Layer 1 blockchain
Decred ticker DCR
Summary
Miners search for a block whose BLAKE3 hash is below a target; BLAKE3 and a per-block difficulty rule with a 12-hour half-life replaced BLAKE-256 mining at block 794,368 in August 2023. Blocks target five minutes. Holders lock DCR in tickets whose price resets every 144 blocks to keep the pool near 40,960 tickets. For each block the protocol calls five live tickets; the next block must carry at least three of their votes, and those votes approve or reject the voted-on block's ordinary transactions. The block reward splits 1% to the miner, 89% across the ticket votes and 10% to an on-chain treasury that ticket holders also vote on. Value sits in unspent outputs guarded by script descended from the btcd codebase, with stake transactions kept in a separate tree inside each block. 123415162122
Design
- System
- Layer 1 blockchainPermissionless base chain in production since February 2016, secured by a hybrid of proof-of-work mining and proof-of-stake ticket voting. Its Go node software descends from the btcd codebase, but Decred has its own genesis block, transaction format and consensus rules and settles to no other chain. The package label of base-layer blockchain is kept.
- Settlement family
- Bitcoin family
- Scarce resource
- Other
- State model
- UTXO
- Finality
- Probabilistic
- Who makes blocks
- Proof-of-work miners assemble and publish every block. Decred's own change proposal for the 2023 hash switch said mining had been controlled by a cartel using specialised hardware; Decred's mining page said that, at the time of writing in August 2023, no BLAKE3 ASICs were in production, no GPU mining software was available and CPU mining could be done in dcrd. Ticket holders do not produce blocks: the five tickets called for a block vote from the owner's always-online wallet or through a voting service provider that holds only the voting right.
- Fork choice
- dcrd keeps the valid branch tip with the most cumulative proof of work. A block is valid only with at least three votes from the tickets called on its parent, so rebuilding history privately needs hashing power plus control of most of the tickets that branch calls. Votes that reject a block's ordinary transactions keep the block in the chain but send those transactions back to the mempool and strip the miner's reward. No signed checkpoint or finality committee overrides the most-work rule; each release only hard-codes an old assumed-valid block below which forks are rejected.
Qualifications
- Scarce resource · Partial. Security rests on two resources: BLAKE3 hashing for producing blocks and DCR locked in tickets for approving blocks, consensus rule votes and treasury votes. Neither work nor stake alone describes it, so it is recorded as another resource.
- Finality · Partial. Settlement is probabilistic, but ordinary transactions in a block are only settled once the next block's votes approve that block, and rewriting history needs ticket votes as well as hashing power. There is no checkpoint signature or finality committee, and no official confirmation count was found.
- Settlement family · Partial. Grouped with Bitcoin-derived chains because dcrd descends from btcd and keeps unspent outputs guarded by script from that lineage. Decred has its own genesis, a two-tree block format, extra signature types and hybrid consensus, and it does not settle to Bitcoin.
- Merged mining · Not applicable. Decred's proof of work is its own BLAKE3 hash; its docs and chain parameters describe no merged mining or auxiliary proof of work with another chain. Not exhaustively verified.
- On chain treasury · Applies. 10% of each block reward goes to a consensus-tracked treasury balance. Spends are signed by keys named in the chain parameters and need ticket-holder approval (20% quorum, 60% yes). Since February 2026 spending in any roughly 24-day window is capped at 4% of the balance, with a floor of about 10,781 DCR.
- Privacy · Partial. StakeShuffle mixing is optional, non-custodial and has been coordinated over the peer-to-peer network since dcrd 2.0 in 2024. It unlinks inputs from fixed-denomination outputs; amounts, address reuse and non-mixed transactions stay public.
- Throughput · Unknown. No primary-source throughput figure was found to classify; block size and spacing are documented but no measured rate was reviewed.
Tradeoffs
- Emphasizes
- Security and Decentralization Contested
- Gives up
- Base-layer capacity and speed: blocks arrive about every five minutes, are capped at 393,216 bytes and give only growing confidence, so fast or high-volume payments rely on a Lightning port that carries its own warnings. Taking part in security also asks more of users than plain proof of work: DCR stays locked in a ticket for weeks, and the holder must either run an always-online voting wallet or trust a voting service provider with the voting right.The decentralization reading is contested. Decred's own 2023 change proposal described proof-of-work hashing as cartel-controlled before the switch to BLAKE3; miners now receive 1% of new issuance; voting weight grows with the DCR a holder can lock; and many holders delegate votes to service providers. Mining-pool, ticket-ownership and service-provider concentration were not measured here.
