Frequently asked questions

Neptune Cash ($NPT) is a layer 1 proof-of-work cryptocurrency built from scratch, focused on private, programmable, and post-quantum-secure payments. It is community-driven, with no venture capital or institutional investors.

Most blockchains are fully transparent, meaning anyone can trace transactions and link activity to identities. Neptune Cash addresses this by making privacy the default at the protocol level, while also preparing for the long-term threat of quantum computing. Why financial privacy matters makes the case that this is a normal thing to want.

Neptune Cash launched its mainnet in 2025.

Neptune Cash was developed by a small team of cryptographers and engineers and launched as a grassroots project. It was built from scratch rather than forked from an existing blockchain.

The ticker symbol is NPT.

Yes. All code is publicly available through the Neptune-Crypto organization on GitHub.

Neptune Cash hides the sender, receiver, and amount of every transaction by default using zk-STARKs and Mutator Sets. No opt-in or shielding step is required — privacy is built into the protocol at layer 1.

zk-STARKs are zero-knowledge proofs that allow one party to prove a statement is true without revealing the underlying data. Neptune Cash uses them to verify transactions without exposing any identifying information. How it works unpacks the name and the cost model.

Mutator Sets are a cryptographic data structure used by Neptune Cash to track unspent outputs in a way that prevents linking transactions together, providing strong on-chain privacy. How it works explains the mechanism in plain language.

Quantum resistance means the cryptographic foundations of Neptune Cash are designed to remain secure even if large-scale quantum computers are developed. Most existing blockchains rely on algorithms that future quantum computers could break. Neptune Cash uses hash-based cryptography that is not vulnerable to known quantum attacks.

Private by default. Unlike some privacy coins that require users to explicitly opt into shielded transactions, Neptune Cash builds privacy into every transaction at the protocol level — there is no transparent mode.

Monero uses ring signatures and stealth addresses; Zcash uses zk-SNARKs with optional shielding. Neptune Cash uses zk-STARKs with Mutator Sets and makes privacy mandatory, while also adding post-quantum security and programmability via Triton VM — features neither Monero nor Zcash offer natively. See the privacy coin comparison for a broader overview.

Use the Get started page for verified wallet links. Official desktop options include Neptune Wallet and Neptune Dashboard. A third-party Android wallet is available through Google Play. Always verify the source before installing wallet software.

The official desktop wallets are available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. A third-party mobile wallet is available for Android through Google Play. Check the latest release notes for supported versions.

Write down your recovery phrase and store it offline in a secure location. Never store it digitally or share it with anyone. Without this phrase, lost funds cannot be recovered.

Yes. Your recovery phrase gives full access to your funds. Use it only in wallet software you trust from a verified source, and never enter it on any website or share it with anyone.

Open the wallet and generate a receive address to share with the sender. To send, paste the recipient's address and confirm the amount. Always double-check the address before confirming.

Transactions require network confirmations before they are considered final. With a target block time of 9.8 minutes, most transactions confirm within a few blocks. Network conditions can occasionally cause delays.

Technically yes, but you should prefer a fresh one per payment. A generation address contains a receiver identifier that is copied into the transaction so your wallet is alerted to an incoming payment without scanning and trial-decrypting everything. The trade-off is stated plainly in the official documentation: different payments to the same generation address can be linked as payments to the same person. The documentation's own advice is to generate a new generation address for every incoming payment, or to use off-chain UTXO notifications. Note what is not exposed: even with repeated payments to one address, in the general case not even the sender can tell whether those payments have since been spent.

A full node downloads and independently validates the entire Neptune Cash blockchain. Running one strengthens the network, improves your own privacy, and lets you verify your own transactions without trusting anyone else.

Binaries are on the releases page; note the naming quirk that the daemon is packaged as neptune-cash rather than neptune-core. The official documentation covers setup in depth: which programs to run, the ports involved, and where the data lives.

Bootstrap nodes help new nodes join the network by providing initial peer connections. Running one is a useful contribution to network health, especially in the early mainnet phase.

Nobody publishes them, so treat any specific figure you read with suspicion, including ours. Disk usage, initial sync time, and memory at rest are not documented anywhere we could find, and they change as the chain grows. What is known: a plain node is far lighter than a composing miner, which the CLI documentation says wants plenty of cores and at least 128 GB of RAM. If you have measured a real node on real hardware, please post it on the forum.

