Hearth — Money Mined at Home

A people-mined, ASIC-resistant proof-of-work chain that speaks Ethereum.
Mine EMBER on the computer you already own — then deploy to it with the tools you already have.

🌐 hearth.cloudsforge.online
_{Hearth is the Mine in CloudsForge's one crypto world — mine it, trade it, mint it, spend it, play in it.}

proof of work · CPU mining · ASIC-resistant · fair launch · EVM · chain id 7411

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Status, before anything else

Hearth is an account-model, EVM-executing proof-of-work chain under construction. There is no mainnet, no testnet, no public endpoint and no EMBER of any monetary value.

The EVM is built and gated on Ethereum's published reference vectors. Consensus on the account model is not — no block has ever been produced on it. The chain that has produced blocks is the original UTXO ledger, and it is being retired.

Built and vector-gated	keccak/RLP/uint256/secp256k1 · Merkle Patricia Trie + StateDB · the interpreter (609/609 VMTests) · transactions, receipts, bloom (188/188 TransactionTests) · the state transition (20,077/20,077 GeneralStateTests) · all nine precompiles including bn128 and blake2f · the eth_* JSON-RPC surface · an EVM-aware explorer · the hearth CLI with an opcode tracer · a browser wallet on secp256k1
Proved end to end	Uniswap V2 runs on our own EVM — node/test/dex.js, 167/167, a real swap at 112,456 gas
Built and running locally	Consensus on the account model. hearthd --evm --mine produces and validates blocks and serves eth_* on 8545; two real nodes partition and reorg in node/test/evm-p2p-fork.js; docker-compose.testnet.yml runs three on chain id 7412
Not published	No endpoint anyone else can reach. Every port binds 127.0.0.1, no genesis outlives a docker compose down -v, and there is no mainnet
Measured, and open	The proof of work is 64 KiB and cannot be raised: a 2 GiB pad measures 185.7 s per evaluation and a validator pays one per block received (docs/pow-parameters.md). Making it meaningfully memory-hard needs an amortised dataset, not a constant

MAP.md is the verified inventory — every claim in it cites path:line or a command that was run. Where this README and MAP.md disagree, believe MAP.md.

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Why Hearth exists

Proof-of-work was supposed to be one CPU, one vote. Instead Bitcoin became a game for warehouse farms and a few pools, and almost everything since became a speculative chip you hoard rather than money you spend.

And the CPU-mineable, fair-launch corner of the space is full of coins with no contracts, no tooling, no wallet support and no way for anyone to build anything. Fairness that nobody can use is a moral position, not a network.

Big crypto problem	What Hearth does
Mining centralized into ASIC farms	Homefire PoW: memory-hard and CPU-friendly, so a farm earns little more per dollar than your laptop. A winning proof must be signed by the key its coinbase pays, so work handed to you cannot be redirected — see docs/mining.md for what that does and does not buy
Development captured by VCs / premines	Fair launch + an on-chain Commons treasury (10% of each block). Genesis mints zero spendable coins, checkable in about thirty seconds
The "fee cliff" (security dies when rewards end)	Perpetual tail emission funds security forever
A chain nobody can build on is a chain nobody uses	Hearth speaks Ethereum. 0x… addresses, secp256k1, 18 decimals, chain id 7411, Shanghai semantics, standard eth_* JSON-RPC — so MetaMask, ethers, viem, Hardhat and Foundry work without knowing this chain is bespoke
Too hard for normal humans	A web wallet and a browser miner that need nothing installed, and a reference node that is a full node, a wallet and a miner in one process

Full argument: WHITEPAPER.md. The specification: docs/evm-spec.md.

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The coin

• Network: Hearth · Coin: Ember · Ticker: EMBER · Chain ID: 7411 (testnet 7412)
• Decimals: 18 — specified; node/src/params.js:6 still defines 1e8 and has not moved yet
• Block time: 15 seconds · PoW: Homefire (memory-hard, CPU-friendly, ASIC-resistant)
• Emission: a deterministic integer schedule — 6 EMBER at genesis, 2-year half-life, perpetual 0.3 EMBER tail; 10% to the Commons
• Supply: uncapped, disinflationary. No hard cap and no fee burn — gas is paid to the coinbase in v1

 yr      reward   issued/yr      supply     commons    gross%
  1        4.50  11,045,161  11,045,161   1,104,516   100.00
  2        3.00   7,889,401  18,934,562   1,893,456    41.67
  5        1.13   2,761,290  31,163,132   3,116,313     8.86
 10        0.30     631,152  36,827,722   3,682,772     1.71
 30        0.30     631,152  49,450,762   4,945,076     1.28

Those are the numbers the consensus schedule produces (node/src/params.js:140-151); reproduce them with the command in docs/tokenomics.md §3. docs/coinnomics.md carries a different table from a smooth exponential model with an assumed fee burn — it is the historical design rationale and its numbers are not the chain's.

