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History & releases
Snowblossom was created by Joseph Gleason (“Fireduck”), formerly of Amazon SQS/SNS and Google SRE and the author of the Java Bitcoin pool SockThing and the Electrum server jelectrum; Zachary Coon (“Clueless”) joined for community, tooling and documentation. It launched in May 2018 with no premine and no ICO.
Milestones
| Date | Block | Event |
|---|---|---|
| 16 May 2018 | Testnet “teapot” restarted (block-zero remark testnet2-20180516). | |
| 22 May 2018 | 0 | Mainnet launch. Block 0's coinbase had to contain the hash of Bitcoin block #523,850 (00000000000000000019d1562bd02674302db7ddd6ccdb77be3e6daaa8eb8a51), so nobody could mine before it existed. Field 0 “cricket” (1 GiB), difficulty 25. |
| 23 May – 23 Jun 2018 | 454 – 6,655 | Hash rate grows explosively; fields 1–7 activate within a month (llama, 128 GiB, at block 6,655). |
| 2018 | 7,289 | SIP-2 (work weighting by field) passes. SIP-1 (four-year halving) passes and ships in 1.1.2. |
| Jul 2018 | 1.3.0: JSON-RPC, key pool and multi-file wallets. | |
| 2 Jan 2019 | 34,630 | Field 8 “bugbear” (256 GiB) activates. |
| 6 Jan 2019 | 35,000 | SIP-3 activates: output locks and extra data (release 1.4.0). |
| Jan 2019 | 1.5.0: BIP-44 seed wallets become the default, dynamic fee estimation, Arktika benchmarking, VanityGen. | |
| 2019 | 1.5.1–1.5.2: SurfMiner, optional TLS service port, IceLeaf GUI, xpub watch-only wallets, fastest-node selection. | |
| Nov 2019 | 1.6.0: address and transaction indexes move into the hashed trie; FBO and name indexes. | |
| Apr – Aug 2020 | 1.7.0/1.7.1: streaming block templates (pools), channel name reservation, SubscribeAddressUpdates, RichList. | |
| Dec 2020 | 1.8.0 “Advent of Blocks”: SIP-4 implementation, new explorer framework, atomic-file DB for pools. | |
| 25 Mar 2021 | 151,680 | SIP-4 (input value checking) enforced. |
| 5 Aug 2021 | 171,069 | Field 9 “hippo” (512 GiB) activates - still the required field today. |
| 14 Feb 2022 | 198,613 | SIP-5 (sharding) approved. |
| 22 Feb 2022 | 2.0.0 “Wee Big Shards” released. | |
| 6 May 2022 | 210,240 | First halving: 50 → 25 SNOW. |
| 15 May 2022 | 211,600 | Sharding activates: header version 2 required. Mainnet stays on shard 0; testnet later splits into shards 1 and 2 at height 170,459. |
| 19 Jan 2025 | 2.2.0 “Post Quack Chillin”: SPHINCS+, Dilithium and Falcon keys, trust-network signed peer info, GetPeerList, TLS for pool miners. | |
| 5 Mar 2025 | 358,700 | SIP-6 (post-quantum signatures) activates. |
| 12 May 2026 | 420,480 | Second halving: 25 → 12.5 SNOW. |
| today | - | Difficulty -, ≈ -, - SNOW in circulation. |
Releases
Release names are whimsical; the zip and IceLeaf builds are on snowblossom.org/releases, the full notes in RELEASE-NOTES.md.
| Version | Name | Highlights |
|---|---|---|
| 1.0.2–1.0.7 | memfield (RAM mining), lobstack DB, node ids, tx index, Windows build, first explorer, auto-snow, alpha mining pool, per-miner rates, hybrid RAM+disk mining, pool vardiff. | |
| 1.0.8 / 1.1.x | Default DB location changed (resync); SIP-1 implemented. | |
| 1.2.0 | Breaking Ice | Arktika distributed miner; explorer address history and height search. |
| 1.3.0–1.3.3 | Pineapple Awakening → Avocado Soup | JSON-RPC, wallet key pool and multi-file wallets, watch-only wallets, rpc import, tx status and unspent calls. |
| 1.4.0–1.4.2 | More Birds, Less Chatter, Duck's Vision | SIP-3, signed arbitrary data, cluster gossip fix, 100 KB low-fee limit per block, pool failover. |
| 1.5.0–1.5.2 | Purring Chains, Verified Vortex, Frozen Trees | Seed wallets default, VanityGen, HoleGen, fee estimation, SurfMiner, TLS service port, IceLeaf, xpub, node_uri. |
| 1.6.0 | The Chocolate Ten | Indexes in the hashed trie; FBO and name indexes; get_fbo_list/get_id_list. |
| 1.7.0 / 1.7.1 | bEARN IT / Mail Sort | Channel names, streaming templates, RichList, BC 1.65, address update subscriptions, MonitorTool. |
| 1.8.0 | Advent of Blocks | SIP-4, seed node refresh, explorer rewrite, get_address_history, atomic-file DB, MrPlow migration tool. |
| 2.0.0 | Wee Big Shards | Sharding (Braid), preview-based sync, automatic RocksDB compaction, UPnP, multi-node MrPlow. |
| 2.2.0 | Post Quack Chillin | PQC keys, signed trustnet peer info, GetPeerList, MrPlow TLS, node_uri for miners, MinerReport, BC 1.80. |
| 2.2.0-dev | master | Bazel 7.6 with bzlmod, gRPC 1.75 module, RocksDB 9.8, Debian bookworm images. Command-line wallet overhaul: coin control (outputs, --input/--from), on-demand quantum-resistant addresses (newaddress --key-mode), sweep/consolidate/backup, offline signing (--out, signtx, broadcast), confirmation prompts, exact decimal amount parsing, and a stack of wallet fixes (multisig helper guard, change shard, split-change fee, confirmed-first coin selection). |
Design lineage
Much of the design reads as lessons from Bitcoin applied with hindsight: opaque transaction bytes to kill malleability, unique coinbases by construction, a committed UTXO set for light clients, per-block difficulty adjustment that also eases while no block is found, fair launch anchored to a public event, on-chain signalling with a simple counting rule, and an ASIC-resistant proof of work whose resource (storage) is what everyone already has. The choice of Java and Bazel aims at readable, deterministic builds rather than raw performance.