PoW Bootstrap: How Every ANM First Enters Circulation, Before BFT-PoS Takes Over
Anemos launches fair in the strongest sense: no premine, no treasury balance, no foundation reward, and mainnet genesis carries no coins at all (see Fair-Launch Tokenomics for the emission design). If nobody starts with coins, every ANM has to be earned. This post covers the mechanism that makes that possible from block 1: a bounded proof-of-work bootstrap phase at the start of the chain’s life: the sole channel by which ANM first reaches real people.
What it is
For a bounded window right after launch (roughly six months’ worth of blocks on mainnet, much shorter on testnet so it can be exercised quickly during iteration), the block reward that would normally go to the BFT-PoS proposer is instead earned by anyone running a CPU or GPU miner. The proof-of-work is a modified, ASIC-resistant Ethash variant, so mining stays accessible on ordinary consumer hardware rather than favoring whoever can buy specialized rigs first.
This is the same idea behind Bitcoin’s early mining era: a permissionless, work-based way for anyone to earn newly-created coins, with no signup, no allowlist, and no insider head start. And because genesis itself allocates nothing (not even to the protocol’s own bootstrap validators, which start with zero stake and only a temporary, ramping-down grant of consensus power), mining is not one distribution channel among several. It is the only one.
What it doesn’t change
This is a reward-source swap, not a consensus change. Anemos’s instant-finality BFT-PoS consensus (the sortition-based committee, block proposal, voting, and certificate-based finality) runs completely unchanged throughout the bootstrap window and after it. Proof-of-work never orders blocks and never finalizes anything; the committee still does that, block by block, with the same instant finality as always. All PoW decides is who gets paid the block reward while the window is open.
When the bootstrap window ends, the chain permanently reverts to paying the block reward to proposers (and their delegates) the normal way; there is no ongoing PoW mining, no permanent hybrid consensus, and no lingering miner privilege. It is a launch-phase distribution mechanism, not a fixture of the protocol’s steady state.
Why bother
A fair launch is only as fair as its distribution mechanism. Any genesis allocation, however disclosed and reproducible, is still a single, one-time snapshot decided by someone. Anemos removes the snapshot entirely: genesis holds zero coins, and a bounded mining window provides an ongoing, effort-based way for anyone, anywhere, with a GPU or even just a CPU, to earn ANM directly from the protocol during the period when the coin is youngest and most in need of wide, non-insider distribution. It costs nothing structurally: BFT-PoS liveness and instant finality are untouched, and the window is bounded so it never competes with the permanent validator security budget described in Fair-Launch Tokenomics.
Getting started
Mining requires running the Anemos node’s PoW miner against a live network. The step-by-step how-to (hardware/software requirements, CPU and GPU miner setup, and pool vs. solo mining) lives on the docs site: docs.anemos.one (see the Get Started / Protocol sections for the mining guide). The testnet’s short bootstrap window is the easiest place to try it before mainnet launch.