Lapis Monetae (LMT) Whitepaper

1. Abstract

Lapis Monetae (LMT) is an independent cryptocurrency built on a high-performance BlockDAG consensus engine. Derived from the Kaspa Rust codebase, LMT replaces the original kHeavyHash Proof-of-Work algorithm with RandomX, enabling fair CPU-based mining accessible to anyone with a standard computer. The network starts from its own genesis block with no connection to any prior blockchain.

LMT targets a total supply of 100,000,000 coins distributed over approximately 8 years through a smooth deflationary emission curve. The network launches at 1 block per second (BPS) and scales to 10 BPS via the Crescendo hardfork after approximately 6 months of operation.

2. Motivation

The cryptocurrency landscape is dominated by networks that favor specialized hardware (ASICs) or large GPU farms, concentrating mining power in the hands of well-funded operations. This undermines the decentralization that cryptocurrencies were designed to provide.

Lapis Monetae addresses this by using RandomX, a Proof-of-Work algorithm specifically designed to be efficient on general-purpose CPUs and resistant to ASIC and GPU optimization. Combined with the high-throughput BlockDAG consensus from the Kaspa research lineage, LMT offers fast confirmations, high transaction capacity, and genuinely decentralized mining.

LMT is a fair launch project with no premine, no ICO, no developer tax, and no venture capital backing. Every coin is earned through mining.

3. Consensus: BlockDAG with GHOSTDAG

Unlike traditional blockchains where blocks form a single chain, LMT uses a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structure where multiple blocks can be created simultaneously. The GHOSTDAG protocol determines block ordering and resolves conflicts without discarding parallel blocks, dramatically increasing throughput.

Key consensus parameters:

4. Proof of Work: RandomX

LMT uses RandomX as its sole Proof-of-Work algorithm. RandomX was designed by the Monero research team to be optimally efficient on general-purpose CPUs while being resistant to ASICs, GPUs, and FPGAs.

The PoW pipeline in LMT works as follows:

The RandomX VM executes random programs that are generated from the block header hash. These programs heavily utilize CPU features such as floating-point operations, branch prediction, cache hierarchy, and memory-hard operations, making the algorithm naturally suited for CPUs.

The RandomX dataset (~2 GB) is regenerated every epoch and cached in RAM, ensuring that memory access patterns cannot be optimized by specialized hardware.

5. Emission Schedule

LMT has a fixed maximum supply of 100,000,000 coins (100 million LMT). The smallest unit is 1 sompi = 0.00000001 LMT (10^-8).

After the pre-deflationary period, the block reward decreases smoothly each month following a calculated subsidy table. The emission curve is designed to distribute approximately 50% of all coins in the first 2 years, incentivizing early adoption while maintaining long-term mining rewards.

6. Network Architecture

LMT operates a fully independent peer-to-peer network. Nodes communicate via a custom protocol (version 7) over TCP. The network is designed to reject connections from incompatible networks.

The node software (lmtd) is written in Rust for memory safety and high performance. It includes a full consensus engine, P2P networking stack, gRPC and wRPC RPC servers, UTXO indexer, and mining manager.

7. Wallet and Addresses

LMT uses BIP-32 hierarchical deterministic wallets with BIP-39 mnemonic seed phrases (12 or 24 words). Wallets are encrypted with XChaCha20-Poly1305 using a password-derived key (Argon2id).

Addresses use CashAddr-style Bech32 encoding with network-specific prefixes:

Account types supported: BIP-32 standard, multisig (m-of-n), watch-only, and legacy import.

8. Mining Infrastructure

LMT includes a complete mining stack out of the box:

• lmtd — Full node with get_block_template and submit_block RPC methods
• lmt-stratum-bridge — TCP Stratum proxy that translates between XMRig and the node's gRPC interface
• XMRig fork — Modified XMRig that understands LMT-native job format (48-byte RandomX input)
• Miner GUI — Desktop application for managing bridge and miner processes with real-time metrics

The LMT Stratum protocol uses standard JSON-RPC framing with mining.subscribe, mining.authorize, mining.notify, and mining.submit methods. The bridge includes rate limiting, stale job detection, automatic retry with exponential backoff, and structured logging.

9. Security

LMT inherits the proven security model of the GHOSTDAG consensus protocol and strengthens it with:

• RandomX Proof-of-Work provides ASIC resistance, ensuring no single entity can dominate mining
• The GHOSTDAG ordering protocol is proven secure under the honest-majority assumption
• Pruning proof validation ensures new nodes can securely sync from any state
• Transaction scripts use a stack-based virtual machine with BIP-62 compliant encoding
• Wallet encryption uses XChaCha20-Poly1305 with Argon2id key derivation (memory-hard)

10. Roadmap