped.

Swap fee: 1.00% → 0.30% by depth · 100% to providers · exit always open
— 06 VERIFY

Run your own full node

Don't trust, verify. The same client that mines runs a full P2P node: it independently validates every block, every signature, every coinbase split. Nothing about the chain's state depends on a central server you have to trust.

RAM: ~1.2 GB (VeldHash dataset) · Disk: grows with chain history

Fixed cap. Clean split.
No hidden cuts.

Every VELD in existence is minted as a block reward to a participant. No pre-mine, no treasury, no founder allocation.

Hard cap
21,000,000
VELD total · ever
Annual emission
550,000
VELD · ~38 years to cap, then fee-funded
Block reward
3.1393
VELD · every ~180 s
Pre-mine
0
none · zero allocation
3.1393
VELD / block
Every block splits four ways
MinerBlock-winner direct50%
Co-mining poolNear-miss payouts20%
VaultStakers, daily20%
EndorsementValidators, daily10%
+ every 100th block routes 100% to the vault.
+ all TX fees flow to the vault.

Longer commitments earn more. The lockup multiplier stacks with your mining tier.

Base
7 days
1.00×
Short
14 days
1.10×
Medium
30 days
1.25×
Long
90 days
1.50×

Tiers are activity-based, not cumulative. A "day" = 480 blocks (~24 h). A day counts as "active" if you mined at least one block in it. Your tier is recomputed every block from the last N days. Mine consistently and the tier climbs; stop mining and it drops — no one-time milestone unlocks a permanent multiplier.

Bronze
7 of last 14 days
1.10×
Silver
25 of last 30 days
1.25×
Gold
165 of last 180 days
1.50×
Platinum
335 of last 365 days
1.80×
Diamond
1000 of last 1,095 days
3.00×
Mine consistently to climb. Stop mining and you drop. A day counts as "active" if you mined at least one block. Your tier is computed every block from a rolling window of recent days, so there are no permanent milestones — keep mining, keep the tier.
Combined cap: Mining tier × Lockup tier, capped at 3.00×. Diamond + 90-day lockup gives the maximum weight on every vault distribution. Full math on the rules page.

Mainnet on 2026-08-30.

The public testnet is live right now, running the exact mainnet ruleset — production stake thresholds, the full Bitcoin peg, smart payments, everything. It runs to launch, gets audited against its own history, and mainnet goes live.

2026-07-06 · public testnet public testnet live 2026-08-30 · mainnet genesis
live now
Public testnet
Mainnet ruleset, open to all
2026-08-16
Launch audit
Full chain + peg review
2026-08-20
Launch prep
Thresholds + checkpoints
2026-08-30 00:00 UTC
Mainnet genesis
Block 0 · public

The full picture, on paper.

Consensus rules, post-quantum cryptography, lockup tiers, the equal-chance co-mining lottery, validator slashing, governance timelocks, and the 38-year issuance schedule. Everything you'd want to know — and a few things you probably wouldn't.

Download PDF

Three steps to a running node.
Everything else is optional.

Download the client, pick a wallet, leave it running. No sign-up, no account, no KYC — your address is your identity.

— STEP 01

Download & extract

Grab VeldClient-Windows-x64.zip from below. Extract anywhere on your PC. No install, no admin rights needed. The package is ~1.4 MB, and your node syncs from a chain snapshot on first run (seconds), or peers if declined.

— STEP 02

Double-click Start Mining

First run shows a four-option prompt: resume, import keyfile, paste a private key, or create a new wallet. Pick one — that becomes your miner's reward address.

— STEP 03

Leave it running

The node syncs with peers, then mining starts automatically. CPU spends about 100% of one core on VeldHash. Close the window to stop. Everything you earn lands at your address directly.

— FIRST LAUNCH

What you'll see

On the very first start-up, the binary prints a four-option menu right in the console:

[1] Resume previous session
[2] Log in from a keyfile (.veld-keys)
[3] Log in with a different VELD wallet
[4] Create a brand-new wallet

Your pick becomes the miner's reward address. It's encrypted to veld-data\miner.key with your passphrase. Back that file up before deleting anything.

— ADVANCED

Validator setup

Extra requirements if you want to endorse blocks for a share of the endorsement pool:

  • Stake the validator minimum on a single address (10,000 VELD)
  • Register pubkey via wallet's Validators tab
  • Keep the node online 24/7 to endorse every block
  • Payouts cadence: every 480 blocks (daily)

One binary. Node, miner, validator.

The desktop client runs a full P2P node, mines blocks, and endorses as a validator — all in a single process. Everyone has access to the ability to mine. Stay in, and the tiers compound — long-term participation is heavily rewarded.

VeldClient

~1.4 MB zip · self-contained · Windows 10 / 11 · runs without install. Extract and double-click Start Mining.bat. First launch offers an instant chain-snapshot download (skips peer IBD).

↓   Download
ZIP SHA25652e79ad8921bc54f4f2efe98db5f1073aa8ec84eda5d271c7436f31516062bae
EXE SHA25650720b1d7f2b43d29776aa600ae5720a00884133b059aecd3d027a726c63344d
1
Extract the zip anywhere — desktop, C:\Veld, a thumb drive, wherever.
2
Double-click Start Mining.bat in the extracted folder.
3
Verify (optional) in PowerShell: Get-FileHash -Algorithm SHA256 .\VeldClient-Windows-x64.zip — match the SHA256 above.