What Is Crypto?

Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency, launched in 2009 by an anonymous developer known as Satoshi Nakamoto.  It solved digital moneys fundamental problem: double spend.  If ^$1 is spent at store A, how does store B know the funds have not already been spent.

Bitcoin introduced several technologies to solve the double spend problem:

Blockchain is a public ledger or a chain of title for every transaction ever made.  Miners create the ledger.  The blockchain is software that runs the code according to the community agreed rules.  If a miner calculates a different answer, then the software must have been altered and the community excommunicates the cheating miner.

Key concepts Bitcoin introduced:

• Decentralization — no central authority controls it
• Fixed supply — only 21 million bitcoins will ever exist
• Identifiable — Each fraction of a token is trackable, like a serial number
• Self-custody — you hold your own keys, you hold your own money
• Proof of Work — computers & energy store the ledger, which makes counterfeiting expensive
• Block rewards — miners receive a raffled reward every 10-minutes
• Store of value — "digital gold"; fixed supply, identifiable, spendable

Bitcoin proved that digital scarcity was possible.  But it was designed primarily as money — it couldn't run programs or build applications.  That limitation led to the next major milestone.

Ethereum launched in 2015, created by Vitalik Buterin and others.  It asked a simple but powerful question: what if the blockchain could run code, not just track balances?

Ethereum introduced smart contracts — self-executing programs that live on the blockchain.  These contracts can hold funds, enforce rules, and interact with other contracts automatically.  No intermediary needed.

Key concepts Ethereum introduced:

• Smart contracts — programmable money and agreements
• ERC-20 tokens — a standard for creating new tokens on Ethereum
• DeFi (Decentralized Finance) — lending, trading, and earning without banks
• NFTs — unique digital assets representing ownership
• Gas fees — the cost of running computations on the network
• ETH — the native currency used to pay for transactions

In the robot picture: Bitcoin is a robot that does exactly one job — moving and recording its own coin.  Ethereum is a robot you can program.  Anyone can write a new set of business rules, load it into the machine, and it runs forever, enforced for everyone equally — no company required.

Ethereum became the foundation for thousands of projects — tokens, exchanges, lending platforms, games, and more.  It proved that blockchains could do far more than just send money.  But Ethereum's success created a new problem: high fees and slow transactions as the network got congested.  This opened the door for new blockchains and new approaches.

HEX is a DeFi protocol built and launched on Ethereum in December 2019, created by Richard Heart.  Where Bitcoin rewards or pays miners to secure the network, HEX pays everyone to not sell by locking HEX supply.  The longer HEX is locked, the higher the yield.

HEX pays everyone to delay gratification and secure the system for the future.  Bitcoin pays miners to burn electricity and computers.  Bitcoin uses more electricity than many countries and it has to keep growing.

Key concepts HEX introduced:

• Time deposits on-chain — lock your tokens for a selected time, earn interest with longer locks paying better, all via automated-smart-contracts
• Staking — committing HEX for a time period in exchange for rewards
• T-Shares — a unit of the share of the pool; more T-Shares you hold = more daily HEX rewards you receive
• Longer Pays Better — longer stake lengths get more T-Shares
• Early End-Stake Penalty — the penalty is the yield of the stake's first half.  Penalties go to stakers that keep their commitment, and gave HEX a nickname, The Truth Engine.  Keep your promise and receive your rewards.
• No admin keys — the contract cannot be changed; rules are immutable; as long as Ethereum runs, HEX will run

HEX is finished, no changes allowed, no admin keys, no team, each user controls their funds.  The HEX contract has run without interruption for 2495-days.

Once HEX is staked, your HEX is locked.  Staked HEX cannot be traded, moved, borrowed against or provide LP in liquidity pools.

HEX is a better Bitcoin, because it does not waste energy, land and equipment.  HEX pays the participants the rewards.  HEX went up 1,000,000% or 10,000x within 2-years of launching and became the #3 token, behind Bitcoin at #1 and Ethereum at #2 in 2021.

Combined: HEX's yield, HEX's capital appreciation and crypto's self-custody make HEX a great investment.

PulseChain is a Layer 1 blockchain launched in May 2023 by Richard Heart.  PulseChain is a full-state fork of Ethereum, sharing the same origin, but like any blockchain that changes the software, forced a new chain of title/blockchain.  Full state means the software's core functions were forked and all tokens and projects were forked to the new chain, PulseChain.  This left every wallet holding all their Ethereum tokens, plus a copy of all the tokens on PulseChain.  Plus, PulseChain kept the best features for speed and cost.

Bitcoin block times are 10-minutes and people consider a transaction settled after 3 to 6 blocks are verified.  That is up to 1-hour to settle.  Ethereum block times are 12 seconds and are settled in 64 blocks, which is a much faster 13-minutes.  PulseChain block times are 10 seconds and settled in 11-minutes.

PulseChain was needed after Ethereum fees and transaction load grew.  By 2021 Ethereum was so congested that HEX End-stakes cost multiple hundreds of dollars in fees.  Richard Heart mentioned that HEX was created for the small investor and they were the ones being hurt the most by the huge Ethereum fees.