No, but it is worth understanding what happens instead. The desktop wallet is a client of a neptune-core server, which it reaches over that server's REST API; it does not join the peer-to-peer network itself. If you never change the setting, it uses a community-run server (currently wallet.neptunefundamentals.org). Your keys stay on your machine, so a malicious server cannot spend your funds. What it can see is which addresses and transactions your wallet asks about, which on a privacy-first coin is the part worth caring about. You can point the wallet at your own server in its settings.

The maximum supply is capped at 42,000,000 NPT. There is no tail emission — once all coins are mined, no new supply is created.

831,488 NPT (approximately 1.98% of total supply) was premined to fund four years of original development. The remainder is mined openly through proof-of-work.

No. There is no ongoing block reward tax, developer fee, or founder allocation taken from block rewards. All mined supply goes entirely to miners.

The target block time is 9.8 minutes.

The block reward halves approximately every 3 years, or every 160,815 blocks. This controls the rate of new supply entering circulation over time.

No. Neptune Cash has no tail emission. The supply is strictly capped and will stop growing after all coins have been mined.

Mining is built into the Neptune node software: run a full node and enable the built-in miner. That built-in guesser is CPU-only, and at current network hashrate it will not realistically find blocks, so most miners now run a third-party NVIDIA GPU miner against the node instead. See the official documentation for setup, and the GPU and pool answers below for what people actually run.

Mining splits into two jobs with very different hardware profiles. Composing builds a block and its zk-STARK proof: plenty of cores and roughly 128 GB of RAM. Guessing is the proof-of-work lottery, and since hardfork beta (block 38,000, May 2026) it is no longer memory-hard: no large RAM buffer is needed, and the practical setup is an NVIDIA GPU with 10 GB+ of VRAM on Linux or HiveOS running the OXZD miner. Older guides describing a ~40 GB guessing buffer or 21 GB+ VRAM minimums predate that change. Be realistic about scale: network hashrate was around 150 GH/s at the early-August 2026 snapshot, roughly double what it was in late July, so a single consumer GPU is a small fraction of a percent of the network. See how composing and guessing fit together.

The block reward decreases over time following the halving schedule. Check the blockchain explorer for the current reward per block.

Yes, all third-party and none run by the Neptune Cash project. PoolHub is the only pool any independent tracker lists: hashrate.no records it at a 10% fee on PPLNS payouts. A few others serve a page but publish nothing verifiable (drpool.io, neptune.minerlab.io, pools.nptmining.com, npt.suprnova.cc), and CatsPool, named in older guides, no longer resolves at all. Fees, reliability and payout behaviour vary, the forum carries first-hand reports of pools that never paid out, and how a pool handles the timelocked half of rewards is a question to ask before pointing hashrate anywhere.

Yes, and GPU mining dominates the network. It is not part of neptune-core, which ships only a CPU guesser; every GPU miner is third-party and NVIDIA/CUDA only, with no AMD or Intel support. The first, the PrivacyRights NPT-GPU-Miner from September 2025, is stale and required 21 GB+ of VRAM; today the network largely runs OXZD (NVIDIA 10 GB+ VRAM, CUDA 12.2+, Linux or HiveOS only). Suprnova's suprminer (v1.9.9, August 2026) is the other current option, likewise closed-source and NVIDIA-only, with its own pool at npt.suprnova.cc, though no tracker lists that pool and its dashboard shows no live NPT data. For a sense of scale, Neptune Bulletin #1 recorded tested OXZD rates from 100.7 Mguess/s on an RTX 3080 up to 388.8 Mguess/s on an RTX 5090. CPU guessing is no longer competitive against that.

Neptune Cash uses proof-of-work (PoW), the same consensus model as Bitcoin. Miners compete to produce valid blocks and earn block rewards.

NPT is currently available on SafeTrade. Additional exchange listings may follow over time. Always verify exchange links through the Get started page or the official Neptune Cash website.

Check the current exchange listing for available trading pairs. Pairs and liquidity may change as the project grows.

Generate a receive address in your wallet, then initiate a withdrawal from the exchange using that address. Always double-check the address before confirming.

Timing depends on network confirmations and exchange processing. Wait until the exchange confirms funds as available before trading. Withdrawals follow the same confirmation process.

DEX availability is limited at this stage. Check the community forum and official project channel for the latest listing updates.

Security issues should be reported responsibly through the appropriate repository in the Neptune-Crypto GitHub organization. Avoid posting vulnerability details publicly before a fix has been coordinated.

Open an issue in the relevant Neptune-Crypto repository. Include as much detail as possible — steps to reproduce, software version, and platform.