- Full node at home
- Practical at home 561434dcrd's README (as of January 2026) recommends 30 GB of disk (16.5 GB of chain data plus 5.5 GB of metadata, growing about 2.5 GB a year), 2 GB of RAM, roughly 150 MB a day down and 1.5 GB a day up, and high uptime. dcrdata reported about 19.2 GB of raw chain data on 26 September 2026. Solo ticket voting also needs a wallet that stays online and unlocked; light wallets can buy tickets but must delegate voting.
- Throughput claims
- No classified figure recorded
Scaling layers
- Decred Lightning Network (dcrlnd) · Payment channels, mainnet 7252930
Two-party payment channels settled with Decred timelock and hash-lock scripts; Decred's docs date mainnet activation of the enabling rules to May 2019. dcrlnd, a port of lnd kept in the Decred organisation, needs a dcrd full node, calls itself beta software that can lose funds if its operating guidelines are ignored, and Decred's docs advise against putting significant amounts in it. Channel partners must stay online or use a watchtower to punish an old-state close. The Bison Relay messaging app requires payments over this network and can run an embedded dcrlnd wallet.
Capabilities
| Capability | How it is provided | Notes and sources |
|---|---|---|
| Account abstraction | Structured assessment pending | Not yet assessed for any chain. |
| Atomic swaps | Core-team softwareFull scope | Core-team software: the Decred project's command-line atomicswap tools swap DCR with Bitcoin and several other script chains, and DCRDEX, also from the Decred developers, settles every trade as an on-chain atomic swap using Decred script's hash-locked, time-locked contracts. Swaps need both parties to act before timeouts, and matching hashes link the two sides for chain observers. 82627 |
| Authenticated data publication | Unknown | Not yet assessed under the current definitions; the nearest feature is Politeia, Decred's off-chain proposal system. The cited governance docs say all Politeia data (proposals, comments and up or down votes) is periodically anchored into the Decred blockchain with dcrtime, so the chain records a commitment, and that users can cryptographically prove whether censorship occurred. They describe no way to retrieve the data and check it against the anchor. The earlier review called dcrtime a project-run timestamping service; no cited source names its publisher or shows it live. 3 |
| Light clients | Built into the protocolFull scope | Protocol: since DCP-0005 each proof-of-work header commits to the block's compact filter, so Decrediton and dcrwallet in SPV mode download headers and filters and check each filter against proof of work. As with any header-chain light client, peers can still hide a transaction by withholding data. SPV wallets can buy tickets but cannot solo vote; that restricts taking part in stake voting, not what the light client checks. 618 |
| Native staking or delegation | Structured assessment pending | Not yet assessed for any chain. |
| On-chain governance | Structured assessment pending | Not yet assessed for any chain. |
| Parallel execution | Structured assessment pending | Not yet assessed for any chain. |
| Payment or state channels | Ecosystem software (publisher not distinguished) Earlier definition | Lightning payment channels run through dcrlnd, a separate daemon maintained in the Decred organisation, using Decred timelock and hash-lock scripts. It is self-described beta software. See the scaling layers. 725 |
| Programmable spending | Native (protocol or core-team software) Earlier definition | Outputs carry script descended from the btcd codebase, extended with a SHA-256 opcode, relative timelocks, stake and treasury opcodes, and a signature-check opcode that accepts Ed25519 and secp256k1 Schnorr keys as well as ECDSA. Signature scripts are left out of the transaction hash, so changing a signature cannot change a transaction's ID. There is no account-style virtual machine or persistent contract storage. 12131719 |
| Protocol-verified messaging | Structured assessment pending | Not yet assessed for any chain. |
| Reversible transfers or recovery | Unknown | Not yet assessed under the current definitions; absolute and relative timelocks (relative locks added by DCP-0003) are building blocks with which wallets can build delayed or revocable spend paths, but no cited source shows a sender-reclaim window or recovery path live, and a confirmed payment cannot be reversed by its sender. Missed or expired tickets are revoked automatically since DCP-0009, returning the locked DCR without reward; that is stake recovery, not a reversible transfer. 1720 |
| Rollups | Unknown | The earlier search of Decred's docs and repositories found no rollup settling to Decred but was not exhaustive, so the rule that absence needs a source makes this unknown. Decred script cannot verify rollup proofs, and the Lightning port is a channel network, not a rollup. 7 |
| Shielded transfers | Structured assessment pending | Not yet assessed for any chain. |
| Signed partial offers | Unknown | Not yet assessed under this row's current definition. |
Reading these values
- How this feature is provided
- Built into the protocol, core-team software or independent software says where a feature lives and who can change it. These are implementation layers, not quality: core-team software is not closer to the protocol than independent software.
