duchain

duchain is a fork of go-ethereum (currently rebased on v1.17.4) that replaces the post-merge Proof-of-Stake consensus with a standalone RandomX Proof-of-Work engine. It keeps the standard Ethereum EVM, state machine, and JSON-RPC/tooling, and runs as an independent, PoW-secured chain — no beacon chain, no consensus client, no staking.

The mainnet built with this code is Ducros (ticker DUC, chainId 271017) — its genesis is baked directly into the binary (params.MainnetChainConfig), the same way upstream go-ethereum embeds real Ethereum mainnet, so there's no launch-scripts folder or genesis file to run: just geth-randomx with plain flags, like real geth. A separate testnet/ (chainId 61102, file-based genesis) exists for development/testing.

⚠️ Status: unaudited. Do not attach real economic value without reading SECURITY_REVIEW.md for the current security posture.

What's different from upstream go-ethereum

• RandomX consensus engine (consensus/randomx/) — the CPU-friendly, ASIC-resistant PoW used by Monero, swapped in for Ethash/PoS. See consensus/randomx/README.md for how it implements consensus.Engine and how to build against real librandomx.
• LWMA difficulty retarget — no difficulty bomb, ~12s target block time, 60-block averaging window.
• Total-difficulty fork-choice — reorgs happen on heaviest-chain (summed PoW), like pre-merge Ethereum, instead of LMD-GHOST/finality.
• Fixed, perpetual block reward — 9 DUC per block, forever (Ethereum PoW-style issuance, no halving, no supply cap).
• Optional treasury fee split — genesis can route a fixed percentage of the priority fee and/or base fee to configured treasury addresses instead of paying it all to the miner / burning it. Opt-in, off by default.
• Validator pinning (core/types/validator_pin.go) — a transaction can pin itself to a specific validator/coinbase, making it valid only inside a block mined by that exact address.
• Announcement hardening (eth/announce_guard.go) — guards against malicious/premature block and transaction announcements from peers.
• Multi-node testnet tooling (testnet/) — ready-to-run bootnode/miner/ node scripts for standing up a small public or private RandomX network.

Quick start

Requires librandomx installed — see consensus/randomx/README.md.

CGO_ENABLED=1 go build -tags randomx -o build/geth-randomx ./cmd/geth

Ducros (DUC) mainnet

No genesis file, no --networkid (it auto-derives from the embedded chainId 271017), no launch scripts — same as running plain geth on real Ethereum mainnet. Open P2P port 30303 (TCP+UDP) on the firewall of any host you run this on.

# One-time: only whoever hosts the network's stable entry point runs this.
# Once params.MainnetBootnodes is populated with a real server, nobody else needs to.
./build/geth-randomx --datadir ~/.duchain-boot --port 30303 --nat extip:<public-ip>

# Get its enode (send it to be baked into params/bootnodes.go as MainnetBootnodes):
./build/geth-randomx attach --exec admin.nodeInfo.enode ~/.duchain-boot/geth.ipc

# A mining node (until MainnetBootnodes is populated, add --bootnodes <enode> from above):
./build/geth-randomx --datadir ~/.duchain --port 30303 --nat extip:<this-host-ip> \
  --mine --miner.etherbase 0xYourAddress

# A non-mining full node with JSON-RPC (e.g. for MetaMask/explorers):
./build/geth-randomx --datadir ~/.duchain-node --port 30303 --nat extip:<this-host-ip> \
  --http --http.addr 0.0.0.0 --http.port 8545 --http.api eth,net,web3,txpool

• GETH_RANDOMX_THREADS=N — mining threads (each light-mode thread holds ~256 MiB). Default: one per CPU.
• GETH_RANDOMX_FULLMEM=1 — fast full-dataset mining (~2.3 GiB RAM), much faster hashing.

Testnet

See testnet/README.md — file-based genesis (chainId 61102), meant for development/iteration before anything lands on mainnet.

Security

The RandomX PoW verification and total-difficulty fork-choice paths have been reviewed and no exploitable HIGH/MEDIUM finding was identified (see SECURITY_REVIEW.md). Known gaps before any real deployment: peer-facing anti-DoS hardening is partial, and there has been no independent external audit.

License

Same as upstream go-ethereum: the library code is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0, and the binaries (cmd/) under the GNU General Public License v3.0.