Latest news and insights from the Shell Chain team
A founder's narrative on the engineering decisions behind Shell Chain — why Rust, why post-quantum first, why a new L1 instead of a fork, and how Feature-Driven Development kept seventeen milestones honest.
A post-quantum chain only matters if it is operated by many independent parties. Here is how Shell Chain plans to get there — the ShellDAO governance design, the validator economics under consideration, and the sequencing from today's permissioned testnet to a credibly-decentralised mainnet.
A technical deep-dive into Shell Chain's v0.18.0 batch transaction and paymaster implementation — wire format, signing domain isolation, mempool admission, and execution semantics.
Four concrete operations improvements land in v0.18.0 — declarative storage profiles, a fully-implemented witness endpoint, Prometheus metrics and health checks, and a unified RPC error code table. Here is what changed and why.
From an empty Cargo workspace to a 19-crate, 1,200-test, audited post-quantum L1 with native account abstraction and STARK signature aggregation. Here is what shipped on the way to v0.17.0.
Shell-Chain v0.22.0 ships durable STARK settlement indexes, O(3) compression-layer lookups, structured proof input decoding, and prover liveness metrics. All five ecosystem repos are updated.
Shell-Chain v0.20.0 launches the first public testnet with Weighted Proof of Authority consensus. Get testnet SHELL from the faucet, explore blocks, and deploy smart contracts today.
Post-quantum signatures are large. To keep node operations affordable for a decade, Shell Chain v0.15 and v0.16 introduced a tiered hot/warm/cold storage model and a single-flag node profile system. Here is how it works.
v0.17.0 is the most operationally important release of Shell Chain to date. No new user-facing features — instead, the architecture was re-split, slashing was wired in, a network amplification class was closed, mempool back-pressure became a first-class metric, and supply-chain CI became blocking. Here is the full picture.
v0.18.0 ships two major tracks simultaneously — Native AA Phase 1 (atomic batch transactions and sponsored gas) and four operations hardening items (storage profiles, witness endpoints, observability, and RPC stability). Here is the full technical picture.
Shell Chain implements account abstraction at the protocol layer, not as an overlay. Here's why we made that choice and how the architecture works.
Quantum computers will break today's blockchain cryptography. Shell Chain is ready.
Shell Chain uses a Winterfell-based STARK to compress batches of post-quantum signatures and feeds the proof into a 3-layer storage pipeline that delivers ~18× end-to-end block reduction. Here is why STARKs over SNARKs, and how the implementation works.