01What QUERN is
A browser-based proof-of-work network settled on Solana. You open a page, your GPU runs a SHA-256 search, and work the server can verify is credited to your wallet. Nothing is installed, and nothing runs after the tab closes.
02The asymmetry
Finding an input whose hash starts with d zero bits takes about 2d attempts. Checking one takes exactly one hash. That gap is the entire design: the network can verify every result it pays for without redoing the work.
A design where the server recomputes the whole workload to check it has the server doing all the work it is paying for, and has harvested nothing. If a compute network cannot state its verification cost, that is the question to ask it.
03A task, precisely
The server issues four things: a 32-byte challenge, a difficulty in leading zero bits, a nonceStart, and a nonceRange. All four are chosen by the server and recorded before you see them.
You must find a nonce inside that window where sha256(challenge ‖ nonce) begins with at least that many zero bits. The window is sized so a solution is overwhelmingly likely to exist inside it.
04What your browser does
A WGSL compute shader hashes the challenge against millions of nonces in parallel, inside a Web Worker so the page stays responsive. The search runs in batches of roughly 90ms — not for looks: one dispatch covering the whole window would be uncancellable, would starve the compositor, and on some drivers would be killed as a hung GPU.
Before a node is allowed online it runs a known-answer check: it searches a tiny window at low difficulty and the CPU confirms the answer. A shader computing the wrong hash still returns numbers and still looks busy — it would simply never solve anything, and would look like bad luck for hours. It is caught at startup instead.
05How a proof is checked
You return the nonce. The server hashes it once, counts the leading zero bits, and checks the nonce fell inside the window it issued. It also checks the task is still open, has not expired, and has not already been settled. Anything else is refused.
Verification happens server-side and only server-side. A proof cannot be credited twice: the task row is claimed conditionally, so two requests racing the same nonce leave exactly one winner.
06What you are paid
Reward scales with 2difficulty, because expected work does. Difficulty adapts to how fast your node actually solves tasks, so a faster GPU receives harder tasks rather than more of them.
Every credit is written to a ledger with the task that produced it and the balance that resulted. Amounts are stored as integers in the smallest unit — floating point has no place anywhere near a balance.
07Signing in
Connecting a wallet proves nothing: any page can ask any extension for a public key, and a public key is public. Authentication is a signature over a challenge this server issued, for this origin, that has never been used before and expires in minutes.
The text you approve is human-readable on purpose, and names the origin, your wallet, the purpose and the expiry. Signing is free and costs no gas.
08What the client is never trusted with
Reported speed, reported hardware and reported timings are never priced. They are recorded for your session history and shown as reported, and that is all. Everything you are paid comes from a proof the server verified.
09Withdrawals
The withdrawal path exists as a state machine — requested, processing, confirmed, failed, rejected — and all signing happens server-side. No treasury key is ever exposed to a browser.
Execution is disabled until a token mint and treasury are configured. When it is unconfigured the interface says so instead of showing a button that would fake a success.
10The marketplace
The marketplace is a register of supply: nodes online now, with rates measured from verified work. There is no buyer side. Nobody is renting this compute, and the page states that above the table rather than in a footnote.
11Limits, plainly
No AI model is being trained here. No customer is renting this capacity. No rendering or scientific workload is being processed. What exists is a verifiable proof-of-work network with an honest verification cost.
WebGPU is required, which today means desktop Chrome or Edge with graphics acceleration enabled. Closing the tab stops the node — there is no background mining, and that is a design decision rather than a missing feature.
Task types are pluggable, so genuinely useful workloads can be added. Until one is, this interface will keep saying that none is here.