Proof-of-Work Blockchain with 50,000+ TPS

The U.S. dollar has lost over 97% of its purchasing power since the Federal Reserve was established in 1913. In August 1971, President Nixon ended the dollar’s convertibility to gold, removing the last constraint on monetary expansion.

Since then, global debt has surpassed $300 trillion. Central banks normalize emergency measures — zero interest rates, quantitative easing, yield curve control — that erode purchasing power and reward borrowing over saving.

Money needs to do two things that are fundamentally in tension: hold value over time, and flow freely as a medium of exchange. Quai is the first protocol to solve both with two native tokens.

Miners choose which token to receive as their block reward. Anyone can convert between QUAI and QI at the protocol-set rate by burning one to mint the other. This creates a self-regulating monetary system — when QI trades above energy cost, supply expands until price falls; when below, holders convert to QUAI, contracting QI supply until price rises.

Quai organizes its network into a three-level hierarchy secured by merged mining. Every miner simultaneously mines all levels — a single hash is checked against Prime, Region, and Zone difficulty thresholds. No extra energy, no extra hardware.

The Quai hierarchy — Prime, Region, and Zone chains, all merged-mined. The network starts small and expands automatically as demand grows.

When a miner’s hash meets the difficulty threshold of multiple levels simultaneously, a coincident block is created — valid in both chains, forming a trustless bridge. A 51% attack on any single zone requires controlling 51% of the entire network’s hashpower.

How Proof of Entropy Minima (PoEM) achieves instant consensus

Traditional blockchains fork when two miners find a block at the same time. Quai’s consensus mechanism, PoEM, measures the intrinsic entropy each block removes from the hash space. Every node always picks the same winner — no forks, no ambiguity, no wasted work. Consensus is instant and objective.

PoEM also eliminates selfish mining incentives. Because the block with the lowest entropy always wins, a withheld block loses to any published block that achieves lower entropy during the withholding period.

PoEM DocsPoEM Paper

At block 1,530,500, the Singularity Fork permanently burned ~1.67 billion QUAI — 81% of all future genesis unlocks — through a multilateral agreement between investors, Dominant Strategies, and the Quai Foundation.

Project SOAP (Subsidized Open-market Acquisition Protocol) turns merged mining subsidies into continuous QUAI buybacks and burns. SHA, Scrypt, and KawPow miners — the same hardware securing Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Dogecoin — earn QUAI through workshares with zero additional energy.

Quai supports three mining algorithms: KawPoW (GPU), SHA-256 (ASIC), and Scrypt (ASIC). The same hardware that mines Bitcoin, Litecoin, or Ravencoin can mine Quai with no extra energy — just point your miner at a pool.

Mining Pools

• Monetary expansion is accelerating. Global central banks have spent two decades normalizing emergency measures that erode purchasing power and reward borrowing over saving. U.S. national debt alone has surpassed $36 trillion.US Debt Clock
• CBDCs threaten financial privacy. Over 130 countries are developing Central Bank Digital Currencies that give governments direct visibility into every transaction. Programmable money means programmable restrictions — spending limits, expiry dates, and account freezes without due process. Decentralized money is the opt-out.
• Centralized stablecoins are permissioned money. USDC and USDT depend on banking relationships that regulators can sever at will. Circle has frozen funds at the U.S. Treasury’s direction. A stablecoin that can be frozen is not stable — it’s a permission slip.USDT Supply
• AI is driving explosive energy demand. Global data center power consumption is projected to double by 2030 as AI training and inference scale. Proof-of-Work mining absorbs surplus and stranded energy as a buyer of last resort — stabilizing grids, funding renewable buildout, and converting excess capacity into monetary security instead of waste.
• Government surveillance is expanding. Financial surveillance infrastructure — from Operation Choke Point 2.0 to cross-border reporting frameworks — is growing faster than the legal protections against it. Permissionless, energy-backed money exists outside these systems by design.
• Proof-of-Stake has centralized. Ethereum’s validator set is dominated by a handful of liquid staking providers. Lido alone controls over 28% of staked ETH. PoS concentrates power in the hands of the already-wealthy — the opposite of decentralization.

Quai mainnet launched January 29, 2025. The hierarchy is live. The Singularity Fork has already burned the insider allocations that plague other projects. Every component exists — now.

Quai is built on a foundation of published, peer-reviewed research spanning consensus mechanisms, reward allocation, and multi-chain coordination.

Quai was built by researchers and engineers from the University of Texas at Austin, Georgia Tech, Stanford, and Apple — with advisory from Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Research) and Professor Cesare Fracassi (UT Austin Blockchain Initiative).

Dr. K (Karl Kreder)Co-Founder · PhD, IEEE Researcher

Alan OrwickCEO & Co-Founder · ex-Apple

Prof. Sriram VishwanathCo-Founder · IEEE Fellow, Georgia Tech

Stephen WolframAdvisor · Founder, Wolfram Research