Blog
Latest news and insights from the Shell Chain team
Shell Chain v0.22.0 — Stability, Observability, and STARK Hardening
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 Testnet is Live — wPoA Consensus, chain_id 10
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.
Native Account Abstraction Phase 1: How It Works Under the Hood
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.
Operations Hardening in v0.18.0: Storage Profiles, Witness Endpoints, Observability
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.
Inside v0.18.0: Native Account Abstraction Phase 1 & Operations Hardening
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.
The Road to Public Testnet: A Recap of Shell Chain M0–M17
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.
Inside v0.17.0: Security & Efficiency Hardening
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.
Community & Decentralisation: ShellDAO and the Path to Mainnet
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.
Storage Architecture: 3-Way Block Pruning & Storage Profiles (v0.15–v0.16)
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.
Building Shell Chain: The Tech Choices Behind a Post-Quantum EVM L1
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.
Why STARK Proofs for Signature Aggregation — and How We Built It with Winterfell
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.
Why We Built Native Account Abstraction — and Why ERC-4337 Wasn't Enough
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.
Why Post-Quantum Security Matters Now
Quantum computers will break today's blockchain cryptography. Shell Chain is ready.