Q: What is this, in one sentence?
A working demo of pay-with-compute — your browser does real cryptographic work, the BTX blockchain verifies it on-chain, and only then do you get the art. No account, no card, no API key.
Q: Is it like a captcha?
Closer to a captcha that's also a payment rail. Captchas just prove you're human. This proves you did useful matmul work AND the chain validates it AND the cost (work amount) is tunable. Same primitive can gate AI APIs, agent calls, micropayments — anything that needs friction without credit cards.
Q: Is the blockchain really involved?
Yes. Every click hits two real RPCs on a live BTX node: getmatmulservicechallenge (issues a fresh challenge anchored to the current chain tip) and redeemmatmulserviceproof (validates your matmul proof on-chain and marks it consumed). The BLOCK # shown on each art piece is the actual chain block your challenge was tied to.
Q: What is "matmul proof-of-useful-work"?
BTX replaces Bitcoin's SHA hashing with matrix multiplication as its consensus work. Same operation neural networks use. Instead of burning electricity for hash collisions, every byte of work secures the chain AND happens to be the math AI runs on. This demo uses dev-scale parameters (n=64) so your laptop solves in seconds; mainnet uses n=512.
Q: Why pay with compute instead of money?
Frictionless access for agents that don't have credit cards. Anonymous use. Micropayments below Visa's minimums. Built-in rate-limiting (each proof is one-shot — try the REPLAY button after minting to see the chain reject a reused proof). The "currency" is verifiable compute, denominated in time on your CPU/GPU.
Q: What's the WebGPU thing?
Your browser does the matmul work. By default JS does it (~30ms/nonce). If you have WebGPU (modern Chrome/Edge with a real GPU), it switches to a fused WebGPU pipeline — ~6ms/nonce, ~5× faster. Open the ADVANCED toggle to see the picker and pick a backend manually.