Rule changes land in GitHub with an activation block height compiled into the release, and are discussed on the community forum. Hardfork Beta, for example, was merged in late April 2026 for activation at height 38,000 around 13 May. If you run a node or point hashrate at the network, watch releases rather than announcements: the height in the code is the thing that actually decides.

A hard fork changes the rules such that nodes running older software no longer consider new blocks valid. In practice that means: upgrade before the activation height, or your node quietly stops following the real chain. Activation is by block height rather than date, so the calendar estimate moves with block times. This is not hypothetical on Neptune. Mainnet has run under five rule sets since the balance-preserving reboot in August 2025, four of them hard forks, and two of those four exist to fix soundness bugs. The project's consensus rule set documentation lists them with their activation heights. Worth knowing if you are deciding how promptly to upgrade.

Check the latest releases for Neptune Core and Neptune Wallet. Staying current is important for security and network compatibility.

The mechanism exists and is in use today, but not yet as a deploy-your-own-contract workflow. Every Neptune UTXO carries two kinds of program, both written in Triton assembly and both proven with STARKs. A lock script decides who may spend a coin and can be arbitrarily complex, covering shared ownership, quorums, or conditions unrelated to keys. A type script decides how a kind of coin may behave: the native currency script is what enforces that inputs equal outputs, and the three-year timelock on half of every mining reward is one too. What the documentation does not yet describe is a path for a third-party developer to author and deploy their own. See how it works.

Triton VM is a zero-knowledge virtual machine with a STARK prover and verifier built in. It is its own project, by the same people, which Neptune Cash relies on as its canonical virtual machine. The distinctive part is what it is used for: most chains use a VM to replicate state, so every node re-executes everything, whereas Neptune uses Triton VM to validate updates to a state commitment, letting nodes agree that the chain evolved correctly without holding the underlying data. See how it works.

TASM (Triton Assembly) is the low-level instruction set for Triton VM. Developers can write programs in TASM to build private applications and smart contracts on top of Neptune Cash.

Possible applications include private payment protocols, confidential token issuance, trustless escrow, and other programs where computation needs to be verified without revealing inputs. The design space is still being explored by the community.

Depends what you mean by support. Triton VM is not a future feature: it validates every transaction on mainnet right now, and lock scripts and type scripts are live protocol machinery rather than a roadmap item. What is not live is an application-developer story. The documentation covers writing Triton programs as a contributor to consensus code, not as someone shipping their own contract, and there is no published deployment path or tooling for that. Treat programmability as a real foundation with the top layer still missing, and follow GitHub and the forum for progress.

All Neptune Cash repositories are publicly available through the Neptune-Crypto GitHub organization. This includes the node software, wallet, Triton VM, and related tooling.

The Neptune Cash codebase is primarily written in Rust. Triton VM and the STARK proof system are also implemented in Rust.

Start by running the node and wallet, then look for open issues through the Neptune-Crypto GitHub organization. Good first contributions include bug reports, documentation improvements, test coverage, and tooling for the RPC API or Triton VM. The developer starting points page collects the docs, repositories, and contribution workflow in one place.

Yes. The project needs testers, writers, translators, community moderators, graphic designers, and people who help answer questions and welcome newcomers. See the Contribute page for more contribution paths.

No formal grant program exists yet. Community funding models are an open discussion on the forum. For now, contributions are voluntary and community-driven.

The official project website is neptune.cash. It includes the whitepaper, documentation, blog, and developer resources.

The whitepaper is available at neptune.cash/whitepaper.

The Neptune community forum is the main place for longer-form discussion, proposals, and project updates.

Follow @NeptuneCash on X for official project updates and @CodewordNeptune for community commentary. The Telegram group is the main real-time chat channel.

Refer to the links on this site and on neptune.cash. Be cautious of accounts or groups impersonating Neptune Cash — the project will never ask for your recovery phrase or private keys.

Check that you are running the latest version of the wallet. Restart the application and ensure your internet connection is stable. If the issue persists, ask for help in the community forum or Telegram.

Check that the required ports are open on your firewall or router. Ensure you are running the latest node software. Peer connection issues are often resolved by restarting the node or adjusting firewall settings.

No. Blockchain transactions are irreversible once confirmed. Always verify the recipient address carefully before sending. If funds were sent to an address you control, you can recover them. Otherwise, they are unrecoverable.

Unconfirmed transactions will eventually be included in a block or dropped from the mempool. Wait for additional block confirmations. If the issue persists, ask in the forum or Telegram for guidance.

The Telegram group is the fastest way to get a response. For more detailed questions, post on the community forum or explore the Community page.