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blockchain height
A blockchain where the "work" spent mining isn't wasted hashing — it's real radio astronomy data triage, searching for signals that might come from somewhere else.
A Bitcoin blockchain spends electricity solving puzzles that serve no purpose beyond securing the network itself. Projects like SETI@home showed, over two decades, that millions of people are willing to donate processing power just to help sift through real radio telescope data — with no reward at all. Galaxy SIGNAL combines the two ideas: the "proof of work" is real scientific work, and whoever does it gets rewarded for it.
Every block starts from a genuine Breakthrough Listen hit — ~28.9 million real radio detections, L band, 692 stars observed.
A classifier trained on real data (the telescope's own ON/OFF cross-referencing) decides whether the hit looks like a genuine candidate or terrestrial interference (RFI). Only what passes this filter reaches the next stage.
Only after triage does traditional proof-of-work (like Bitcoin) kick in. Without passing the science, no nonce turns a weak hit into a valid block — not even with all the hashpower in the world.
The search for signals of technological origin in space — so-called technosignatures — today generates volumes of data that far exceed manual analysis capacity. Breakthrough Listen, the largest SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program ever funded, publicly makes available petabytes of radio observations collected at telescopes like the Green Bank Telescope and the Parkes Observatory — it's exactly this open archive that feeds every block on this network: ~28.9 million real L-band detections, 692 stars observed.
The public data exists, is free, and is ready to use — but analyzing it requires
specific tools and methods. Telling a real signal apart from human-made interference
(RFI) is a classic pattern-detection problem, well suited to data-mining and
machine-learning techniques. That's the reason this network reuses, as its proof-of-work, the
same scientific pipeline an active community already maintains in the open (blimpy,
turboSETI, the UC Berkeley SETI Research Center), with published results against
which what's found here can be validated and compared.
Searching and selecting observations via the Breakthrough Listen public API, filtering by target, frequency, and file type.
Reading filterbank/HDF5 files with blimpy, converting to
time-frequency spectrograms, and data cleaning.
Detecting narrowband signals and Doppler drift with turboSETI,
clustering and classification to separate candidates from noise/RFI.
ON/OFF cadence — alternating observation of the target with a reference — to confirm whether the signal is consistent with a celestial origin or is terrestrial interference.
Identified candidates are compared against already-published results, evaluating detection rate and possible false positives.
| Source | Data type | Use in the project |
|---|---|---|
| Breakthrough Listen Open Data Archive | Real radio telescope observations (filterbank, HDF5, raw) | Primary source — the hits that become blocks on this network |
| 1327 Star Analysis (Data Release 1) | Already-processed, published results | Comparison and validation baseline for the results obtained |
| Breakthrough Listen public API | Observation metadata (target, coordinates, frequency, telescope) | Programmatic search and selection of files to analyze |
Two ways to contribute processing power to the network — pick whichever you prefer.
Open a page, generate a wallet automatically, and start mining right from the browser — Windows, Mac, Linux, doesn't matter.
/minerA monitoring widget in the style of the classic SETI@home screensaver — animated galaxy map, network statistics, and the hit each node is processing in real time.