I’ve been experimenting with a memory-hard PoW design for a cryptocurrency protocol and I’m trying to figure out whether the core assumptions are fundamentally flawed before investing more time into it.

The broader protocol idea is a CPU-oriented PoW + staking system intended to reduce industrial mining concentration while avoiding fixed supply schedules and governance-controlled monetary policy.

But the PoW assumptions are the part I distrust most.

Very simplified overview of the current prototype (“Evo-OMAP”):

* miners generate a large memory dataset derived from previous block state
* mining traverses pseudo-random memory locations
* each lookup affects future traversal paths
* execution is intentionally branch-heavy and data-dependent
* performance becomes dominated more by memory latency/cache behavior than raw arithmetic throughput

Current prototype uses ~256 MiB working memory per mining instance, though that parameter is still experimental.

The hypothesis being tested:
forcing irregular memory access patterns + branch divergence may reduce the optimization advantage of ASIC pipelines and massively parallel GPU execution relative to general-purpose CPUs with strong cache hierarchy and DRAM bandwidth.

I’m aware most “ASIC-resistant” systems eventually admit specialized hardware anyway, so I’m trying to understand whether the assumptions here are meaningful or mostly wishful thinking.

Questions I’m struggling with:

* How meaningful is branch divergence against modern GPUs today?
* What hardware optimization paths am I most likely underestimating?
* Do memory-hard traversal systems inevitably converge toward efficient ASIC implementations anyway?
* Is “ASIC resistance” even the right framing, or is minimizing specialization gradient more realistic?
* What failure modes usually blindside custom PoW designers?

I’ve been studying RandomX, CryptoNight, Ethash, Argon2-related work, and memory-hard function literature, but I assume there are important prior results I’m missing.

Mostly looking for criticism from people who understand hardware, cryptography, distributed systems, or adversarial compute design.

Prototype repo:
https://github.com/AdamBlocksmith/evo-omap