- Structured assessment pending
- The shared review has not assessed this feature for any chain yet (Account abstraction, Native staking or delegation, On-chain governance, Parallel execution, Protocol-verified messaging and Shielded transfers). That does not mean it is absent, and a chain’s profile may already describe it.
- Unknown
- The review has not established this for this chain under the current definition; the note beside it says why. Unknown is not absent and not a low score. A feature reads “Not present” only when a source shows it is absent.
- Earlier definition
- Payment or state channels, Programmable spending and Rollups keep the earlier definition until the next fact-check. There, “Native” does not separate the protocol from core-team software, “Ecosystem software” does not say who publishes it, and “Partial” does not say which layer.
- Reading across rows
- The list of capabilities is incomplete. Do not read these rows as a chain leading or lagging overall.
Ecosystem & custody
| Product type | Status | Notes and sources |
|---|---|---|
| Automated market makers | Unknown | The earlier note said absence was not verified, so the rule that absence needs a source makes this unknown. Earlier finding: no automated market maker runs on Decred, whose script has no pooled contract state. The main Decred-built venue, DCRDEX inside Bison Wallet, is an order book: a server matches orders in epochs and each trade settles as on-chain atomic swaps, with a bond instead of trading fees. Its download page lists 14 tradable assets. 2728 |
| Issuer-native stablecoins | None found | Decred has no token-issuance feature, and neither Tether's supported-protocols page nor Circle's USDC address list includes Decred. DCRDEX can swap DCR against USDC and USDT that live on other chains; those stay other chains' tokens. 283738 |
| Algorithmic stablecoins | Unknown | No source was cited for absence, so the rule that absence needs a source makes this unknown. Earlier finding: no algorithmic stablecoin on Decred was identified; absence was not exhaustively verified. |
| Bridges | Unknown | Wrapped DCR tokens on other chains were not searched, so the rule that absence needs a source makes this unknown. Earlier finding: no bridge or wrapped-DCR system was found in Decred's docs or repositories reviewed; cross-chain trades go through hash-time-locked atomic swaps (the atomicswap tools and DCRDEX), which exchange coins on each chain instead of locking DCR to mint a copy elsewhere. Risk: Atomic swaps avoid custodians but need both parties online before the refund timeouts (48 and 24 hours in the command-line tools), and a DCRDEX server can stall matching though it never holds funds. 82627 |
| Block explorers | First-partydcrdata (dcrdata.decred.org), dcrdata mirror (explorer.dcrdata.org) | dcrdata is open-source explorer software from the Decred organisation that shows both transaction trees, votes, tickets and treasury activity; Decred's docs point to it and to no other explorer. Both public instances were serving mainnet block 1,118,807 at review. Third-party explorers were not verified, and a public instance's view is provider data, not independent validation. 93132 |
| Hardware wallets | Established in the ecosystemLedger, Trezor (third-party apps only) | See the custody section. Ledger lists Decred in its own Ledger Wallet app, and Ledger Wallet's current code includes Decred among its Bitcoin-family coins; Trezor supports DCR only through other apps such as Exodus or Decrediton. The main limit is staking: Decred's docs say hardware wallets cannot buy tickets or vote, and dcrdata showed about 11.3 million of roughly 17.6 million circulating DCR locked in tickets at review, so DCR used for staking sits outside hardware-wallet support. 103233353640 |
Hardware-wallet custody
| Device maker | Status | What users can and cannot do |
|---|---|---|
| Ledger | Native supportSame as native: Yes | Can: Set up a Decred account and manage it in the Ledger Wallet app with private keys kept on the Ledger device, according to Ledger's Decred page Cannot: Buy tickets, vote or otherwise take part in proof of stake from a hardware wallet, according to Decred's docsLedger's Decred page still describes an older reward split and calls the Lightning rule vote ongoing, so its explanatory text is dated. Mixing and Lightning use with a Ledger were not verified. 103540 |
| Trezor | Through an intermediaryThird-party wallet apps: Exodus (named by Trezor) and Decrediton (documented by Decred)Same as native: No | Can: Send and receive DCR with a Trezor through Exodus or a watching-only Decrediton wallet, confirming each transaction on the device Cannot: Manage DCR in Trezor Suite, which Trezor shows as unsupported for Decred Cannot: Buy tickets or vote with a Trezor-backed Decrediton wallet Cannot: Restore a Trezor recovery seed into a standard Decred wallet, because the seed formats differTrezor's page data lists Decred as supported on two devices without naming them and does not mark it deprecated. 1136 |
Public data
iKnow Blockchain has no public-data lookups for Decred yet. This is a limit of the service, not a statement about the network.