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This is a working application, not a slide deck

Everything below runs, and every number was produced by running it:

• ✅ An EVM we wrote ourselves (node/src/{crypto,state,evm,chain}/) — Keccak-256, RLP, secp256k1 recovery, uint256, the Merkle Patricia Trie, StateDB, the interpreter, the Shanghai gas schedule and all nine precompiles. No @ethereumjs/*, no ethers, no web3, no runtime dependency of any kind
• ✅ Gated on Ethereum's own vectors — 609/609 VMTests, 20,077/20,077 GeneralStateTests, 188/188 TransactionTests, plus RLP and Trie tests. No component is done until its vectors pass
• ✅ Uniswap V2 runs on it — node/test/dex.js deploys the factory, router, pair and WEMBER, adds liquidity, swaps, swaps back, exercises permit and removes liquidity. 167/167, swap at 112,456 gas against mainnet's ~150,000
• ✅ the eth_* JSON-RPC surface (node/src/jsonrpc/) — 41 methods, 422 checks against a fake chain and 170 against a real one over HTTP; strict QUANTITY/DATA encoding, batches, notifications, revert payloads as code 3. Mounted on 8545 by node/src/evmnode.js
• ✅ hearth, the terminal tool — trace (an opcode-level debugger with gas, stack, memory and storage deltas per step), watch, wallet, call, send, deploy, devnet. 310 checks
• ✅ an EVM-aware block explorer (web/) — decoded logs, revert reasons, EOA-vs-contract with disassembly, ERC-20s, eth_getLogs search. Zero dependencies, no build step, and it renders "no node answered" rather than inventing data
• ✅ a non-custodial browser wallet on secp256k1 — its crypto is a port of the node's, and CI runs both over the same random inputs and compares them. That cross-check found a real gas bug in the node on its first run
• ✅ a developer kit (tools/) — a faucet, working Hardhat and Foundry templates, and an RPC probe that serves the real method surface over a fake chain
• ✅ contract verification (tools/verify/, 116/116) — including the API forge verify-contract speaks — and 🟡 an Etherscan-compatible /api (tools/explorer-api/: account, contract, stats, transaction, logs, proxy over a real address index) whose test suite currently fails. Zero dependencies; no chain to serve either of them yet
• ✅ property fuzzing (node/test/fuzz/) — random bytes into uint256, the trie, RLP, transactions and the interpreter. It found two real defects in merged code and reports rather than patches; both are listed in SECURITY.md
• ✅ a real proof-of-work network (the UTXO chain) — most-work fork choice with reorg over real sockets, P2P gossip, LWMA difficulty, disk persistence
• ✅ browser mining — a Web Worker pool running real Homefire, checked digest-for-digest against the node in CI
• 🟡 a Rust crate (rust/hearthd) — a self-check and a PoW benchmark. Not a node and not consensus-compatible, and it has no EVM at all — see docs/why-two-implementations.md

Two honest caveats about that list. None of it has been driven by a block — consensus on the account model is the missing phase. And web/pay-demo.html is a merchant-button mockup that simulates settlement on a timer; there is no payment SDK.

npm test passes from a clean clone — 27 suites, no install, no corpus and no network. Verified by cloning this repository into an empty directory and running it. Fetching the reference corpus completes two of them: blake2f goes 43/43 → 46/46 and bn128's one skipped case runs.

The caveat that used to matter most is closed. docs/robustness-review.md measured StateDB re-rooting both tries on every single mutation: a single 30M-gas transaction cost 443 MB of retained heap and 65 seconds of CPU, against a 15-second block time. Hashing is deferred to root() now and the same transaction measures 5.2 s and 9.2 MiB, gated by node/test/bench/block-execution.js.

The caveat that matters most now is the proof of work: every block ever produced used a 64 KiB pad, the 2 GiB the documents promised measures at 185.7 s per evaluation, and closing that gap is a redesign rather than a constant (docs/pow-parameters.md).

