Hardfork Beta is Neptune Cash’s next set of consensus rules, scheduled for mainnet block height 38,000 — estimated around May 12, 2026. PR #912 was merged on April 24, 2026 specifically as “Hardfork beta @ block height 38,000.”
A note on the name: “Beta” is simply an internal codename indicating this is the second hard fork (the first being Hardfork Alpha). It has nothing to do with the maturity or quality of the software.
What changes
Old nodes will stop following the valid chain after height 38,000. Neptune’s docs define a hard fork as a rule change where legacy versions do not consider blocks under the new rules valid. If you run a node, you want to be on a release that includes the Hardfork Beta logic before block 38,000 — otherwise your node can fall off the post-fork chain.
PoW memory-hardness is removed. The PR drops the requirement that PoW authentication paths match the PoW Merkle root. Mining no longer requires tens of gigabytes of precalculated Merkle-tree data, significantly lowering the hardware barrier to participate.
A lustration barrier is added. This is a supply-audit mechanism designed to address an earlier Triton VM soundness bug that could theoretically have inflated supply. Pre-Hardfork-Beta UTXOs must reveal and prove their input values when spent. A global counter is decremented by the value of coins passing through. If the counter reaches zero, remaining pre-fork UTXOs become unspendable. The goal is to prove that no unauthorized coins exist in the supply.
PoW difficulty checking changes. Before Beta, PoW was checked against the parent block’s difficulty; after Beta, it is checked against the current block’s own difficulty. This makes future recursive block verification cleaner because a parent block’s PoW verification then depends only on fields in the parent block itself.
Related rule adjustments. Allowed future-dating of blocks is reduced from five minutes to one minute, and the mempool is cleared across the fork to prevent incompatible transactions from being mined.
What you should do
Make sure you are running the minimum required versions before block 38,000:
- Neptune Core 0.9.0 or later — covers the node, CLI, and dashboard. See the Neptune Core releases.
- Neptune Wallet App 3.0.3 or later — the desktop wallet application. See the Neptune Wallet App releases.
If you have questions, the community is active on the Neptune Forum and Telegram.