PKT is a new blockchain-powered by PacketCrypt, the world’s first bandwidth-hard proof of work (PoW). PKT cloned Bitcoin code and then replaced the PoW with PacketCrypt, which requires bandwidth and encryption, not the high energy computation of Bitcoin and Ethereum PoWs. The PKT Network pays people in PKT Cash every 60 seconds to connect bandwidth and hardware to maintain and scale the network. This community participation aims to keep the network infrastructure decentralized.

The purpose of the PKT project is to build a global decentralized ISP powered by the people who are incentivized to connect to the network. This infrastructure powered by the people will also enable people to get onto the internet without paying a traditional ISP. This is accomplished via mesh networking using cjdns and PKT Network.

PKT also has a Network Steward, which is a wallet address elected by POS vote, where 20% of each mined block is paid, and 100% of the funds are granted to the community every 90 days to build open-source technology for the network, or else the coins are burned. Over 10% of the mined coin supply has been burned to date.

PacketCrypt is a bandwidth hard proof of work, this means it requires lots of bandwidth to mine. Miners collaborate with one another by sending small messages (called Announcements) and the sending of these messages requires a large amount of bandwidth.

Miners who are working in collaboration with one another are members of a mining pool, therefore all mining of PacketCrypt is done in pools. PacketCrypt mining is split into two distinct stages:

• Announcement Mining - Using your CPU to create Announcements
• Block Mining - Collecting Announcements from Announcement Miners and using them to mine blocks.

Block mining is typically done at the mining pool's data center, however, Announcement mining can be done from anywhere.