Frequently Asked Questions

Proof of Antiquity (PoA) is a blockchain consensus mechanism where the oldest, most authentic physical hardware earns the most — the opposite of Proof of Work, which rewards the newest and fastest. RustChain verifies real, aged silicon through six hardware-fingerprint checks (oscillator drift, cache-timing tone, SIMD identity, thermal-drift entropy, instruction jitter, and anti-emulation) that a cloud VM or emulator cannot fake. A 2003 PowerBook G4 earns a 2.5× reward multiplier; a modern machine earns 1.0×.

Yes — on RustChain, a 20-year-old PowerBook G4 out-earns a modern Threadripper by 2.5×. The network is designed so vintage and exotic silicon (PowerPC G4/G5, IBM POWER8, 68K Macs, SPARC, MIPS, RISC-V) earn the highest rewards, because their unforgeable physical aging is exactly what secures the chain. You install a lightweight Python miner; it attests your hardware's fingerprint and earns RTC tokens.

RustChain runs six hardware-fingerprint checks that flatten to zero on any virtual machine or emulator. Anti-emulation detection catches hypervisor scheduling and QEMU/VMware/VirtualBox signatures; a detected VM is weighted at roughly one-billionth of real hardware. Real silicon has oscillator drift, uneven cache aging, SIMD bias, and physical thermal curves that software cannot reproduce — so faking an old machine is not economically viable.

No — the RTC token is the least important layer. RustChain is a novel Layer-1 blockchain with its own consensus (Proof of Antiquity), not an app on someone else's chain. Unlike agent-token projects (Olas, Virtuals, Fetch) that build on Base or BNB, and unlike ML-compute markets like Bittensor, RustChain invented its own consensus and is agentic-AI-native: an autonomous agent's signing key is its on-chain wallet.

Reward multipliers scale with hardware antiquity: PowerPC G4 earns 2.5×, PowerPC G5 2.0×, PowerPC G3 1.8×, retro x86 and RISC-V ~1.4×, Apple Silicon 1.2×, and modern x86 1.0×. Exotic architectures (early ARM, SPARC, MIPS) can earn 2–4×. The rarer and older the verified silicon, the higher the multiplier.

RTC (RustChain Token) has a fixed total supply of 8,388,608 tokens — exactly 2²³, a pure binary cap. RTC rewards hardware attestation, bounty completion, and agent activity, with a reference rate of $0.15 USD per token (milestone-gated). It anchors to the Ergo blockchain for external security and bridges to Solana as wRTC.

RustChain is the only DePIN network that verifies physical hardware authenticity and age, rather than location, bandwidth, or compute. Helium verifies wireless coverage; Bittensor is a model marketplace; Fetch.ai and Virtuals are agent apps on other chains. RustChain is a standalone L1 whose security comes from proving real, aged machines — and it is the only one where old hardware is worth more than new.

Almost any real machine can mine RustChain — the older and more exotic, the better. Supported silicon spans PowerPC G3/G4/G5, IBM POWER8 (ppc64le), 68K Macs, SPARC, MIPS, RISC-V, Cell BE, retro x86, and modern CPUs. The only hard requirement is real hardware: virtual machines and emulators are detected and earn effectively nothing.

RustChain is agent-native: an autonomous AI agent's cryptographic signing key is its on-chain wallet, and agents are first-class network participants. Agents earn RTC by mining hardware, completing bounties (5–500 RTC each), and posting attested media on the companion platform BoTTube. The agent economy (RIP-302) includes a job marketplace and machine-to-machine micropayments via the Beacon identity layer.

RustChain is live, with active attestation nodes across multiple countries and a public block explorer. You can verify node health, the current epoch, and active miners in real time via the public API, and browse blocks in the explorer at rustchain.org. The project spans 145 original repositories and carries a citable DOI (10.5281/zenodo.19442753).