Community
Lethe is fully open source. The network grows through miners, node operators, developers, and everyone who believes financial privacy is a right, not a feature.
Source code, issues, pull requests. All development happens in the open.
Protocol questions, feature proposals, research discussions. GitHub Discussions.
Found a bug? Have a question? Open an issue. All feedback is welcome.
Why Lethe exists
Financial privacy is a basic right that billions of people have already lost. Every bank transaction is permanent, searchable, and shareable across governments and corporations without your knowledge or consent.
Zcash proved the cryptography works. Monero proved people want it. Lethe fixes the remaining friction: mandatory shielding (so your anonymity set is everyone), no trusted setup (so there is no catastrophic ceremony failure), and compliance proofs (so exchanges can list it without regulatory conflict).
There is no company, no foundation, no pre-mine. Coins are distributed through mining. The protocol is the product. The code is the team.
Mining guide
Lethe uses SHA-256d Proof of Work. The genesis difficulty is intentionally easy — approximately 50% of hashes satisfy the target. This means anyone with a laptop can accumulate coins before the network has significant hash rate. Difficulty retargets every 504 blocks toward the 2-minute target as more miners join.
You need Rust (stable) installed.
git clone https://github.com/lethe-network/lethe
cd lethe
cargo build -p lethe-node --releaseInstall the Lethe wallet, create a wallet, and copy your address from the navigation chip — it's the 64-character hex string. This is your coinbase address.
LETHE_COINBASE_ADDRESS=<your-64-char-address> \
RUST_LOG=info \
./target/release/lethe-nodeBlocks will start appearing in the logs. Each block creates a new note locked to your address.
Open the wallet, click Scan for notes. Your balance will reflect all mined coinbase notes. Each block = 50 LTH at genesis reward.
To mine on the shared testnet rather than solo, add bootstrap peers:
LETHE_BOOTSTRAP_PEERS=/ip4/<peer-ip>/tcp/9000/p2p/<peer-id> \
LETHE_COINBASE_ADDRESS=<your-address> \
./target/release/lethe-nodeContributing
The codebase is structured as a Rust workspace with five crates. Each has its own test suite. All CI runs on GitHub Actions.
Cryptographic primitives: Poseidon2, note commitments, nullifiers, Merkle tree, key derivation. Pure Rust, no networking. Best place to start.
Noir ZK circuits: spend, output, compliance. Requires Nargo. The hardest part to get right — extra review welcome.
P2P node: mempool, block production, PoW mining loop, REST API, libp2p swarm. Good for systems/networking contributors.
Tauri desktop wallet: React UI + Rust backend. Good for frontend contributors. The user-facing product.
# Clone, build, run tests
git clone https://github.com/lethe-network/lethe
cd lethe
cargo nextest run --workspace
# Open an issue before large changes — align on approach first
# Small fixes and test improvements are always welcome without prior discussionFAQ
No. There is no pre-mine, no ICO, no developer allocation, and no foundation treasury. All LTH is distributed through Proof of Work mining only. The only way to acquire LTH is to mine it or receive it from someone who mined it.
Approximately 21 million LTH, following a Bitcoin-style halving schedule: 50 LTH per block, halving every 210,000 blocks. A tail emission of 0.01 LTH per block applies after halvings would reduce the reward below that floor. This ensures miners remain incentivised indefinitely.
SHA-256d is the simplest, most battle-tested PoW algorithm in existence. ASIC resistance is a perpetual arms race that eventually fails anyway. Using SHA-256d keeps the consensus code simple and auditable. The focus of Lethe is the privacy and ZK layer — not inventing novel consensus mechanisms.
Zcash's biggest mistake. When most users use transparent addresses, the shielded pool stays small. A small shielded pool means shielded users stand out as suspicious. The anonymity set only works when everyone is in it. Lethe enforces this by making it the only option — there is no transparent mode, full stop.
Zcash's Groth16 proof system required a one-time ceremony where participants generate and immediately destroy secret randomness. If any participant kept their randomness, they can create fake proofs that mint unlimited coins — with no on-chain trace. Lethe uses Noir circuits with a transparent proof backend. There is no ceremony. There is no trapdoor. Anyone can verify the proof system is sound by reading the code.
After two independent security audits — one for the ZK circuits, one for the node and wallet. ZK bugs are silent: a broken circuit can allow infinite coin creation with no on-chain evidence. We will not launch until at least two audit firms have reviewed the critical paths. The bug bounty program will run in parallel with the audit process.