HYBRID PARTICIPATION

One deterministic memory-hard ticket per wallet, parent and slot.

PBE does not require a minimum stake. Instead, every authorized wallet is eligible to derive a deterministic Argon2id participation proof for a given parent block and slot, while confirmed holdings can improve eligibility timing.

Ticket construction

The challenge commits to network/chain context, the parent block, slot and mining wallet identity. The same wallet, parent and slot therefore produce the same ticket rather than supporting an internal nonce-grinding loop.

Holdings multiplier

A zero-balance wallet remains eligible. Holdings influence the timing window through a bounded schedule but funds are not locked by consensus. The protocol's nominal multiplier bound is 2.50x; because final mainnet issuance is below the schedule's 100 million PBE anchor, the economically reachable all-supply multiplier is approximately 2.4558x.

Fork choice and finality

PBE 0.0.1 uses deterministic fork comparison and canonical-chain confirmation depth. It does not implement cumulative-work selection, a hard checkpoint, weak-subjectivity checkpoint or BFT finality gadget.

Open research issueMemory-hard ticket evaluation makes large-scale identity creation non-free, but it is not an identity admission gate. Distinct zero-balance wallets remain cheap to create relative to stake-based admission, and alternate-history resistance is a principal area requiring further review.

Settlement meaning

In PBE 0.0.1, a merchant-facing confirmed state means the exact payment is on the current canonical chain at or above the requested depth. It does not mean mathematically irreversible.