FERRULE
The rules are fitted before the first strike.
Ferrule is a proof-of-work chain for ordinary processors. Its name comes from the brass collar pinned around the end of a tool handle: a small part, fitted before any work begins, that decides where the force goes and takes the wear so the handle does not split.
Nothing about this chain is negotiated after the fact. Block cadence, reward, halving point, supply cap and the difficulty rule are written into published source before the first block exists. There is no premine, no dev fee, no treasury and no key that can mint.
01 What Ferrule is
A permissionless, single-purpose proof-of-work network. No smart contracts, no tokens on other chains, no bridges, no foundation treasury. One binary, one chain, one fixed emission schedule.
The design target is narrow on purpose: a coin that a person with a desktop CPU can mine without renting a warehouse, and whose rules a person with a text editor can read in an afternoon. Everything that could be used to change the deal later — a developer cut, a pre-mined reserve, a governance switch — is absent rather than merely switched off.
02 The collar
Fitted first
The collar is not adjusted while the tool is in use. Consensus constants are published and tagged before genesis; after that they are not parameters but facts.
Takes the strain
The ring is the part that wears. Here the wear is paid in electricity by whoever chooses to mine, and the reward is paid in full to whoever finds the block.
Small and visible
A collar is a few grams of brass on a wooden handle. The whole rulebook fits in a handful of constants and a short validation function.
No hidden core
No foundation allocation, no vesting, no market-maker agreement, no privileged RPC. A node run by a stranger validates exactly what the author's node validates.
03 Emission
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Block interval | 288 s |
| Blocks per day | 300 |
| Stage-1 block reward | 39 FRL |
| Daily issuance, stage 1 | 11,700 FRL |
| Halving interval | 648,000 blocks (≈ 5.9 years) |
| Maximum supply | 2 × 39 × 648,000 = 50,544,000 FRL |
| Premine / ICO / treasury | none |
| Developer fee | 0 % |
The cap is a consequence of the schedule, not a target: two reward eras, each paying 39 FRL for 648,000 blocks. Halving repeats after that with the same rule, so the figure is a hard ceiling approached asymptotically.
04 Network
| Consensus | RandomX (CPU), proof-of-work |
| Difficulty | retargeted every block, damped |
| Block header | Bitcoin-style, 80 bytes |
| Address prefix | V… (base58check, version byte 0x46) |
| P2P port | 18978 |
| RPC port | 18979 (loopback by default) |
| Minimum relay fee | 0.0001 FRL / kB |
| Coinbase maturity | 100 blocks |
Full details, including message types and the validation order, are in docs/NETWORK.md.
05 Build status
| Part | State |
|---|---|
| Consensus constants and specification | Published |
| Reference node source | In progress |
| Public testnet | Not running |
| Windows wallet build | Not released |
| Block explorer index | Not indexing |
| Mining pools | None official |
This page is deliberately blunt about the last five rows. An announcement that pretends a download exists is worse than one that says it does not yet. Dates are not promised; the changelog records what actually changed.
06 Read before you run anything
07 Taking part
There is nothing to buy and no allocation to claim. The only ways in are to read the specification, run a node when the reference build lands, or mine when a network exists. Source and issues live at github.com/ferrule-core/ferrule.