Does PulseChain have a hidden pre-mine or founder treasury?

What exactly is claimed?

That when PulseChain launched, the founder or the team received PLS that nobody can see — a hidden pre-mine or a treasury written into the chain’s genesis. It is a fair question for any new chain: many projects do reserve an allocation for the team, and the place to look is the code that creates the starting state.

What does the client add at the fork block?

The fork function in the execution client does two things and nothing else (pulse/pulse.go:11-15):

1. Sacrifice credits. PLS balances for sacrifice participants are added from an embedded file (pulse/sacrifice_credits.go:15-50). The file is identical to data/credits.bin in the separate official repository compressed-allocations at its tag Mainnet (same SHA-256, shown below), and that repository publishes the input lists and a decoder to check it.
2. Deposit contract swap. The copy of Ethereum’s beacon deposit contract is self-destructed together with its copied balance and replaced by empty code that rejects payments (pulse/deposit_contract.go:57-58); PulseChain’s own deposit contract is written to 0x3693693693693693693693693693693693693693 (:61-73).

Everything else on the chain at that moment is the copied Ethereum state. SHA-256 of the embedded credit file and of credits.bin:

6a8b1890c13c65b2b08e8eb4af7d4707ac73b7bd5e5332c23992381493ba79e1

Is there a treasury anywhere?

Only on the test network. The configuration of Testnet v4 contains a Treasury entry (params/pulse.go:67, :72-80); the mainnet configuration PulseChainConfig has none (:24-45), so the treasury branch of the credit code (sacrifice_credits.go:32-35) does not run on mainnet.

Who is in the credit list?

The inputs are three published lists: the PulseChain sacrifice, the PulseX sacrifice, and Ethereum beacon-chain stakers. Our reading of the last list: their ETH sat in Ethereum’s deposit contract, whose copy — balance included — is destroyed at the fork, so they are credited directly instead. The credit list itself is public. Who received how many credits — including any large sacrificers — can be read from that data; this portal has not analysed the individual entries yet and does not guess.

Verdict

Not supported by the client code. There is no hidden mainnet allocation in the client; the only PLS created at the fork are the sacrifice credits, from a published and reproducible file. This verdict is incomplete on one point: the individual entries of the credit list have not been analysed here. How the fork worked: How PulseChain works.