vs Monero: "no chip in seven years" is not proof
5 October 2026vs Monero: "no chip in seven years" is not proof
6 October 2026Absence of a public RandomX ASIC is not evidence one cannot exist. Monero is also a small prize.-
a repository file, Mining, "no chip publicly shipped, approximate" and "Monero is precedent, not proof"; a repository file, hero, "a chip gains too little to take your place". Was: Conceded, label needed.The answer as first written
True. "No chip publicly shipped, approximate" is the defensible phrasing. The argument from Monero is precedent, not proof, and the bounty exists because precedent is not proof.
a repository file, For miners and Questions miners ask). The gate is one the reader already knows from the roadmap's phase 5. The 5 October answers in M1, X1 and the overclaims list that name January 2027 are the history of the plan and stay as written.The answer as first written
The month was the plan of 3 October 2026. The benchmark tool is part of the testnet's go checklist, so it ships with the testnet; no month is given for either.
RandomX described as chip-free
6 October 2026The home page said the random program 'has kept chips off Monero since 2019', the litepaper said Monero ran on RandomX 'with no chip publicly shipped' and spoke of 'Monero's seven years without a public chip'. Bitmain's Antminer X9, a RandomX chip, ships from July 2026 (1 MH/s at 2,472 W, about USD 5,600; monero-project/monero issue 10270), and RandomX 2.0 shipped on 25 March 2026. Every sentence that said or implied RandomX is chip-free, or that Monero's approach has held, was wrong.+
The answer as first written
The precedent Igneum cites is now a complete one: a fixed random program held CPU mining for about seven years and then a chip shipped. Igneum's program changes every hour from a genesis-fixed schedule, its dataset grows, and the chip model on the numbers page prices the chip that stores the dataset rather than assuming none can be built. The X9's rate and power are Bitmain's published figures, not our measurement.
Proving and the zkEVM
An unwound transaction leaves the node's view until its sender resends it
6 October 2026| Piece | Closest precedent | What Igneum adds | State, 5 Oct 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| A mining program that regenerates itself, for GPUs | RandomX on Monero since 2019, for CPUs, a program per hash. ProgPoW, as KAWPOW on Ravencoin since 2020, changes the maths inside a fixed program shape every few blocks on GPUs (approximate) | A whole kernel per hour compiled to native code, a daily dataset from a 256 MB cache, a verifiable delay before the seed, era draws from a genesis reserve | Measured: hourly swaps on Apple, NVIDIA and AMD cards on the live devnet, 4 October 2026 |
| A mining program that regenerates itself, for GPUs | RandomX on Monero since 2019, for CPUs, a program per hash; its first chip, Bitmain’s Antminer X9, ships from July 2026. ProgPoW, as KAWPOW on Ravencoin since 2020, changes the maths inside a fixed program shape every few blocks on GPUs (approximate) | A whole kernel per hour compiled to native code, a daily dataset from a 256 MB cache, a verifiable delay before the seed, era draws from a genesis reserve | Measured: hourly swaps on Apple, NVIDIA and AMD cards on the live devnet, 4 October 2026 |
| The mining card does paid, useful, verifiable work | Primecoin's prime chains in 2013 were not useful. Aleo ran proving as consensus and the fastest prover won (both approximate) | Proving kept apart from the lottery; shards assigned by sortition, not by speed | Implemented: proving v0 on the live devnet since 5 October 2026. The job market for other chains is Designed |
| A proof-of-work chain where every block is proven | zkEVMs run as rollups on proof-of-stake Ethereum. Conflux has run GPU-mined EVM apps on a DAG since 2020, without proofs (approximate) | Proven state on a proof-of-work base layer, produced by the miners themselves | Implemented in part: shards proven and paid on the devnet. The aggregated block proof checked in consensus is Designed |
| Finality held by miners and not moved by hour-long rentals | Decred votes with stake. Horizen penalises hidden chains. Kaspa limits merge depth (approximate) | Vote weight is 30 days of blocks per key. Hashrate that appeared today has no vote | Implemented: rule v2 live on the devnet, first lock 4 October 2026. External review is owed at gate 3 |
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. These are automatic schedule changes: they defeat a chip wired for one datapath and they need no human fork. Against a chip that stores the dataset every drawn parameter is firmware, and what meets that chip is the latency-shadow work (class v4) and the price per joule (the Horizon lane analysis, 6 October 2026, section 5.4; ledger M32). 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 miner signal turns one on, at the class-change threshold: miners signal three things at three thresholds, 60 percent of blue blocks over two weeks for a parameter genesis leaves open, 90 percent for an upgrade (new code), and 95 percent with a floor height for a class change. No fork.
