Deterministic evaluation.
The portable integer implementation defines the exact result. Every accelerated implementation must reproduce it bit for bit.
PhotonicMoney.
Laser is a post-quantum proof-of-work monetary network under active qualification, with ML-DSA-65 account authorization and exact integer monetary state.
Electronically mineable. Matrix-centric by design. Structurally compatible with future photonic acceleration.
A computational security market designed for light.
PhotonHash v0.4.0-shadow.1 / LF2-K8 is the current proof-of-work candidate for Laser. It evaluates one nonce-derived low-bit vector across eight parent-derived matrices, creating an exact workload for electronic mining today and a long-term path toward photonic acceleration.
Electronic mining first.
Laser does not require an optical miner to operate. CPU, GPU, FPGA, and ASIC implementations form the initial computational security market.
Photonic-compatible work.
Dense low-bit matrix operations are intentionally engineered for future photonic acceleration. No end-to-end photonic advantage is currently claimed.
Transaction and block processing.
Signed intent
A wallet constructs a transaction and authorizes it with ML-DSA-65.
Authorization
Scheme-bound addresses and network-bound signing domains define who may change an account.
Account state
Nodes apply valid transfers, fees, rewards, balances, and issuance using exact integers.
Candidate block
A miner assembles valid state transitions and commits them to a candidate header.
PhotonHash
One nonce-derived vector is evaluated across eight parent-derived matrices to produce the proof-of-work value.
Chain selection
Independently valid histories are compared by accumulated proof of work.
Public Shadownet execution.
Shadownet qualifies the Laser protocol across peer discovery, block propagation, ML-DSA-65 transaction validation, persistent account state, mining, and read-only explorer indexing while LF2-K8 undergoes separate exactness, security, and hardware-market evaluation.
Canonical height—Greatest valid accumulated work
- Network
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- Blocks
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- Orphans
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- Tip time
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- Tip hash
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- Chain work
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Data source: explorer.laserchain.org/api/tip. Refreshed every 15 seconds. Shadownet is the resettable public test environment.
PhotonHash v0.4.0-shadow.1 / LF2-K8.
LF2-K8 is the current candidate for making Laser's computational security market structurally compatible with future photonic acceleration. It is electronically mineable and does not depend on demonstrated optical hardware before the network can operate.
Photonic advantage is plausible and intentionally engineered for, but has not been demonstrated end to end. Production qualification instead requires confidence in LF2-K8 as a computational market, including evidence against catastrophic electronic shortcuts.
Historical baseline: v0.2.2
The CUDA implementation reproduced reference outputs and passed differential and sanitizer checks. Matrix execution accounted for approximately 11–12% of device time; SHAKE, expansion, requantization, and support stages comprised the remainder.
This profile falsified its hardware-economic target and is retained only as a historical baseline.
Recurrent R1
Fused recurrent execution raised the electronically accelerable share to approximately 93–94%. The construction required an exact nonlinear state-regeneration boundary between rounds.
Modeled conversion energy and measured noise sensitivity prevented the recurrent architecture from satisfying the complete-system criteria. The candidate is archived.
v0.4.0-shadow.1 / LF2-K8
LF2-K8 evaluates one nonce-derived vector across eight independent 4096 × 4096 parent-derived matrices, exactly requantizes each result, XOR-folds the outputs, and applies one final digest.
The measured RTX 5090 GEMM-time share is 61.55–61.98%. The frozen candidate is under independent implementation, adversarial, cross-hardware, and network qualification.
Open the technical record
- Current candidate
- PhotonHash v0.4.0-shadow.1 / LF2-K8
- Status
- Frozen non-production candidate under active qualification
- Reference behavior
- Portable exact integer implementation with independent implementation vectors
- Work per attempt
- 134,217,728 exact low-precision MACs
- Matrix bank
- Eight parent-derived 4096 × 4096 matrices; 128 MiB unpacked
- Nonce input
- One nonce-derived vector shared across all eight matrix passes
- LF2-K8 construction
- Eight exact matrix products, exact requantization, XOR fold, and one final digest
- Qualification work
- Independent implementation, omission and approximation attacks, precomputation, batching, matrix-bank amortization, and cross-hardware analysis
- Photonic claim
- Plausible and intentionally engineered for; not yet demonstrated end to end
Post-quantum accounts and monetary state.
Laser uses ML-DSA-65 for account authorization and integer-valued state transitions for balances, fees, rewards, and issuance. Every node evaluates monetary validity during block validation.
Maximum issuance
The consensus supply cap is 137 million LASER. Nodes validate rewards and issuance as part of block acceptance.
Photons per LASER
Every ledger quantity is an integer. Photons are the atomic unit; LASER is the displayed denomination.
Target block interval
Proof-of-work discovery varies, but difficulty aims the network toward a ten-second block interval.
Authorization without elliptic-curve accounts.
Transactions use ML-DSA-65, standardized in NIST FIPS 204. Scheme-bound addresses identify the authorization method, while network-bound signing domains prevent a signature prepared for one Laser environment from being interpreted as authorization in another. The result is a native account-based ledger whose ownership model is post-quantum from the protocol boundary inward.
Open the ledger record
- Signature scheme
- ML-DSA-65
- Standard
- NIST FIPS 204
- State model
- Native account-based ledger
- Supply cap
- 137,000,000 LASER
- Atomic unit
- 1 LASER = 1,000,000,000 photons
- Public environment
- Shadownet, a resettable and valueless test network
Integrated protocol implementation.
Shadownet executes the node, wallet, miner, peer-discovery, seed, persistence, and explorer paths against a common public chain.
Technical publication.
Shadownet: First Public Execution of the Laser Protocol
A technical account of the network environment, consensus path, post-quantum transaction model, PhotonHash execution, public instrumentation, and qualification work now operating together.