2. Architecture

Tesserax is an independent layer-1 chain built with the Polkadot SDK (Substrate, release stable2606). It is not a parachain and shares no security with any other network: it has its own proof-of-work consensus, its own validator set — the miners — and its own token. The Polkadot SDK provides the database, the networking stack, the transaction pool, the RPC server and the FRAME framework for the runtime; Tesserax replaces every cryptographic component that is not post-quantum and adds its own consensus and modules.

2.1 The node

The node (node/, consensus/pow/) is a native binary that:

• imports blocks after checking their proof of work and executing them with the runtime;
• keeps the chain of greatest cumulative difficulty as the best chain and finalizes blocks 60 deep;
• relays blocks and transactions over a peer-to-peer network whose connections are encrypted with keys exchanged by ML-KEM;
• mines with a built-in RandomTESS miner, or serves block templates to external miners (XMRig and pools) over a stratum protocol;
• serves the JSON-RPC interface that wallets and applications use.

The node contains no business logic. Everything that defines the chain — accounts, fees, rewards, difficulty, agents, privacy, contracts, governance — lives in the runtime.

2.2 The runtime

The runtime is a WebAssembly program stored on chain, executed by every node for every block. A referendum can replace it; nodes then run the new version from the next block without being updated themselves (chapter 10). It is composed of FRAME modules, called pallets:

Index	Module	Role
0	System	Accounts, nonces, events, runtime upgrades
1	Timestamp	Block time, used by the difficulty adjustment
2	Difficulty	LWMA difficulty adjustment over 120 blocks
3	Balances	TESS balances, holds and freezes
4	TransactionPayment	Fees by weight and length, paid to the miner
6	Revive	Smart contracts on PolkaVM
7	Shielded	Private transfers proven with STARKs
8	Emission	Block rewards and halvings
9	Vesting	Locks released over time
10	Multisig	Multi-signature accounts, used by the foundation
11	Allocations	Team and foundation allocations at genesis
12	Agents	Delegated spending for agent keys
13	AgentRegistry	Identity, endpoints, capabilities and reputation of agents
14	Channels	Payment channels and vouchers
15	Tasks	Task market with escrow and arbitration
16–22	Governance	Preimages, scheduler, referenda, conviction voting, origins, whitelist, technical committee
23	Swaps	Atomic swaps against BTC, ETH, USDC and USDT

Index 5 was the sudo module of the early testnet; it was removed when governance took over (chapter 10), and the index is not reused.

Accounts and units

• An account identifier is the BLAKE2-256 hash of an ML-DSA-87 public key (chapter 3).
• Addresses use the SS58 encoding with prefix 2261 and start with te.
• Balances are u128 amounts of planck; one TESS is $10^{12}$ planck (12 decimals).
• The existential deposit is 0.001 TESS: an account below it is removed and its dust goes to the miner of the block.
• Block numbers and nonces are u32.

Transactions

A signed transaction carries the call, the signer's public key, an ML-DSA-87 signature and the transaction extensions: the spec and transaction versions and the genesis hash (so that a transaction cannot be replayed on another chain or runtime), a mortality era, the nonce, the fee payment with an optional tip, the metadata hash and weight accounting. Two kinds of calls are valid without any signature, because a proof authorizes them instead: private transfers of the shielded pool, authorized by their STARK, and claims of atomic swaps, authorized by the secret of the swap. Applying a runtime upgrade that a referendum authorized is the third.

2.3 Clients and services

Component	Description
tesserax-wallet	Command line wallet: encrypted ML-DSA accounts, transfers, agents, channels, tasks, private transfers, contracts, governance and swaps
Web wallet, extension, desktop	The same features in a browser, a browser extension with a provider API for web applications, and a desktop application
Explorer	An indexer following the chain, reorganizations included, into a database, and a web application to search it
Faucet	Free testnet TESS, limited per address and per IP
Mining pool	Stratum server for rigs, verified shares, PPLNS rewards and automatic payouts
RPC gateway	The public endpoint wss://rpc.tesserax.app, with TLS 1.3 limited to ML-KEM key exchanges
SDKs	Rust, TypeScript and Python libraries with the same operations, ML-DSA signing included
MCP server	Tools for any agent speaking the Model Context Protocol
Miner	A build of XMRig for the rx/tess algorithm, CPU only, without developer fee

All of them are open source. The node and the proof-of-work consensus are licensed under the GPL-3.0 with the Classpath exception, like the Polkadot SDK client crates they build on; RandomTESS keeps the BSD-3 license of RandomX; the runtime, the SDKs, the tools and the documentation are licensed under Apache-2.0.