-No hash has stayed free of chips forever. Igneum does not claim to. It states the gain its own model finds, the response takes a week, and both are measured. The model is public: the numbers; the claim is tested by paid independent cryptanalysis and the public benchmark. Monero has run on RandomX since 2019 with no chip publicly shipped, approximate; that is precedent, not proof.
+No hash has stayed free of chips forever. Igneum does not claim to. It states the gain its own model finds, the response takes a week, and both are measured. The model is public: the numbers; the claim is tested by paid independent cryptanalysis and the public benchmark. Monero ran on RandomX from 2019 (approximate) with no chip publicly shipped until Bitmain’s Antminer X9 in July 2026 (1 MH/s at 2,472 W, about USD 5,600; monero-project/monero issue 10270). About seven years of hold and then a chip: that is the record Igneum’s hourly program and its chip model are built against.
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.
Monero's idea, finished for GPUs
-RandomX has kept chips off Monero since 2019 (approximate) by making the mining program random, so the only hardware that runs it well is the hardware everyone already owns. Igneum takes the same principle to graphics cards and adds what RandomX never had.
+RandomX kept chips off Monero from 2019 (approximate) by making the mining program random, so the hardware that ran it well was the hardware everyone already owned. That hold ended: Bitmain’s Antminer X9 ships from July 2026 at 1 MH/s and 2,472 W, about USD 5,600, and RandomX 2.0 shipped on 25 March 2026 (monero-project/monero issue 10270). Igneum takes the same principle to graphics cards and adds what RandomX never had.
| Property | RandomX, Monero | Igneum |
|---|---|---|
| Changes over time | None. A fixed design, unchanged for seven years | A new program every hour, its memory pattern with it; era draws and reserved families on a schedule fixed at genesis. Nobody touches it |
| Seed grinding | Not applicable, the program comes from the hash input | Closed by a verifiable delay between seed and program |
| Useful work | None. Hashing only | Every NVIDIA card from 8 GB proves; 12 GB and up mine and prove; 24 GB on the stock server (eleven rented cards, RTX 3060 to RTX 5090, 6 October 2026); they sell proofs to other chains. AMD and Apple cards mine, and a prover for them lands when a zkVM ships one |
| Track record | No chip publicly shipped in seven years, approximate | Zero years. Every number above is measured and logged with the commands that produced it. The specification, reference hash, test vectors and simulators are public now (github.com/igneum-network/spec). The node, the miner and the wallet are in a private repository until the public testnet |
| Track record | About seven years without a public chip, then Bitmain’s Antminer X9, shipping from July 2026 | Zero years. Every number above is measured and logged with the commands that produced it. The specification, reference hash, test vectors and simulators are public now (github.com/igneum-network/spec). The node, the miner and the wallet are in a private repository until the public testnet |
Measured so far: the same hourly program, generated on an Apple M5 Max, compiled by Apple's Metal and NVIDIA's CUDA on an RTX 5090, produced identical hashes on both, 192 of 192 across two programs. On a 1 GB dataset the 5090 ran at about 228 million hashes a second and the Mac at about 45 million, both bound by random memory access rather than arithmetic. Those are prototype figures, not mining rates. The first prototype dataset was a closed-form function, and a miner could compute items instead of loading them: measured 111x faster that way on the Mac. The 256 MB cache construction replaced it on 3 October 2026. With the cache, computing items on the fly runs 4.8x slower than loading them, measured on the Mac, and the honest rate is unchanged on both vendors. Open: the same shortcut ratio on NVIDIA and on a discrete AMD card, and the time-memory trade-off between the two measured points. Inside the 5090's 96 MB cache the same program ran nearly six times faster, which is why the dataset starts at 2 GB and grows. On 4 October 2026 the live devnet crossed an hourly program change on all three vendors with no pause and no rejected block: a Mac at 26.7 million hashes a second, an RTX 5090 at 123 million and an integrated AMD chip at 2.7 million, every hash doing 128 distinct reads of the memory-hard dataset.