Ethereum has introduced several technologies to lower fees and increase transaction volume, and PulseChain now has the option to use those better technologies, as well.  In addition, PulseChain is a second highway next to Ethereum.  Together they provide more than twice the throughput.

Because PulseChain runs most of Ethereum's technology, anything built for Ethereum runs on PulseChain with minor changes, which means "Ethereum is PulseChain's testnet."  PulseChain runs battle-tested code millions of Ethereum users tested first.

Key concepts PulseChain introduced:

• Ethereum full-state fork — all wallets, balances, and contracts were copied
• PLS — the native coin (equivalent to ETH), used for gas fees
• Origin Address (OA) — the origin allocation is not one giant address (the OA itself holds 1,803,087 PLS, read on chain); the great majority of PLS sits across never-moved origin-era addresses, and the OA concept is to protect the network from large players buying their way into supply and altering the game for smaller players.  HEX & PulseChain were made for regular people, not Venture Capitalists.
• Much lower fees — typical transactions cost fractions of a cent
• Faster blocks — ~10-second blocks vs Ethereum's 12
• PulseX — the native DEX (Decentralized EXchange) on PulseChain, equivalent to Uniswap on Ethereum.  HEX was the first and largest project at the time on Uniswap in early 2020.
• pTokens — copies of Ethereum tokens that exist on PulseChain (pDAI, pUSDC, etc.).  These copied tokens will Not have the same value as the same tokens on Ethereum with the same label.
• Sacrifice phase — PLS launch allocations followed a "sacrifice": a political statement for freedom of speech, made under the explicit term of no expectation of profit — deliberately a donation, not a sale, so nothing was promised to anyone.  Sacrifice was a concept that followed existing laws to allow a community to express their freedom of speech.  Courts have ruled software is speech.

PulseChain also gave rise to projects built natively on the chain — protocols that do not exist on Ethereum at all: DeFi lenders, DEX aggregators, NFT platforms, bridges, and protocols built on top of HEX staking (the roster is on PulseChain Tokens).  One of them is Actuator.Finance, which makes staked HEX liquid by turning it into tradeable tokens called HEX Time Tokens (HTTs).

Actuator.Finance is a set of DeFi Smart Contracts launched October 8, 2024 on PulseChain, and utilizes portable HEX stakes (HSIs).  Actuator vaults the HSI until its maturity date and then releases the HEX to HEX Time Tokens (HTTs) holders.  HTTs are the tokens released against the vaulted HSIs.  PulseChain's PRC-20 tokens have the same function as Ethereum's ERC-20 tokens.  Users have multiple ways to rebalance the system and earn a yield.  The easiest strategy is to buy HTTs at a discount to HEX.  The buyer gets discounted HEX and the seller sells their HEX position, without hurting the HEX price.  This liquidity allows users to stake HEX at the maximum longer-pays-better bonus to earn 3x T-Shares.

Here's how it works in simple terms:

1. Have an HSI (HEX Stake Instance) in your wallet — a Portable HEX Stake
2. Delegate the HSI to the Actuator contract
3. Mint HTTs based on the HSI T-Share Count
4. The HTTs can be Sold for anything, Held to maturity, or paired with HEX to Provide Liquidity and farm ACTR
   • Your wallet still controls the HSI and you can redeem it back at any time by repaying what was removed

   Check: HTT Bond Discounts and the Charts Tab

5. At maturity — any holder redeems exactly 1 HEX per HTT, guaranteed 1:1 forever

Actuator is a robot bond desk.  It takes time-locked value, prints tradable claims against it, keeps the books, and settles every redemption — around the clock, with no desk and no dealer.  You can find the data here: Actuator vs Traditional HEX Staking runs one stake both ways.

Actuator created a reward token, ACTR, that receives the 1% fee of all HTTs created and is released on a 3-year schedule with 372-days remaining.  ACTR is farmed by providing HTT to HEX liquidity.  The schedule is on Tokenomics, the live farm and vault rates on Farm & Vault Yields, and the mechanics in the Manual, Ch. 11.

The result is a "yield curve" — HTTs maturing sooner trade at different prices than those maturing far in the future, similar to how bonds work in traditional finance, "HEX bonds."  The live curve is on Charts.

The resemblance to the bond market is not an accident — it is the founding intent.  Co-founder C3Works spent his career in trading and sales for institutional bonds — on Wall Street through the 2008 crisis, until he left the bond market for crypto in 2017 — and he describes Actuator as rebuilding that market's backbone for HEX:

"What we believe we're going to see happen is that HEX, as a native asset — as a reserve asset for this ecosystem — will have an emerging yield curve unfold, where the market measures what the discount rate is, or what the cost — the time value of money — is for each spot along the curve, all the way out.  And that's much like what we have in, say, traditional markets with the Treasury yield curve.  The fact that we have such a curve is a backbone of traditional finance, because it's a reliable, market-based ruler on which you can build your financial house."

To dive deeper into how Actuator works, visit our How It Works page, or check the Guides for step-by-step walkthroughs.