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Try it now

1 — Run the test suites (needs Node 18+, no install, no network):

cd node
node test/interpreter.js      # 194 checks
node test/statetransition.js  # 133 checks
node test/jsonrpc.js          # 422 checks
node test/cli.js              # 310 checks
node test/fuzz/run.js         # 82,481 property-fuzz checks

2 — Run the real conformance gate (fetches ~350 MB of Ethereum's corpus):

cd node && ./scripts/fetch-vectors.sh
node test/conformance/runner.js --impl=test/interpreter.js \
     --dir=test/conformance/vectors/VMTests --no-gas          # 609/609
node test/conformance/runner.js --impl=test/statetransition.js \
     --suite=GeneralStateTests --dir=test/conformance/vectors  # 20,077/20,077

3 — Watch Uniswap V2 execute on our EVM:

pnpm --dir contracts install && pnpm --dir contracts compile
cd node && node test/dex.js                                    # 167/167

4 — Point your tooling at something — there is no endpoint, so serve the real RPC layer over a fake chain:

node tools/rpc-probe/stub.js --port 8745
cast chain-id --rpc-url http://127.0.0.1:8745                   # 7411

Full walkthrough, with every step marked [RUN], [PROBE] or [WAITING]: docs/quickstart.md.

5 — Boot the UTXO network (the chain that actually produces blocks today):

docker compose up --build      # seed + 2 miners + web on :8080

No Docker? ./scripts/run-local-network.sh. Details: docs/network.md.

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Repository layout

hearth/
├── README.md · WHITEPAPER.md · MAP.md   the pitch, the argument, and the verified inventory
├── docs/                                evm-spec (authoritative) · decisions · quickstart ·
│                                        network-config · tokenomics · exchange-integration ·
│                                        listing-checklist · mining · records · architecture ·
│                                        robustness-review (measured) · testing (coverage)
├── node/                                the reference node — AND the EVM implementation
│   ├── src/crypto  src/state  src/evm  src/chain  src/jsonrpc   the account-model chain
│   ├── src/*.js                                                 the UTXO chain, being retired
│   ├── src/cli/  bin/hearth.js                                  the terminal tool + tracer
│   └── test/  test/conformance/  test/fuzz/                     27 suites + vectors + fuzzing
├── contracts/                           WEMBER, a Uniswap V2 port, Multicall3 (compiled, undeployed)
├── tools/                               faucet · hardhat · foundry · rpc-probe · metamask.md ·
│                                        explorer-api (Etherscan-compatible /api) · verify
├── web/                                 EVM explorer + secp256k1 wallet + browser miner
├── site/                                the marketing site (React)
├── rust/hearthd/                        a self-check and a benchmark — not a node
├── proto/                               teaching scripts (the emission model is NOT consensus)
└── .github/workflows/ci.yml             six jobs; `npm test` is the single source of truth

Contributing

Hearth is a commons. See CONTRIBUTING.md. Highest-leverage areas right now: publishing the testnet (it runs on loopback and nothing routes it), an amortised proof of work so the memory-hardness argument is more than a construction (docs/pow-parameters.md), and closing the items in docs/listing-checklist.md §7. Contract verification is already built (tools/verify/, 116/116) and the Etherscan-compatible /api shim is built and green (tools/explorer-api/) — both are waiting on a chain to serve.

Security

Please report vulnerabilities privately — see SECURITY.md. There is deliberately no security@ mailbox yet, and that is tracked rather than papered over.

License

MIT — money should be free to fork.

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_{Keywords: Hearth, EMBER, cryptocurrency, proof of work, CPU mining, ASIC resistant, memory-hard proof of work, EVM chain, EVM implementation, Ethereum JSON-RPC, chain id 7411, Solidity, Uniswap V2, decentralized digital cash, mine crypto at home, no premine, fair launch, crypto wallet, block explorer, blockchain node, tail emission.}

How this was built

Parts of this repository were produced with AI assistance, and it seems worth saying so plainly rather than leaving it to be inferred.

• Code — written with Claude Opus 5 and Claude Opus 4.8 (Anthropic), reviewed and directed by a human, and gated on the same tests and CI as anything else here.
• Artwork — brand marks, icons and in-game art generated with OpenAI's image models (GPT Image 1, 1.5 and 2), driven by the manifest pipeline in asset-forge.

The models were used under paid API access and the output is the project's to use. Nothing here is claimed to be hand-written that is not, and nothing is claimed to work that has not been tested. The conformance-vector discipline exists partly for this reason: an implementation is judged by whether it passes the reference vectors, not by who or what wrote it.