Is it finally time to build a chain we actually need?

This is kind of just a rationale to myself to be honest, but why not share it, why not build publicly.

I've always wanted to build a chain, I spun up Geth on my mac and played around with dev nets, rebuilt little parts of it just for pointless fun really.

But I've never really had a reason to tryhard the build. Nobody needed another chain, another layer 2 that does the same exact thing as 73 others. Now with quantum computing on the edge of becoming a reality, I think we actually do need a new chain.

Because we need one that won't implode in 10 years when Shor's algorithm breaks current blockchain encryption, and people derive secret keys from public addresses and empty dormant sleeping whales onto the open market. Bloodshed like we've never seen. It should use post-quantum signatures from day one.

https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/post-quantum-cryptography

We need one that has a lower barrier to entry for developers, one that's written from scratch in JavaScript end-to-end, because you know, 22 million+ developers write JavaScript. Imagine what smart contracts could be capable of if they were written and executed natively in pure JavaScript? Guess how many active blockchain developers there are? 24k.

https://www.developerreport.com/developer-report

Current chains claim they are decentralized. In reality joining a chain as a validator is ruthlessly expensive and dominated by the same 3 massive validators. A new chain should make it easy for just anybody to become a meaningful validator, because it's good for the chain to be dispersed across as many locations and nodes as possible.

I'll go into more detail on each of these points separately I think, but in short, over the coming weeks we'll build a smart contract compatible blockchain from scratch with JavaScript, and quantum-resistant Dilithium3 signatures, where users can download something simple that turns their home hardware into a meaningful, incentivized validator.

So naturally, I just got started. The first blocker was performance, which is why I guess people haven't released a blockchain built entirely from JavaScript, but it's 2026 and we have new things now, like libp2p. Which immediately brings us to our first problem. I got started with that as a base framework, and obviously after 2 days of setting it up, it didn't work.

Because for some reason I thought nobody else had tried this before, and that I was gonna be the big brain that swung in out of nowhere and solved "JavaScript Blockchain"..

Not just gonna wrap it up there though, here it comes — HTTP polling. It's old school but that's one of the allures to it, it just works, so we're already kind of making compromises but we might return to it later on during testnet but honestly if we can keep signature size down it shouldn't have a problem or affect transactions per second.

So with that, tomorrow I'll work on fleshing out a really simple framework that should get us a local ledger at least running, essentially we just need to confirm that we can create and derive a secret key using the post-quantum Dilithium3, and sign a transaction with that Dilithium3 keypair, and a validator can verify that signature against its own Dilithium3 keypair. That checks the boxes for our post-quantum signatures and accounts right off the bat.