| Lookup | Status | What it covers and its limits |
|---|---|---|
| Address or account | Not available yet | Public-data lookups for this chain are not built yet. |
| Tokens and assets | Not available yet | Public-data lookups for this chain are not built yet. |
| NFTs | Not available yet | Public-data lookups for this chain are not built yet. |
| Transactions | Not available yet | Public-data lookups for this chain are not built yet. |
Sourced developments
Developments: Review overdue Reviewed Sep 27, 2026; next review was due Oct 7, 2026, 12:00 UTC.
Publication date · newest first
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Post-incident report: a launch-era inflation bug was exploited on mainnet
The project's report says a bug in how consensus handled the regular and stake transaction trees together, present since launch, allowed inputs to be double-spent. It was reported through the bug bounty on 12 August 2026, exploited on mainnet between 16 and 17 August, and fixed in dcrd 2.1.6 on 18 August. About 2,078 DCR was created, and exchanges were asked to pause deposits and withdrawals while the chain was watched. Developers chose not to roll back the chain.
- Implementation:fix shipped in dcrd 2.1.6; double-spend watching service built; upgrade-signalling fields planned
- Release:report published 2026-08-25
- Activation:fix in force on upgraded nodes since 2026-08-18; no rollback
Sources: Decred blog — Decred Consensus Vulnerability: Post-Incident Report (external site) · Decred developers — dcrd v2.1.6 release notes (external site)
-
dcrd 2.1.6 ships an emergency fix for a consensus vulnerability
dcrd 2.1.6 fixed a critical consensus-related vulnerability and told everyone to upgrade or risk being forked off the network. It also fixed a possible periodic deanonymisation attack on mixing and several denial-of-service issues.
- Implementation:shipped in dcrd 2.1.6
- Release:stable release published 2026-08-18
- Activation:tightened rules enforced by upgraded nodes immediately; not a ticket-holder vote
Sources: Decred developers — dcrd v2.1.6 release notes (external site) · Decred developers — Decred binary releases (dcrd, dcrwallet, Decrediton) (external site) · Decred blog — Decred Consensus Vulnerability: Post-Incident Report (external site) · Decred developers (GitHub) — dcrd releases (Atom feed) (external site)
-
dcrd 2.1.4 patches several denial-of-service weaknesses
dcrd 2.1.4 fixed several ways a malicious peer could disrupt nodes, including stricter checks on network messages and mixing messages, and made the RPC server reject cross-origin requests arriving through reverse proxies. The release notes list no consensus change; 2.1.5 followed three days later to fix a possible node crash that affected only 2.1.4.
- Implementation:shipped in dcrd 2.1.4
- Release:stable release published 2026-04-07
- Activation:no consensus change; took effect as nodes upgraded
Sources: Decred developers — dcrd v2.1.4 release notes (external site) · Decred developers — dcrd v2.1.5 release notes (external site) · Decred developers — dcrd releases (external site)
-
dcrd 2.1.0 opens a ticket-holder vote on a new treasury spending cap (DCP-0013)
dcrd 2.1.0 added a consensus vote on DCP-0013, which caps treasury spending in each roughly 24-day window at 4% of the treasury balance, with a floor of about 10,781 DCR, replacing a rule tied to recent treasury income. The release also cut mixing bandwidth and added timeouts for disruptive mixing peers. DCP-0013 is now listed as active: it locked in at block 1,044,352 and took effect at block 1,052,416.
