Author: 798.eth

Foreword:

Yesterday I published an article about the PoW protocol replication, and today a browser mining project on the ETH main chain has also arrived, using a v4 hook to guard the entry point for pool creation.

In the projects I've reviewed, hooks were used in economic engine design. UPEG used hooks to stitch ERC-20 tokens and NFTs together. SATO used hooks to manage the pricing curve. SLOP used hooks to automatically use swap fees to buy and destroy floor NFTs. These all demonstrate how hooks are designed as economic engines.

Today I looked at something called HASH, and its logic is completely different. It's essentially a PoW token, with a 21M cap, difficulty adjustment, and halving—it's a complete copy of BTC. Mining is done using a browser running keccak256. The hook doesn't participate in the mining logic; it only does two things. First, it guards the pool creation entrance, only allowing anyone to call seedPool to trigger pool creation after the genesis sale is complete, and the parameters must match. Second, it collects 1% from each swap transaction, both in the two directions, into the protocol treasury.

In other words, the hook is infrastructure in this project. It's not an economic engine, but rather the gatekeeper at the moment of launch, acting as a protocol fee channel in addition to the LP fee.

0% team, 0% VC, 0% airdrop, all supply through public sale and PoW. The reason they were able to make the fair launch so thorough is that they used hooks to move the pool creation process from the developers to the contracts.

This is not investment advice.

Only look for places that are innovative.

The following is the original text of the article:

Five days, five independent builders, dug up the history of cypherpunk. The first one was RPOW.

Bitcoin didn't appear out of thin air.

It has a cypherpunk lineage: 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 primitives, b-money provided the prototype of decentralized settlement, Bit Gold provided the prototype of circulating value, and RPOW turned PoW into a reusable token. Satoshi connected this lineage in 2008 and wrote the Bitcoin white paper.

Twenty-two years later, in the first five days of May 2026, this lineage was collectively reimplemented by a group of people on X and GitHub, with the first protocol to be replicated being RPOW.

What is RPOW?

In 2004, Finney released RPOW on the Cypherpunk mailing list, the first cryptocurrency based on Proof-of-Work (PoW). It was centralized, running on a single server. However, this server was equipped with an IBM 4758, a FIPS 140 certified hardware cryptographic coprocessor, capable of hashing and signing the code running internally to generate a remote proof. Any user could use this proof to verify that the server was running Finney's publicly available source code, unmodified, centralized yet auditable. This was the real problem that the entire RPOW design solved.

Bitcoin launched in 2009, offering a different answer to the same problem: decentralized consensus. It eliminated the need for trusted hardware; no single machine required to be trusted. Finney was the first person to receive Satoshi's transfer; he passed away in 2014 from ALS.

Jump to May 7, 2026

That day, Fred Krueger registered rpow2.com and deployed it.

A brief introduction to Krueger: From the 1980s to the 1990s, he worked as a Wall Street trader at Salomon Brothers and RBS Greenwich Capital. From the 1990s to the 2000s, he founded TagWorld, iWin, Traffic Marketplace, and Adconion Media Group, exiting nine times and accumulating $500 million, according to his own statement in 2018. In 2017, he entered the crypto world 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 in the same year launched 2718.fund , a Bitcoin fund that uses BTC as collateral to borrow stablecoins to generate an annualized cash flow of 10%. 2718 is derived from Euler's number e. He has 244,000 followers on X, is a Bitcoin maxi, anti-Ethereum, and has publicly predicted that the final value of BTC will be between $4.5 million and $10 million.

I dug out the webpage from May 7th, and it said the following:

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

It lacks Bitcoin features. Krueger at the time opted for a faithful replica of Finney, replacing the IBM 4758 with an Ed25519 and adding Postgres, while copying the rest.

In the next 48 hours

On May 8th, developer cryptonaut420 (Nick Rathman) registered rpow4.com and directly copied all the parameters of Bitcoin: 210,000 blocks halving, initial reward of 50 RPOW, transaction fees, treasury, etc.

On May 9th, GitHub user ImMike launched rpowmarket.com, creating a Polymarket-style BTC price fluctuation betting game, incorporating rpow2/3/4 as chips.

On May 10th, Adam McBride, CSO of EmblemVault, built rpow2swap.com.

Five days, three forks, one prediction market, and one DEX.

Krueger didn't sit down to watch.

Between May 9th and 10th, he modified rpow2's about page:

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 phrase "Faithful by design" is gone.

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.

They added a 21M limit, adjusted difficulties, and conveniently reserved 1.1 million for themselves as a pre-hit reward for founders. The Streamflow protocol, hosted on Solana, will be linearly vested for a year, named the Satoshi Tribute.

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

Let's go back to the most crucial sentence on that line of 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 ran. What's missing is all of Finney's engineering contributions.

Krueger copied parts of Bitcoin that resembled Bitcoin: the 21M cap, halving, the scarcity narrative, and the word "satoshi." It didn't copy parts of Bitcoin that it actually used: decentralized consensus, trustless alternatives to remote proofs, and fair launch.

Story Overflowing RPOW

On the morning of May 10th, around 06:30 UTC, Mike In Space posted b-money.replit.app on Replit, paying homage to Wei Dai's 1998 electronic cash proposal.

Small in scale: 5 accounts, 107.5 total supply, 16 transactions. The code contains an `activeContracts` field, corresponding to the `contracts` concept in Wei Dai's original paper.

Mike In Space is no ordinary person. He is the founder of the Bitcoin Stamps protocol, the author of the SRC-20 protocol, and a contributor to Bitcoin Magazine. He is one of the key figures etched into the Bitcoin blockchain in this wave.

Wei Dai's b-money predates Hal Finney's RPOW by 6 years. No one has ever actually implemented it, because Wei Dai himself stated in his proposal, "I don't know if this will work." Mike's version is clearly prototype-like, but it pushes the concept of cypherpunk revival back to an earlier origin than RPOW.

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

This wave of collective behavior

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

There's overlap at the community level. They all belong to the Bitcoin veterans/Counterparty/Ordinals/NFT archaeology lineage. Mike In Space's Bitcoin Stamps protocol is the same asset type Adam McBride packaged on EmmblemVault. This isn't five strangers independently forking; it's a collective response to the same meme within the same subculture over five days.

Currently, the Rpow FDV on rpow2swap is 0.68M. Let's see how it develops. Essentially, Rpow is centralized; if the server shuts down, everything is gone.

But this reissued line is still quite interesting.

Disclaimer

This article is for event recording and engineering analysis only 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 for entertainment purposes.

The original text on rpow2's webpage 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.

rpowmarket's disclaimer states: parody · no value · for fun.

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

No investment advice is given.

Binance co-founder He Yi has been named one of Fortune's "Most Powerful Women in Business" for 2026.

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