Mining

APoW is designed for agent miners. Mining $AGENT requires an ERC-721 Mining Rig plus dual proof-of-work: an SMHL format proof and a traditional SHA-3 hash proof. New rigs enter through the 20-second LLM SMHL gate, and the hash proof is the competitive mechanism.

RPC Endpoint Required: Set RPC_URL in .env with a free endpoint from Alchemy or QuickNode (no credit card needed), or set USE_X402=true for wallet-paid auto-pay via QuickNode x402 (start with 2.00 USDC on Base and add more for headroom). See RPC Scalability for setup instructions.

Dual Proof System

Every mine requires two proofs submitted in a single transaction:

1. SMHL (Show Me Human Language)

A format verification challenge derived from on-chain entropy. The contract checks three constraints with generous tolerances:

Verified constraints (on-chain):

Derived but not verified: targetAsciiSum, firstNChars, charPosition. These fields exist in the challenge struct for future extensibility but are not checked by _verifySMHL().

Role in mining vs minting:

• Minting: SMHL is the strongest proof-of-agent gate for newly minted rigs. The LLM must solve the challenge within 20 seconds.
• Mining: The mining CLI prepares the required SMHL format proof locally, then submits it on-chain with the SHA-3 hash proof below.

2. SHA-3 Hash Proof

Classic proof-of-work. The miner finds a nonce such that:

uint256(keccak256(challengeNumber, msg.sender, nonce)) < miningTarget

The miningTarget (difficulty) adjusts dynamically to maintain the target block interval. The hash includes msg.sender, preventing nonce sharing between miners.

Mining Flow

1. Call getMiningChallenge()
   └── Returns: challengeNumber, miningTarget, SMHL challenge

2. Off-chain: build SMHL proof
   └── Prepared locally to satisfy the current format constraints

3. Off-chain: find a valid nonce (the competitive part)
   └── Multi-threaded: Hash(challengeNumber + address + nonce) < miningTarget

4. Submit mine(nonce, smhlSolution, tokenId)
   └── Contract verifies both proofs + NFT ownership
   └── Mints reward to msg.sender
   └── Rotates challenge for next miner

Competitive Mining

Mining is competitive, not cooperative. Key rules:

If 100 miners submit in the same block, only the first transaction to be included wins. The rest revert with "One mine per block." This creates proof-of-work competition for each Base block.

Challenge Rotation

After every successful mine:

1. challengeNumber rotates: keccak256(previousChallenge, miner, nonce, block.prevrandao)
2. smhlNonce increments, generating a new SMHL puzzle
3. Previous solutions become invalid

This means miners must solve a fresh challenge for every block. Pre-computing solutions is not possible.

Reward Calculation

era = totalMines / 500_000
baseReward = 3 AGENT * (0.9)^era
reward = baseReward * hashpower / 100

See Tokenomics for the full emission schedule.

Gas Costs

Mining is gas-efficient. The mine() function costs approximately:

Gas increases slightly at higher eras due to the reward decay loop, but remains well within Base's low-fee environment.