This is the first Neptune Bulletin: a regular roundup of what is happening across Neptune Cash, for people who want to follow the project without having to follow every forum thread, Telegram message, X post, release note and commit.
Development itself is already well covered, by the forum, the repositories and the core team’s own dev updates. What is harder to find in one place is everything around it: direction, security, mining, tooling, coverage, markets and the occasional thing from outside the project that Neptune ought to be paying attention to. That is the gap this tries to fill.
It aims to be useful rather than promotional. Where something is unclear, contested or simply wrong, it says so, and each edition closes with a short list of things worth acting on. Corrections are welcome and will be published.
In brief
- Miners should upgrade neptune-core. v0.14.3 fixed a recovery bug that could cost you rewards you had already earned.
- Difficulty is up roughly elevenfold in four weeks, and most of the rise has no published explanation. Stock miners are well behind.
- A security review found no critical flaws in the cryptography stack, but medium-severity issues in neptune-core. The fixes ship in v0.15.0, and succinctness work now waits on them.
- The first timelocked-NPT trade executed: 60,000 timelocked for 15,000 liquid, a four-to-one ratio and the first public price on locked coins.
Mining
A much faster GPU miner shipped. Qubic Solutions’ OXZD gained an optimized NPT build in mid-July, announced in Telegram on 16 July with tested rates of 3080 100.7 Mguess/s, 3090 119.8, 4090 293.3 and 5090 388.8, each at a stated power limit, 550W for the 5090. The current release is 0.8.4, a bug fix dated 18 July.
Difficulty rose about elevenfold over four weeks, from 3.67 × 10¹² at block 42,000 (29 June) to 4.10 × 10¹³, having peaked at 6.59 × 10¹³ on 26 July. One part of that has a published explanation: the 13 July dev update reported a ~3x surge over a 5 to 10 day window and put it down to a mining pool implementing an optimized hashing algorithm rather than a sudden influx of physical hardware. That surge largely predates this edition’s window, and nothing published accounts for the rest of the rise. If you’re on a stock miner, your share of blocks has quietly fallen.
Neptune Cash’s mining hardware partner held a public event. Qubite International is a Hamburg-based colocation provider running data centers in the UAE, and has been Neptune Cash’s exclusive hardware partner since an agreement announced on 10 June. On 25 July it presented alongside the Neptune Cash development team at a free public event at Kraftwerk Rottweil, a 9am–1pm session with talks from developers, data center operators and tax advisers on running mining as a business in 2026. Its nptmining.com sells NPT mining servers rated at 650 MH/s.
Two facts worth holding side by side, without joining them: most of the difficulty rise has no published explanation, and a commercial operator with an exclusive hardware partnership is selling 650 MH/s servers. Nobody has publicly connected the two and this bulletin is not doing so either. For calibration, 650 MH/s is roughly 1.7 times a 5090, and about 0.8% of a network running near 80 GH/s, so it would take a lot of them to move difficulty.
If you’re offering a 64.01 NPT guesser reward, Thorkil wants to hear from you. Miners set up that way are not merging transactions properly. Syncing and merging beats creating a no-op transaction, and it pays better. He has offered to help directly.
Releases
neptune-core v0.14.3 (23 July) is the one to install if you mine: it fixes guesser rewards being recovered against only some of your keys, meaning recovery could previously miss rewards you had actually earned. It also stops proof-collection transactions flickering in and out of the mempool, and adds viewing keys to generation addresses. Release notes
neptune-wallet v4.1.3 (20 July) tightens seed handling and balance reporting. Going back a step or switching between create and import no longer replaces a phrase you have already written down; new phrases come only from an explicit “Change seed phrase” action. Balances are now split into spendable, pending and total, and inputs to unconfirmed transactions no longer count as spendable. Release notes
Security
A security review of the software and cryptography stack, carried out with Claude 5. It confirmed cryptographic integrity and monetary soundness with no critical flaws, and identified medium-severity issues in neptune-core. Those findings are being worked through, and the fixes ship in neptune-core v0.15.0.
Tooling
nptstats.org is a new dashboard and explorer built by a community member, covering block height, hashrate, difficulty, block times, supply and pool worker counts, with a halving countdown and wallet lookup.
A token standard has been drafted. NEP20 proposes a single shared type script for every token, each one distinguished by a token_id derived from its issuer parameters, so new tokens could be created permissionlessly by producing a valid proof rather than needing a protocol change for each one. The repository carries a normative spec, security notes and an integration guide alongside a Rust implementation.
Coverage
Neptune Cash was added to QuantumTracker on 25 July, and the grade is an F. Five of the six categories are graded A and shipped: transaction signatures, consensus, on-chain logic and privacy, all post-quantum since genesis. The F comes entirely from the peer transport. The libp2p Noise handshake uses classical X25519 key exchange with Ed25519 node identity, so there is no post-quantum key establishment on the wire, and because that is the only elliptic-curve cryptography left anywhere in the protocol, the EC Sunset category grades F as well.
