For everyone / Pickle in plain terms

What Pickle is

An Ethereum Layer 2 built from scratch around one idea: your transaction runs the moment it arrives, and everything else - preconfirmation, confirmation, settlement on Ethereum - follows at its own pace behind it.

What it is

Pickle is a blockchain that sits on top of Ethereum. When you do something on it, send money or use an app, the network works out the result immediately and hands you a signed note saying so, within a fraction of a second. A moment later that result is packed into an ordinary Ethereum-style block, and later still a copy of everything is written to Ethereum itself, so anyone can check the network never lied.

You pay its small fees in ETH, the same money you already use on Ethereum. It has its own coin, PKL, but you never need PKL to use the chain. The chain also publishes prices of things like shares, gold and currencies right inside its blocks, so apps can use them without asking anyone else. And apps that make money on Pickle share a small published slice of their own earnings with PKL.

Pickle Chain is an Ethereum Layer 2 written from scratch in Rust around real-time execution. Transactions execute the moment they arrive. Signed mini-blocks are sealed at a 10 millisecond scheduling target and serve as preconfirmations; standard Ethereum-shaped EVM blocks are sealed at a 250 millisecond scheduling target and are the confirmation wallets and explorers see; finality is Ethereum settlement. Every block's full transaction list is published so that any independent operator can re-derive the chain's state and check it.

The protocol publishes prices itself: one system transaction per block carries 33 feeds, 19 of them real-world assets, with market hours respected. Two things are built on that layer: exposure to those assets, and a registry admitting third-party tokenised assets as collateral.

Value flows through two fee-sharing mechanisms. Gas, paid in ETH, is split on a net basis between a PKL buyback, PKL stakers, the treasury and security. Applications settle a progressive share of their own protocol revenue through an on-chain router, on a marginal schedule under which the first $100,000 of annual revenue is free and the builder keeps at least 82 percent at any scale. PKL is the ecosystem asset both flows feed, with a fixed supply of ten billion, no mint function and a holder-only burn. That buyback reduces total supply, not circulating supply during the vesting years.

A single Rust sequencer executes transactions synchronously on admission and runs two producers over the execution stream: mini-blocks at a 10 ms scheduling target, each carrying the interval's transactions, receipts, logs, a state-diff hash, a microsecond timestamp and a sequencer signature over the header; and Cancun-shaped EVM blocks at a 250 ms scheduling target wrapping those mini-blocks, with the next block's timestamp fixed at the previous seal so re-execution reproduces the hash. Each sealed block emits a derivation payload to a content-addressed data-availability layer, and one envelope per 60 s scheduling target is committed to an inbox on Ethereum, with calldata as the fallback. A replica re-executes from those payloads and halts on any hash mismatch.

Genesis predeploys a price registry and an adapter; one flagged system transaction per block writes 33 feeds at eight decimals. Gas is credited to the block beneficiary and split inside the same transaction, on a net basis, 40/30/20/10 to buyback, stakers, treasury and security. An application-side registry, router and vault settle a marginal 0/6/12/18 percent of protocol take above $100,000, $500,000 and $1,000,000. PKL is a plain ERC-20: ten billion minted once, no mint, no owner, holder-only burn.

Two intervals, and what they are not

The 10 and 250 millisecond figures are scheduling targets, not latency guarantees, and neither is a throughput claim. Pickle publishes no throughput figure that is not a dated benchmark result from a named machine.

One name

SurfaceName
BrandPicklewith the pickle mark
ChainPickle Chainchain ID 78271 in wallets and registries
Gas tokenETHpermanently; PKL is never required in order to transact
Ecosystem tokenPickle, ticker PKL18 decimals, ten billion fixed supply
Name service.pklthe display suffix

The Pickle community originates from AlphBanX, a lending protocol on the Alephium network whose ABX token had a maximum supply of 100,000,000. Pickle recognises that community with a continuity allocation of PKL, described on the migration page. Pickle itself is an independent Ethereum Layer 2 implementation, built from scratch in Rust rather than forked.

Design principles

These are constraints rather than aspirations. Where one of them costs the project something, the page that describes the mechanism says so at the point where the cost falls.

  1. Ethereum alignment. Pickle is an L2; security and canonical ETH derive from Ethereum.
  2. ETH is gas, permanently. PKL is never required in order to transact.
  3. PKL is a fee-share and coordination asset, never equity, and never a claim on any entity's profits.
  4. Wallets and tooling work unmodified. MetaMask, Foundry, Hardhat and the standard Ethereum RPC surface, with documented gaps.
  5. Two timescales. Execute immediately; preconfirm at a 10 ms scheduling target; confirm at a 250 ms scheduling target; finalise on Ethereum.
  6. The chain is derivable. Every block's full transaction list is published so that any independent party can rebuild the state and check it.
  7. Costs are paid before value is distributed. Nothing is distributed from a base that has not first been netted against settlement, data-availability and operating costs.
  8. Compensated capital and labour are never revenue. Liquidity-provider fees, supplier interest, creator royalties, keeper, solver and oracle payments, and user principal sit outside every revenue base, permanently.
  9. Permissionless deployment is inviolable. Registry status affects verification, funding and promotion. It never affects the ability to deploy a contract, transact with one, or use one.
  10. State the limits. Every trust assumption is disclosed next to the benefit it qualifies, not gathered at the back where it can be skipped.

A principle the list deliberately does not contain is any claim about throughput. Nor does Pickle make any claim about how distributed its operation is; the trust model page states what a user relies on and names the properties such a claim would require.

Where to go next