Tessera

A post-quantum cryptocurrency built on the Bitcoin Core architecture.

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Tessera keeps the Bitcoin Core design — a UTXO ledger, Script, full-node validation, a peer-to-peer network, a built-in wallet — and replaces the cryptography that a quantum computer breaks.

That replacement is the whole point. In March 2026 a joint whitepaper from Google Quantum AI, the Ethereum Foundation and Stanford put a number on it: the 256-bit elliptic-curve discrete logarithm, the problem every Bitcoin signature rests on, falls in minutes to fewer than half a million physical qubits (arXiv:2603.28846). NIST has separately scheduled ECDSA for deprecation after 2030 and disallowance after 2035. Tessera starts on the other side of that line.

What is different from Bitcoin

• Signatures: ML-DSA-44 (FIPS 204), vendored from PQClean. There is no elliptic-curve code in the tree at all — libsecp256k1 is not present.
• Encrypted transport: ML-KEM-768 (FIPS 203) in the v2 P2P handshake, in place of the elliptic-curve exchange of BIP324. On by default, so the wire is covered as well as the coins.
• Hashing: SHA3-256 (FIPS 202) throughout — block and transaction ids, Merkle trees — and SHA3-256d for proof of work.
• Everything else is deliberately unchanged. The 2016-block difficulty retarget, the ten-minute target, the 210 000-block halving, Script. A post-quantum chain is already enough novelty for one project.

The cost is honest and worth stating: an ML-DSA-44 input is 3732 bytes against 104 for ECDSA, so a transaction is roughly 17× a Bitcoin transaction, and a payment costs proportionally more in fees at equal congestion. Nothing about the signature scheme is free.

Status

Mainnet started 12 August 2026. Genesis is mined and the parameters are fixed. The network is young and thinly connected; consensus rules may still change while it has little weight behind it, and after that they will not.

The chain begins at difficulty 1 — the same target Bitcoin's genesis used — so an ordinary CPU can mine from the first block. On a modern desktop that is a few minutes per block until the difficulty finds its level.

Binaries

Binary	Purpose
tesserad	Headless full node and wallet daemon
tessera-cli	JSON-RPC command-line client
tessera-qt	Desktop GUI wallet (Qt Widgets)
tessera-miner	Standalone multi-threaded CPU miner
tessera-wallet	Offline wallet tool
tessera-tx	Offline raw-transaction tool
tessera-util	Offline utility tool

Building

CMake and a C++20 compiler (GCC ≥ 12 or Clang ≥ 15). Per-platform instructions and the dependency list are in doc/build-unix.md, doc/build-windows.md and doc/dependencies.md.

# deps (Ubuntu 24.04): g++-14 cmake libboost-dev libsqlite3-dev libzmq3-dev
cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build -j"$(nproc)"
ctest --test-dir build              # unit tests

The wallet and ZMQ notifications are on by default. The Qt GUI (-DENABLE_GUI=ON) and multiprocess IPC (-DENABLE_IPC=ON, Unix only) are opt-in.

Running

# regtest — a private network for development
tesserad -regtest -daemon
tessera-cli -regtest getblockchaininfo
tessera-cli -regtest -generate 10
tessera-cli -regtest getnewaddress

Mining

tessera-miner fetches work over JSON-RPC, grinds SHA3-256d on every core and submits the block. It is a plain CPU miner: no GPU code ships in this tree, and anyone who wants one is free to write it.

tessera-miner -benchmark                       # this machine's hashrate
tessera-miner -address=<your address>          # mine to a running tesserad
tessera-miner -address=<addr> -threads=4       # or pin the thread count

The node's own generatetoaddress RPC exists too, but it is single-threaded and gives up after a million attempts by default — about 0.02% of what one block needs at difficulty 1. It is meant for regtest, not for mining.

Network parameters

	mainnet	testnet	regtest
P2P port	11333	21333	21444
RPC port	11332	21332	21443
Address prefix	T	t	t
bech32 prefix	tsr	ttsr	tsrrt
Data directory	~/.tessera

Repository layout

src/            node, consensus, wallet, P2P, RPC, crypto
  ML-DSA-44/    vendored FIPS 204 signature implementation
  ML-KEM-768/   vendored FIPS 203 key encapsulation
  qt/           the Qt Widgets GUI
  test/         unit tests (run via ctest)
tools/          offline helpers, including the genesis miner
doc/            build, design and interface documentation
contrib/        tooling and helper scripts

Documentation

Start at doc/README.md. Design notes are under doc/design/.

Contributing and security

Developer notes and coding style: doc/developer-notes.md.

Report vulnerabilities as described in SECURITY.md — never in a public issue.

License

MIT. See COPYING.