Notes from the bench
Short, honest posts about building APEX-256. Written by the person building it.
The $3 gas fee that started all this
A blockchain digital notary was the first job. Smart contracts, tokenized gold, a team that wanted quantum-resistant crypto because of harvest-now-decrypt-later.
The problem showed up on a spreadsheet. Post-quantum keys and signatures are many times larger than the classical ones, and on-chain data is billed by the byte. For a $5 purchase of tokenized gold, the fee came out around $3. That’s 60 percent overhead on someone slowly building a savings. Nobody does that twice.
So the team dropped post-quantum and kept the standard stuff. Fair call for that product.
I stayed on the part nobody had solved. On a chain you pay for every byte. On a coin-cell sensor you pay for every byte too, in battery, in radio time, in packets that might not arrive. Different bill, same math.
The question got smaller: after a single key exchange, can everything else ride on something with no padding, no fragments and no growth? That question became APEX-256.
More posts to come on our formal Z3 verification work and hardware bench testing.