The PoW protocols that existed before Bitcoin have recently been recreated.

Author: 798.eth

Preface:

Yesterday, I published an article about a PoW protocol replica. Today, a browser-mining project on the ETH mainnet has also arrived, using v4 hooks to secure the pool’s entry point.

In the projects I’d seen before, hooks were used for economic engine design. UPEG uses hooks to stitch ERC-20 and NFTs together. SATO uses hooks to take over the pricing curve. SLOP uses hooks to automatically take swap fees to buy and burn floor NFTs. All of these treat hooks as an economic engine.

Today, I looked at one called HASH, and the logic is completely different. At its core, it’s a PoW token: a 21M cap, difficulty adjustment, halving—an entire copy of BTC. Mining runs in the browser using keccak256. The hook does not participate in the mining logic; it only does two things. First, it guards the entry point for building the pool: it must wait until the genesis sale is finished before anyone is allowed to adjust the seedPool to trigger pool creation, and the parameters must match. Second, it charges 1% in both directions on every swap and deposits it into the protocol treasury.

In other words, in this project, hooks are infrastructure. Not an economic engine—rather, a gatekeeper at launch, plus an additional protocol fee channel beyond the LP fee.

0% team, 0% VC, 0% airdrop—everything in the supply goes through public sale and PoW. To make such a thorough fair launch, it relies on hooks moving the pool-creation step from developers into the smart contract.

Not investment advice.

I only look for places with innovation.

Below is the original article:

In 5 days, 5 independent builders dug through the cypherpunk prehistory. The first is RPOW.

Bitcoin didn’t appear out of nowhere.

It had a cypherpunk lineage before it: 1997 Adam Back’s Hashcash, 1998 Wei Dai’s b-money and Nick Szabo’s Bit Gold, 2004 Hal Finney’s RPOW. Each proposal addressed part of the problem of “using PoW as electronic cash.” Hashcash provided primitives, b-money laid out an early form of decentralized settlement, Bit Gold provided an early form of transferable value, and RPOW made PoW into a reusable token. In 2008, Satoshi connected this lineage into the Bitcoin whitepaper.

Twenty-two years later, in the first 5 days of early May 2026, this lineage was collectively re-implemented by a group on X and GitHub, and the earliest replica to be copied was RPOW.

What is RPOW

In 2004, Finney published RPOW on the cypherpunk mailing list—the first PoW-based digital currency. It was centralized, running on a single server. But this server had an IBM 4758—a FIPS 140 certified hardware crypto co-processor—that could hash and sign a remote proof of the code running internally. Any user could take this proof to verify that the server was running Finney’s publicly released source code, unmodified. Centralized, but auditable. This is the real problem RPOW’s entire design solves.

In 2009, when Bitcoin launched, it gave another answer to the same problem: decentralized consensus. It cut the trusted hardware path—no single machine needed to be trusted. Finney was the first person to receive a Satoshi transfer, and he died in 2014 from ALS.

Jump forward to May 7, 2026

On that day, Fred Krueger registered rpow2.com and deployed it.

Here’s a quick overview of Krueger. From 1980 to the 1990s, he worked as a Wall Street trader at Salomon Brothers and RBS Greenwich Capital. From the 1990s to the 2000s, he consecutively founded TagWorld, iWin, Traffic Marketplace, and Adconion Media Group. According to his own statement in 2018, he exited nine times for a total of $500 million. In 2017, he entered crypto with WorkCoin. In 2022, he initiated Libre Chain, claiming it was 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-backed stablecoin yield fund where BTC is used as collateral to generate an annualized 10% cash flow. “2718” is taken from Euler’s number e. He has 244k followers on X. He’s a Bitcoin maxi, anti-Ethereum, and has publicly predicted BTC’s terminal value between $4.5 million and $10 million.

I pulled up the page from May 7; it read like this:

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

No Bitcoin features. At that time, Krueger chose a faithful replication of Finney: replacing IBM 4758 with Ed25519 plus Postgres, and copying everything else.

Over the next 48 hours

On May 8, developer cryptonaut420 (Nick Rathman) registered rpow4.com and directly copied Bitcoin’s full set of parameters: halving every 210,000 blocks, initial reward of 50 RPOW, transaction fees, treasury—everything was included.

On May 9, GitHub user ImMike launched rpowmarket.com, creating a Polymarket-style BTC up/down prediction market that brought in rpow2/3/4 as the collateral.

On May 10, EmblemVault CSO Adam McBride set up rpow2swap.com.

In 5 days: 3 forks, plus one prediction market and one DEX.

Krueger didn’t just sit and watch

Between May 9 and May 10, he changed the about page of rpow2:

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” was removed.

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.

It adds a 21M cap, difficulty adjustment, and conveniently leaves 1.1 million for a founder pre-mine. The Streamflow protocol linearly vests it over one year on Solana, and it’s named a satoshi tribute.

Satoshi’s most iconic feature is that there was no pre-mine. Anyone who wants BTC has to mine it themselves. Calling a 5.24% founder pre-mine a satoshi tribute is somewhat ironic.

Back to the most critical line on the webpage:

No IBM 4758 — Ed25519 signatures.

Ed25519 can prove that the holder of the private key signed the transaction, but it cannot prove what code the signer ran. That’s precisely what’s missing compared to Finney’s entire engineering contribution.

Krueger copied parts of Bitcoin that look like Bitcoin: the 21M cap, halving, the scarcity narrative, and the word “satoshi.” But he didn’t copy Bitcoin’s core: decentralized consensus, a trustless alternative to remote proofs, and a fair launch.

The story spills beyond RPOW

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

It’s tiny: 5 accounts, 107.5 total supply, 16 transactions. The code includes an activeContracts field, corresponding to the concept of contracts in Wei Dai’s original paper.

Mike In Space is not a random. He’s the founder of the Bitcoin Stamps protocol, the author of the SRC-20 protocol, and a writer for Bitcoin Magazine. He’s also one of the key figures behind inscribing this wave on the Bitcoin chain.

Wei Dai’s b-money predates Hal Finney’s RPOW by 6 years. No one has ever truly implemented it, because Dai’s own proposal explicitly said, “I don’t know if it can work.” Mike’s version is also clearly prototype-like, but it pushes the cypherpunk replica lineage back to an even earlier source than RPOW.

The next rational step to infer is Bit Gold (Nick Szabo, 1998), and the next after that would be DigiCash or ecash from Chaum in the 1980s. That archaeological path is already laid out.

This wave of collective behavior

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

There’s overlap within the scene. They all belong to the same lineage of Bitcoin old-timers / Counterparty / Ordinals / NFT archaeology. The Bitcoin Stamps protocol that Mike In Space built is exactly the asset type wrapped by Adam McBride in EmblemVault. This isn’t five people who don’t know each other forking independently; it’s a collective response within the same subculture over 5 days to the same meme.

Right now, on rpow2swap, rpow FDV is 0.68M. Let’s see where it goes next. Essentially, rpow is centralized—when the server is shut down, everything disappears.

But this replica lineage is still pretty interesting.

Disclaimer

This article is for recording events and engineering analysis only and does not constitute any form of investment advice. All projects mentioned in the text are clearly labeled by their respective authors as experimental, homage, or entertainment in nature.

The original webpage text for rpow2 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.

The rpowmarket disclaimer states: parody · no value · for fun.

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

Not investment advice.

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