$NOID - Parano1d is a PoW chain that launched Aug 21, created by @ignotus_nemo and funded by a 10% cut of block rewards for its first three years. It showed up on WhatToMine and a couple of tiny exchanges, and the price went from about $0.002 (Sep 17) to $0.64 (Oct 20). Not a call. Some pockets of CT noticed, so I looked at the docs and the explorer. I’d never heard of it until this week. The idea is about one thing: making it cheap to check a blockchain yourself. Think of a blockchain as a shared account book. One way to check today’s balances is to start at page one and work through every payment. Parano1d takes a different approach: the balances come with mathematical proofs your computer can check, showing the transactions followed the rules. You don’t have to take the bookkeeper’s word for it, but you don’t have to redo all their work either. A computer joining the network checks the headers and the proofs, downloads the verified current state, processes up to 18 recent blocks, and it’s in. There are no conventional transaction signatures either; you prove you know a secret without showing it, while addresses and amounts stay public. The author says the whole stack is built to survive quantum computers. I haven’t found a published independent audit of the full cryptography. The mainnet is barely two months old. But someone still has to make those proofs. A producer must finish the proof before the hash race even starts. GPUs in a pool just search for nonces on a block someone else built. So "how many miners" tells you less than "who builds the blocks." I checked. For the first 51 days, the reward was 50 NOID per block with a 20-second target. On Oct 11 it dropped to 16 with a 30-second target. Of the 11.1M NOID issued by Oct 24, 10.5M came out of those first 51 days. 95%. The reward keeps stepping down to a permanent 1 NOID per block; there’s no fixed supply cap. 118 addresses have ever mined a block. In my Oct 24 snapshot, five that first appeared within six blocks of each other on Aug 27 accounted for 62% of all blocks since genesis. A different address first won a block on Oct 16; in the Oct 25 snapshot it alone had 57% of the past week’s. Only 11 reward addresses appeared in that snapshot’s preceding 24 hours. A pool, a private operation, or anons with great timing? Addresses aren’t identities and the chain doesn’t say. The project reports no premine, and the explorer’s reported issuance matches the published reward schedule. The 10% goes to two developer funds, about 1.09M NOID so far, and they publish reports. The first covers launch through Oct 16: about 25k NOID spent on early bug bounties, and 1M NOID locked in two timelocked vault contracts until block 490,000, around Jan 16. The contract files are public, with instructions for checking the locks. Can you do anything today? There’s an official desktop wallet for Mac, Windows and Linux with its own node. NOID pays network fees. You can send payments and use the built-in contracts, timelocked vaults among them, which is what the funds did with their million. You can mine on a laptop with the official CPU miner, but treat it as an experiment, not income. GPU pool mining uses third-party software, including closed-source miners that charge their own fee. Buying: one small exchange does almost all of the volume. What’s next is why I’m gonna keep looking: Around Nov 4 (block 279,370) v2.1’s financial features activate: fixed-supply token launches, bonding curves, a DEX and NFTs. Launchpad tokens require NOID backing that holders can redeem by burning their tokens. When a curve graduates, its proceeds become permanent trading liquidity the creator can’t pull, though traders can still buy and sell against it. That’s the coin’s job in this economy. Whether anyone shows up to use it is the thing we can actually measure. Anyone can verify this chain. One address won 57% of its blocks in the week to Oct 25. Who’s behind it? 🫡