- Proposal:DCP-0013 created 2025-11-20; approved by ticket-holder vote
- Implementation:shipped in dcrd 2.1.0
- Release:stable release published 2025-11-26
- Activation:active from block 1,052,416 (block time 2026-02-08)
Sources: Decred developers — dcrd v2.1.0 release notes (external site) · Decred developers — DCP-0013: New Max Treasury Expenditure Policy (external site) · Decred project (dcrdata) — dcrdata API: block 1,052,416 (external site)
Topics your AI can explain
Your AI can explain these topics for Decred through the connection, with sources.
Known gaps
What this profile's review did not establish:
- No throughput figure is listed: no primary-source rate was found to classify.
- Mining-pool concentration, BLAKE3 mining hardware in use today, ticket-ownership concentration and how many tickets each voting service provider votes were not measured; the hardware statement on Decred's mining page dates from August 2023.
- The size, liquidity and reliability of the Decred Lightning Network were not measured, and whether dcrlnd ships inside current Decrediton builds was not confirmed from release notes.
- Wrapped DCR tokens on other chains and any third-party bridges were not searched; web search was unavailable, so rollup, bridge and stablecoin absence rests on Decred's own docs, repositories and issuer pages.
- Third-party block explorers were not verified; only the project's dcrdata instances were checked.
- Which two Trezor devices support Decred is not named on Trezor's page, and whether Ledger Wallet supports mixing or Lightning with DCR was not verified. Decred's Trezor guide was last updated for Decrediton 1.6.3 and its hardware-wallet table in August 2020, so Trezor use in current Decrediton builds was not tested.
- Decred's privacy docs still describe a central mixing server, while the dcrd 2.0 release notes say mixing moved to the peer-to-peer network; the docs page appears out of date.
- No official confirmation-count guidance was found for exchanges or merchants.
- The August 2026 inflation bug report does not say publicly who exploited it; the extra DCR stayed in the supply and that was not independently recounted here.
- The launch distribution (the block-one allocation) was not reviewed.
Sources
Oldest dated source check: Source checked Sep 27, 2026 Next check due Oct 27, 2026.
- Proof-of-Stake overview (external site)
- Research: Hybrid Design (external site)
- Governance overview (external site)
- Proof-of-Work mining overview (external site)
- Solo Proof-of-Stake voting (external site)
- SPV mode (external site)
- Lightning Network overview (external site)
- Atomic swaps (external site)
- Using the block explorer (external site)
- Hardware wallets (external site)
- Decrediton: Trezor wallets (external site)
- Research: Elliptic curve signature algorithms (external site)
- Research: Signature script isolation and fraud proofs (external site)
- dcrd: Decred full node (README and minimum specifications) (external site)
- dcrd chaincfg/mainnetparams.go (external site)
- dcrd internal/blockchain README: chain selection (external site)
- Decred Change Proposals (DCP) index (external site)
- DCP-0005: Block Header Commitments (external site)
- DCP-0006: Decentralized Treasury (external site)
- DCP-0009: Automatic Ticket Revocations (external site)
- DCP-0011: Change PoW to BLAKE3 and ASERT (external site)
- DCP-0012: Change PoW/PoS Subsidy Split To 1/89 (external site)
- DCP-0013: New Max Treasury Expenditure Policy (external site)
- dcrd v2.0.0 release notes (external site)
- dcrlnd: Decred Lightning Network Daemon (external site)
- Decred cross-chain atomic swapping tools (external site)
- DCRDEX and Bison Wallet repository (external site)
- DCRDEX download and overview (external site)
- Bison Relay (external site)
- Bison Relay repository (README) (external site)
- Decred block explorer by dcrdata.org (external site)
- dcrdata API: best block and ticket pool (external site)
- dcrdata API: circulating supply (external site)
- dcrdata API: blockchain size chart data (external site)
- Decred wallet (external site)
- Decred wallet (external site)
- Supported protocols (external site)
- USDC contract addresses (external site)
- Decred Consensus Vulnerability: Post-Incident Report (external site)
- Ledger Wallet coin module loaders (libs/ledger-live-common/src/coin-modules/loaders.ts) (external site)
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Funding disclosure
Funding disclosures appear here when an upkeep arrangement exists, in the form “Upkeep funded by [name]; verdicts unaffected.” The funder ledger has not been published yet. Neutrality & funding