Any 4 GB card, approximate. 80% of each block to its finder.
+Any 4 GB card at launch, 8 GB from year 4, approximate. 80% of each block to its finder.
About the minerEvery GPU chain that promised ASIC resistance shipped a fixed algorithm, and a fixed algorithm gets a chip the moment the prize pays for one. Igneum does not have a fixed algorithm.
-Each hour the chain derives a seed from a locked checkpoint one epoch back, passes it through a ten-minute verifiable delay so no miner can see which program a seed implies before choosing whether to publish a block, and feeds it to a deterministic generator. The generator emits a random integer program built from what graphics cards are uniquely good at: wide parallel integer maths, shuffles between the 32 lanes of a warp, and random reads over a multi-gigabyte dataset that changes daily, so the program is bound by memory bandwidth. The memory footprint and instruction count are fixed and only the maths sequence is random, so no hour favours one vendor's cards and nobody gains by grinding the seed. Miners compile the program once per hour. Anyone running a node, a wallet or an exchange checks a hash on an ordinary CPU in under ten milliseconds by simulating one warp, so nobody needs a GPU except to mine. Measured: 0.41 to 0.58 ms per warp on one Apple M5 Max core with the 256 MB cache, about 17x inside the 10 ms gate; a 2019-class laptop core is not yet measured.
+Each hour the chain derives a seed from a locked checkpoint one epoch back, passes it through a ten-minute verifiable delay so no miner can see which program a seed implies before choosing whether to publish a block, and feeds it to a deterministic generator. The generator emits a random integer program built from what graphics cards are uniquely good at: wide parallel integer maths, shuffles between the 32 lanes of a warp, and random reads over a multi-gigabyte dataset that changes daily, so the program waits on memory latency, not on maths or bandwidth. The memory footprint and instruction count are fixed and only the maths sequence is random, so no hour favours one vendor's cards and nobody gains by grinding the seed. Miners compile the program once per hour. Anyone running a node, a wallet or an exchange checks a hash on an ordinary CPU in under ten milliseconds by simulating one warp, so nobody needs a GPU except to mine. Measured: 0.41 to 0.58 ms per warp on one Apple M5 Max core with the 256 MB cache, about 17x inside the 10 ms gate; a 2019-class laptop core is not yet measured.
The hash is a lottery, not a general-purpose cryptographic hash. It has to be unpredictable per nonce, free of any shortcut cheaper than honest evaluation, and free of bias a miner can exploit. It does not need preimage or collision resistance. Open: no analysis of the lottery properties exists yet. It is the first job of the external review in phase 1, and until then the hash is a design claim backed by the measurements below.
| Clock | What changes | Miner update needed? |
|---|---|---|
| Continuously | The dataset grows on a schedule fixed at genesis, slowly enough that consumer cards keep up for years. A chip is built with fixed memory, so it is on a countdown from the day it ships. Ethereum's growing dataset ran Bitmain's E3 out of memory in 2020 this way, approximate, with nobody doing anything | No |
Everything above is automatic. Nobody writes a new program, nobody schedules a fork, and Igneum runs on the generator fixed at genesis, as Monero has run on RandomX since 2019 with no chip publicly shipped, approximate. Monero is precedent, not proof: absence of a public chip does not show that none can exist, which is why a bounty exists. The generator is designed so that the best hardware for any program it can emit is a graphics card. Target: a chip that dropped the graphics parts and kept the parallel cores and the memory gains under 2x, below what pays for a tapeout. That is a design target, not a measurement. Ethash chips reached roughly 1.5 to 2x, approximate, and the standing bounty exists to test the target. On top of that, the widening program space and the growing dataset mean a chip designed for this year's Igneum meets a harder Igneum next year without anyone lifting a finger.
+Three ideas carry the chip resistance. The hash rewrites itself. A new program every hour, drawn from the chain. Its memory pattern changes with it. The rules change on a schedule fixed at launch. No release, no vote. It waits on memory, not maths. Every hash is a chain of random reads into a table too big for a chip to carry. The wait is the same physics for everyone. Miners hold the switch. Spare defences are written into the rules, switched off. A 90% miner signal turns one on. No fork.
+No hash has stayed free of chips forever. Igneum does not claim to. It claims the gain is small, the response takes a week, and both are measured. The model and the bounty are public: the numbers. Monero has run on RandomX since 2019 with no chip publicly shipped, approximate; that is precedent, not proof.
One thing takes a person, here and on every chain that exists: writing new code. A chain cannot safely write its own generator, and it cannot safely tell a chip from a wave of honest new cards by hashrate alone. If the design above ever failed, anyone could publish a new generator and miners would switch it on by signalling, as Monero's community can fork. Igneum is built to make that day unlikely, and does not depend on avoiding it.