The core team does not read it as a headline problem. Asked on 26 July whether Neptune uses quantum-insecure networking, Alan’s answer was that there are two network stacks and only the libp2p one uses transport encryption, inherited from libp2p and not post-quantum; monetary integrity and confidentiality are guaranteed post-quantum at a deeper level, and the legacy stack needs neither. Post-quantum transport is “worth postponing until after bigger changes.”
NPT is now listed on hashrate.no, a cryptocurrency tracking site. The listing went up on 24 July, the result of legwork by a community member.
A community member wrote a technical explainer. An overview of Neptune Cash covering zk-STARKs, mutator sets, post-quantum signatures, proof of work and the 42 million supply cap went up on Medium on 24 July, written for readers new to the project.
Tracker data has not caught up. Thorkil submitted the CoinGecko correction on 24 July, but the listing still carries wrapped-NPT metadata and Coinpaprika still links the retired @seagodcrypto handle.
Markets
The first timelocked-NPT trade executed. On 27 July sword-smith confirmed @drpool filled the standing offer: 60,000 timelocked NPT for 15,000 liquid, via a wallet build that watches the pool’s address using an imported viewing key.
Direction
Succinctness now waits on the security fixes. Announcing v0.14.3 in Telegram on 23 July, Thorkil hedged the timing from the outset: “If all goes well, this will be the last time in a while that I work on application stuff, as I’m hoping to work on succinctness starting next week.” The hedge is now doing the work, with v0.15.0 and its security fixes going first. Worth knowing what the feature actually buys: cheap syncing rather than richer smart contracts, a distinction Thorkil drew the same day. The tracking issue has been open since April.
Transaction chaining implementation has started, at the TASM layer. The open design question is a recursive one: whether the chain transaction proof must encode the single proof digest. The legacy transaction pipeline is being kept alongside the new one so that low-cost proof generation stays available.
The project has stepped up its public communication. Since the official @NeptuneCash profile was announced on 10 July, posting has settled into a regular cadence, part of a stated shift in communication direction.
A voluntary community fund was proposed, and drew 15 votes. A community member ran the pinned poll on 21–22 July, covering marketing, content, outreach and possibly listing costs. The 15 came in over 24 hours from a group of ~3,000, and responses were mostly positive.
The organizer’s own read is the honest one: participation that low can’t be treated as representative, and the engagement question needs answering before a fund is built. Others noted a similar listing-contribution poll has been tried before.
There’s prior work to build on: a forum thread on a Neptune CCS design, modeled on Monero’s. The right technical question has already been asked: can releasing funds require multiple authorizations, or only a single signer? Neptune has no k-of-n lock script today, so for now the honest answer is no.
Elsewhere
Zcash sealed its legacy shielded pool. The Ironwood upgrade activated on 28 July at block 3,428,143, routing 3.76 million ZEC through a public accounting turnstile that will either surface or freeze any counterfeit coins minted through a soundness flaw in the Orchard circuit that had been live since May 2022. The gap was in the elliptic-curve scalar multiplication used to prove every private transaction valid, and it allowed unlimited undetectable minting inside the pool. Fifty-one engineers and more than 1,300 pull requests, in sixty days.
Directly relevant to Neptune: on a private chain, monetary soundness is a property of a circuit, and a circuit can be wrong for four years without anyone noticing. Supply that cannot be audited by looking is supply that has to be proved correct.
Claude Mythos found a real weakness in a post-quantum signature scheme, and the scheme was withdrawn. HAWK, a candidate in NIST’s additional signature standardization process that had survived two years of expert scrutiny, turned out to contain an unused symmetry in its lattice structure. Anthropic published the finding on 28 July: its model worked semi-autonomously for around 60 hours, improving the best-known key-recovery attack from 2⁶⁴ operations to 2³⁸ for the smallest parameter set. On 29 July the HAWK team withdrew HAWK from the NIST process after confirming the result.
This does not affect Neptune, whose signatures are hash-based rather than lattice-based, and nothing in production is threatened today. The method is the point: two years of human review missed something a model found in sixty hours. That is the argument for the security review above, and for repeating it rather than treating it as done.
Galaxy committed up to $5 million to making Bitcoin quantum-ready, announced 21 July: grants for post-quantum signature schemes, wallet migration tooling and security audits. It is here as a price signal rather than as news about Bitcoin. The cost of retrofitting post-quantum security onto a chain that was not designed for it is now being quantified by people spending the money, and that number is the clearest available statement of what Neptune gets from having started there.
Worth doing
- If you mine, upgrade to the latest version of neptune-core. Earlier versions could miss guesser rewards you had actually earned.
- If you are offering a 64.01 NPT guesser reward, sync and merge instead. It pays better than creating a no-op transaction, and Thorkil has offered to help set it up.
- Correct crypto sites carrying outdated information about Neptune Cash, and flag it on the forum or in Telegram if you cannot. Still current: listings treating the Base-chain wrapped token as the chain itself, and profiles pointing at the retired @seagodcrypto handle.
Thanks to the community members keeping discussion going across the forum, Telegram and X, and turning up in the replies when the project posts. That kind of steady visibility is harder to sustain than it looks, and it does work that no commit log records.
Corrections, questions and any other input are welcome in the Neptune Bulletin thread on the forum. If something here is wrong or incomplete, saying so publicly is more useful than letting it stand.