Tessera — a post-quantum cryptocurrency

Why

In March 2026 a joint whitepaper from Google Quantum AI, the Ethereum Foundation and Stanford put a number on the threat: 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 (NIST IR 8547). Tessera starts on the other side of that line, which is why its genesis block carries the first of those two findings rather than a slogan.

This is not a claim that Bitcoin is doomed tomorrow. It is a claim that a chain being started today has no reason to be built on a primitive with a published expiry date.

What is different

ML-DSA-44 signatures

FIPS 204, vendored from PQClean. libsecp256k1 is not in the tree.

ML-KEM-768 transport

FIPS 203 in the v2 P2P handshake, in place of BIP324's curve exchange. On by default.

SHA3 everywhere

FIPS 202 for block and transaction ids, Merkle trees, and SHA3-256d for proof of work.

Everything else unchanged

2016-block retarget, ten-minute target, 210 000-block halving, Script.

The cost, stated plainly

An ML-DSA-44 input is 3732 bytes against 104 for ECDSA. 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.

Mining

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.

A multi-threaded CPU miner ships in the tree. No GPU code does; 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

Download

Version 0.1.0. Both archives carry every binary — node, CLI, GUI wallet, CPU miner and the offline tools — and nothing needs installing: unpack and run.

Platform	File	Size
Windows x86-64	tessera-0.1.0-win64.zip	34 MB
Linux x86-64	tessera-0.1.0-x86_64-linux-gnu.tar.gz	30 MB

The Linux build needs glibc 2.38 or newer — Ubuntu 23.10, Debian 13, Fedora 39 and later. On an older distribution, build from source; the requirement comes from the machine these were built on, not from the code.

Verify what you downloaded

Checksums: SHA256SUMS.

sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS --ignore-missing

A checksum file served from the same host as the archive proves little: whoever could replace one could replace the other. The same sums are committed to the repository, so compare the two — they come from different places, and a mismatch is the point.

Build and run

git clone https://github.com/gettessera-project/tessera
cd tessera
cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build -j"$(nproc)"
ctest --test-dir build

Requires CMake and a C++20 compiler (GCC ≥ 12 or Clang ≥ 15).

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