以下是根据要求翻譯後的英文輸出： A Beginner's Guide to Hash: Ethereum's "In-Browser Mining Rig"

Original Author: KarenZ, Foresight News

Hash is attempting to redo something that seems quite outdated: mining. However, this time, there's no need for mining rigs or server farms. Just open a browser tab and use your GPU to participate in a PoW issuance experiment written on the Ethereum mainnet.

On May 11th, Beijing time, Hash's official X account stated that Hash has launched Uniswap trading after the Genesis phase ended. Its market cap briefly approached $9 million before retreating to around $4 million.

A word of caution first: Although Hash has a clear rule design and its narrative ties together browser mining, the Ethereum mainnet, and post-quantum concepts, it is essentially still a highly volatile new project that has just completed its Genesis phase and entered the trading stage. The current price of $0.19 is already more than 5 times higher than the Genesis price of $0.03. Investors should still approach it cautiously.

What Exactly is Hash?

The Hash website defines itself as a "post-quantum token mined in a browser on the Ethereum mainnet." It is an ERC-20 token deployed on the Ethereum mainnet, with the following core selling points:

• Mining can be done using a browser without downloading a client or emphasizing GPU.
• A total supply cap of 21 million coins, clearly borrowing Bitcoin's scarcity narrative.
• The project emphasizes that its contract is non-upgradeable, with no team treasury, no pre-mining, and no admin privileges. Issuance rules are executed directly by the contract.
• Emphasizes post-quantum security.

In other words, the project's main point is to first lock down the issuance rules and then let the market and miners take over.

How Do the Rules Work?

The barrier to understanding this mechanism isn't as high as it seems. You can think of it as a simplified on-chain puzzle game.

Every miner address receives a challenge bound to itself. Users continuously try nonces in their browsers, performing local brute-force calculation of keccak256. Once they find a result small enough, they submit it to the chain. The contract does only two things: verify if the result is correct, and if it meets the current difficulty, mint the corresponding amount of Hash.

There are several key designs within these rules.

First, the challenge is bound to the miner's address. Even if others see your answer in the mempool, they cannot directly take it.

Second, the epoch rotates every 100 blocks (approximately 20 minutes), reducing the incentive to hoard answers.

Third, each combination of (miner, nonce, epoch) can only be used to mint once.

Fourth, the protocol sets a hard cap of at most 10 mints per block to prevent a sudden surge in supply at any given moment.

This means the core principle is "the first to calculate the answer gets the reward." However, to prevent others from stealing answers, each participant's puzzle is tied to their own wallet address. Even if someone sees you are about to solve it, they cannot use your result to claim the tokens. Meanwhile, the puzzle changes periodically, so you can't hoard old answers for later use.

In terms of issuance pace, Hash also tries to mimic Bitcoin. The whitepaper states that the base reward in Era 1 is 100 Hash per mint. After every cumulative 100,000 mints, it enters the next era, and the reward is halved.

The difficulty adjusts every 2,016 mints, aiming to bring the network's total output back to a rhythm of roughly "1 mint per minute." The official estimate is that, running at this target rate, it would take approximately 290 days to mine all the tokens.

The total supply is also predetermined, with a hard cap of 21 million. Of this, 5% of the tokens were sold during the initial Genesis phase; another 5% is allocated for trading pool liquidity, paired with the raised ETH and injected into the Uniswap V4 liquidity pool. The remaining majority is to be slowly produced through subsequent "mining."

From the issuance pace and token distribution, it's clear that the first 10 million tokens allocated for mining are released the fastest. This single phase accounts for 47.6% of the total supply and 52.9% of the total mining supply. In other words, Hash's release is heavily front-loaded. It doesn't release slowly over time but releases a large amount upfront, which sharply contracts later.

Extrapolating at the whitepaper's target rate, if the "1 mint per minute" rhythm were maintained long-term, it would roughly look like this:

• Day 1: Approximately 1,440 mints, releasing 144,000 Hash.
• 7 days: Approximately 10,080 mints, releasing 1,008,000 Hash.
• 30 days: Approximately 43,200 mints, releasing 4,320,000 Hash.
• Approximately 69.4 days: Complete the first 100,000 mints, entering the first halving.
• Approximately 138.9 days: Enter the second halving.
• Approximately 208.3 days: Enter the third halving.
• Approximately 294 days: Nearing completion of all mining.

This extrapolation is crucial. The new mining output in Hash's first week alone is close to the total 1.05 million tokens sold during the entire Genesis phase. Of course, the difficulty adjusts.

Why Does It Keep Emphasizing "Quantum Resistance"?

This is where Hash tries to distinguish itself from most projects.

The project team argues that Hash mining relies on hash primitives like keccak256. When facing quantum computing, the theoretical main impact on hash puzzles is closer to "improved search efficiency," rather than the direct compromise faced by certain elliptic curve systems. The whitepaper explicitly mentions that Grover's algorithm would provide a square-root speedup, but this can be offset by increasing difficulty; Shor's algorithm doesn't directly target these types of hash puzzles.

Hash's team also references the SPHINCS+ reference code mentioned by Vitalik Buterin, emphasizing that the latter is also built upon hash families like SHA3/keccak256, the same primitives Hash uses in its issuance and verification processes. In simpler terms: the post-quantum cryptography currently discussed in the Ethereum community shares some fundamental building blocks with what Hash is using. Hash aims to use this angle to prove that it's not just a typical "browser mining" gimmick, but an issuance experiment aligned with Ethereum's post-quantum security narrative.

This, of course, doesn't mean Hash has become some kind of "post-quantum asset." However, it has helped the project find a position that feels more substantive than a simple meme or fair launch.

Overall, Hash's appeal lies in the combination of several points: mining via a browser, a pre-determined total supply, a clear halving mechanism, transparent liquidity rules, coupled with the more infrastructure-oriented "post-quantum" story.

Of course, Hash's most attractive feature is also its biggest source of risk. A small initial circulating supply can easily drive rapid price increases. However, because mining releases are concentrated and early holdings show significant paper profits, price volatility will be extreme if subsequent buying demand cannot keep up. In other words, what matters next for Hash isn't just short-term hype, but also miner participation, real trading depth, and whether the market can continuously absorb the new supply. In this regard, it remains a high-risk, high-volatility new project.