TrueNorth

A Canadian, CPU-mined fork of Bitcoin Core. Ticker NORTH.

Proof of work is RandomNorth, a RandomX variant with a custom Argon2 salt and per-epoch seed-key rotation, so stock xmrig hashpower cannot be aimed at the chain. Blocks target two minutes with LWMA-1 per-block retargeting. The subsidy floors at 8 NORTH instead of terminating, and P2QRH quantum-resistant addresses are the wallet default.

Not a meme launch. No hype thread. No moon math. The repository is the single source of truth for everything below.

Status

Mainnet has been live since 2026-10-12 00:00:00 UTC. Public testnet4 is also live and open to anyone — see doc/testnet.md.

Ticker	NORTH (mainnet), tNORTH (testnet)
Block time	2 minutes, LWMA-1 retarget every block over a 90-block window
Initial subsidy	512 NORTH, halving every 1,051,200 blocks, floors at 8 NORTH
Default address	P2QRH, `north1z…` (bech32m, witness v2)
Mainnet ports	`9555` P2P, `9554` RPC
SLIP-44 coin type	1867
Mainnet genesis	470c8b8ae824c06575cfae0851282c495b861829211194842590dc6a2c829981

A TrueNorth node and a Bitcoin node will refuse to peer with each other. Magic bytes, ports, address prefixes and the genesis block are all distinct.

Download and verify

Binaries for Linux x86_64, macOS arm64 and Windows x86_64 are on the releases page. There is no other download location. Building from source is documented in the README.

Each release carries SHA256SUMS and a detached signature SHA256SUMS.asc. Verify both:

gpg --import contrib/keys/septentrion-dev.asc
gpg --verify SHA256SUMS.asc SHA256SUMS
sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS

The two fingerprints

Signing is done by a subkey, so GPG reports two different fingerprints and neither output is wrong:

primary (identity, certification only)	3F0BAE0458615427B8CA935E3E242DF5E4478AE5
signing subkey (what signs releases)	895B7591E9701E99D87D58A9B932A2FBD92C626D

gpg --verify opens with using EDDSA key 895B…626D. That is the subkey, and it will not match the primary fingerprint — expected, not a problem. It then prints both, labelled Primary key fingerprint and Subkey fingerprint. git verify-tag reports only the subkey.

Check the primary fingerprint against a source other than this page before trusting it. Anyone who can alter a page can alter both the key and the fingerprint printed beside it. The same key is published at github.com/septentrion-dev.gpg and on keys.openpgp.org, which fail independently of each other.

Running a node

Mainnet, testnet4 and regtest
doc/tor.md — running over Tor, including finding peers when onlynet=onion
doc/public-seed-setup.md — operating a public seed
doc/reduce-memory.md — low-memory tuning

Mining

Mining is CPU-only in practice. The release archives include truenorth-miner. If you are building from source it is excluded from the default target and needs asking for by name:

cmake --build build --target truenorth-miner

Solo mining, and huge-pages and NUMA tuning — the tuning section matters, a correctly configured box is several times faster
doc/mining-policy.md — solo and P2Pool are preferred, and why concentration is the thing to watch

RandomX wants 256 KB of L2 cache per thread. On most server parts that works out to one thread per physical core, and running more threads than that makes a box slower, not faster.

Quantum resistance

P2QRH is the wallet default rather than an opt-in, which is the whole point — a quantum-resistant address type nobody uses protects nobody. See doc/p2qrh.md for what the commitment scheme does and does not protect against.

There are no official social accounts

TrueNorth has no official Twitter or X account, Discord, Telegram, Matrix room or YouTube channel, and exactly one website: https://truenorth-project.github.io/. Anything claiming otherwise is not connected to this project. There has been no presale, no ICO, no airdrop and no founder allocation, and the protocol takes no dev fee: the coinbase carries a single output paying whoever mined the block, and consensus caps only the amount, never the recipient. The genesis reward is an OP_RETURN and is unspendable by anyone. The subsidy schedule is the only way coins come into existence.

Pools and third-party miner binaries set their own fees, which are theirs and not the protocol's. Check what a pool takes, and what binary it asks you to run, before pointing hashrate at it.

Nobody involved in the project will message you first, ask for a seed phrase, ask you to validate a wallet, or offer to send coins. Download binaries from the releases page and nowhere else, and verify the signature.

These are the only places the project communicates:

github.com/truenorth-project/truenorth — source, releases, issues and discussions
IRC on OFTC: #truenorth and #truenorth-dev
Nostr: npub1w2kxm7jq9ynqnr0p93j5casz88pxz56jhp9zadl53f4cl59ye8tqejqyw5

Questions

Is there a GUI wallet?: Not in the releases. Each archive ships truenorthd, truenorth-cli and truenorth-miner. The inherited Qt GUI is still in the tree but is not built for releases.
Can I mine with a GPU or an ASIC?: No ASIC exists for RandomNorth. GPUs are poor at RandomX and the custom salt means stock miners will not work against this chain unmodified.
Is it on an exchange?: The project does not arrange listings and does not endorse any. Exchange operators should read doc/exchange-listing-guidance.md for confirmation-depth guidance.
Are the builds reproducible?: No. Releases are built by GitHub Actions from the tagged source and carry a build provenance attestation, but recompiling a tag is not guaranteed to produce the published bytes.
Who runs this?: One maintainer, pseudonymously, with outside contributors on specific work. Review the code rather than trusting the name on it.