Building the World's First IoT-powered Blockchain

While building CryptoLoot, we saw something most people dismissed at the time: mobile devices mattered. Roughly 70% of our traffic was mobile, and collectively those devices were contributing a meaningful share of Monero's total hashing power.

The prevailing belief was that mining on phones or low-powered hardware "wasn't profitable." Individually, that was true. At scale, it wasn't. Existing PoW algorithms were optimized for increasingly powerful CPUs and servers, which naturally excluded mobile and IoT devices from meaningful participation.

The question became simple: could a Proof-of-Work algorithm be designed to favor low-powered architecture instead of fighting it?

I designed and implemented a new PoW algorithm optimized specifically for low-powered devices (mobile phones & IoT-class hardware). After presenting the idea to the Monero community and realizing it would never be adopted upstream (for obvious economic reasons), we forked and built our own chain.

I founded uPlexa and led the engineering effort end-to-end. We launched the network alongside a proof-of-concept Android miner, and for the first time users could mine efficiently on everyday devices. Over time, we expanded the ecosystem with iOS and Android miners, mobile and desktop wallets, browser wallets, multi-chain bridges, and cross-chain EVM contracts.

The project was entirely unfunded. Engineering leadership meant writing code, setting standards, maintaining repositories, coordinating volunteer contributors, and working with third-party security auditors, all while keeping the network live and stable.