A chain built so a chip gains too little to take your place. A mining program that rewrites itself every hour, so a chip built for one hour is useless the next. The same card proves every block and gets paid for it. No premine, no stake, no foundation, no merge to proof of stake.
+A chain built so a chip gains too little to take your place. A mining program that rewrites itself every hour, so a chip built for one hour is useless the next. An NVIDIA card with 24 GB or more proves every block and gets paid for it; AMD and Apple cards mine. No premine, no stake, no foundation, no merge to proof of stake.
Igneum Ember finds your GPU, makes a wallet for you and runs the node, the miner and the prover as one app.
Every Igneum block is proven with a zero-knowledge proof, and the miners produce it. Proving is a useful GPU workload that is cheaply verifiable by construction. A proof is right or it is not, and a phone can check it in milliseconds.
Blocks carry transactions only and make no claim about state. Every node executes the ordered transactions natively at once, so users see their transaction land in about a second. The execution is then split into shards of a fixed proving cost. Shards are assigned by lot to eight provers for ten seconds, then open to anyone; there is no bond. Provers run them on consumer cards, and the shard proofs are folded by recursive aggregation into one proof for the block. That proof lands on-chain within about a minute at launch. Because the proof computes the state from the ordered sequence, no node accepts a block with a wrong state root. Full nodes also execute every block natively and reject a proof record whose result differs from their own execution, so a forged proof is a light-client problem and never a chain split. Implemented: the native-execution check on every carried proof record, proving v0 on the devnet (specification section 7). The emergency path for a soundness bug in the proof system is a human one: a new proof-system version is written by people and activates only on miner signalling. Invalid transactions are skipped by rule, the way Kaspa skips conflicting spends.
+Proving needs an NVIDIA card with 24 GB or more (32 GB until the fee switch of 6 October 2026; from it a 24 GB card mines and proves on the same card: 22.2 GB peak measured with the miner on, 5 October 2026). AMD and Apple cards mine. A prover for them lands when a zkVM ships one.
Gas prices execution. Proving cost is a different number, so Igneum meters it separately: every transaction pays in both dimensions, and each block has a proving-cost budget set in consensus from measured prover throughput. A transaction that is cheap to run and expensive to prove pays for what it costs the provers. Target: shard size will be set so a 12 GB card proves one shard in about 20 seconds. That number is the phase 2 gate on the roadmap and is not measured yet on the card the gate names. The first proofs exist: on 4 October 2026 an RTX 5090 proved a small two-transaction block in 1.4 seconds (2.7 seconds compressed), verified in 0.22 and 0.038 seconds, and a laptop CPU proved a three-shard block end to end in 19 minutes. Later that day the same card proved a full shard at the provisional size, 6.75 million prover gas, which executed in 60.8 million cycles: core proof 8.3 seconds, compressed proof 10.9 seconds, verified in 0.040 seconds; a four-shard block took 44.5 seconds of GPU stages end to end. Since 5 October 2026 shards are assigned and proven on the live devnet. The gate asks for a mid-range card, and an RTX 5090 is not one, so the gate stands open. Once the gate is measured, the budget rises by schedule as hardware improves. The proof system is hash-based, which is what runs on consumer cards, and sits behind a versioned interface, so Igneum can adopt a better proof system when one exists by a miner-signalled release, and runs for ever on the current one if none is adopted.
Ember finds your GPU, makes a wallet for you and runs the node, the miner and the prover as one app. Every hour it compiles the next program while the current one mines, so the card never stops.
Five steps from download to the first block on a friend's laptop: drag to Applications, open, Get started, Make me an address, Start mining.
One button starts the node, waits for sync, starts one miner per card and the prover. Quit stops them in order.
One button starts the node, waits for sync, starts one miner per card and, on an NVIDIA card with 24 GB or more, the prover. AMD and Apple cards mine; a prover for them lands when a zkVM ships one. Quit stops them in order.
NVIDIA through the driver, AMD and Intel through OpenCL, Apple silicon through Metal. Real card names, one worker per card.
A payout key made on your machine and locked to your user, with a backup step before mining starts. Or paste an address you already hold.
Every block this machine finds pays one address in IGN. The dashboard counts them per run, per hour and for life. The wallet shows the balance.