@@ -687,7 +687,7 @@ body.all .pager{display:none}Here are the limits, stated before anyone else states them.
- A proof in seconds. Not at launch. Proving a full block today needs a cluster of 100 to 200 consumer GPUs, approximate, so Igneum launches with proofs within about a minute and tightens as hardware improves. Users still see their transaction land in one second. -
- A chip is impossible. No. A chip wired for one program is a bad bet, because the program moves before it ships. A programmable chip is not stopped by the moving target: everything it needs is public at genesis and every drawn parameter is firmware to it (an address permute, a rotator, an immediate table), so the defence against it is the latency-shadow work (class v4) and the price per joule, not the schedule (the Horizon lane analysis, 6 October 2026, section 5.4; ledger M32). The published model (5 October 2026) prices the strongest chip we can name, one with the whole cache on-die computing dataset items on the fly, at 0.92x the hash rate of an RTX 5090 per unit of silicon with a 3x fixed-function allowance, approximate. The same model, drawn out to the chip that stores the dataset (6 October 2026): The strongest recompute chip we can price, holding the whole 256 MiB cache on-die, reaches under 1x per chip against an RTX 5090. A memory-controller chip that stores the whole dataset reaches 1.2x per chip and, in our model, 5x to 9x per joule; the Ethash chips of this class reached 2.1x to 4.8x. The lever against it, program work in the latency shadow, is measured and in its gates: it brings the chip to about 2x. Sources: the chip model analysis (6 October 2026); the Ethash rows of the ASIC history (Linzhi Phoenix 2020, Jasminer X4 2021, Antminer E9 2022); Counter ASIC 3.0 item 8 (100,000 ops per hash: the chip's per-joule edge over the RTX 5090 falls from 5.6x to 2.1x on GDDR7 at a chip core equal to the GPU's, the 5090 at 0.2% less rate, gates G1 to G6 in progress). No hash has stayed free of chips forever; Igneum does not claim to. Monero's seven years without a public chip are precedent, not proof, and a small prize: they say nothing about the price of a chip with the 256 MB cache on its die, and that price is a cost model, not a measurement. +
- A chip is impossible. No. A chip wired for one program is a bad bet, because the program moves before it ships. A programmable chip is not stopped by the moving target: everything it needs is public at genesis and every drawn parameter is firmware to it (an address permute, a rotator, an immediate table), so the defence against it is the latency-shadow work (class v4) and the price per joule, not the schedule (the Horizon lane analysis, 6 October 2026, section 5.4; ledger M32). The published model (5 October 2026) prices the strongest chip we can name, one with the whole cache on-die computing dataset items on the fly, at 0.92x the hash rate of an RTX 5090 per unit of silicon with a 3x fixed-function allowance, approximate. The same model, drawn out to the chip that stores the dataset (6 October 2026): The strongest recompute chip we can price, holding the whole 256 MiB cache on-die, reaches under 1x per chip against an RTX 5090. A memory-controller chip that stores the whole dataset reaches 1.2x per chip and, in our model, 5x to 9x per joule; the Ethash chips of this class reached 2.1x to 4.8x. The lever against it, program work in the latency shadow, is measured and in its gates: it brings the chip to about 2x. Sources: the chip model analysis (6 October 2026); the Ethash rows of the ASIC history (Linzhi Phoenix 2020, Jasminer X4 2021, Antminer E9 2022); Counter ASIC 3.0 item 8 (100,000 ops per hash: the chip's per-joule edge over the RTX 5090 falls from 5.6x to 2.1x on GDDR7 at a chip core equal to the GPU's, the 5090 at 0.2% less rate, gates G1 to G6 in progress). No hash has stayed free of chips forever; Igneum does not claim to. Monero’s RandomX held for about seven years before Bitmain’s Antminer X9 shipped in July 2026 (1 MH/s at 2,472 W, about USD 5,600; monero-project/monero issue 10270). That record says nothing about the price of a chip with the 256 MB cache on its die; that price is a cost model, not a measurement.
- A guaranteed income floor. No. External proving is a small market today. Igneum's miners' electricity cost in it is close to power, but the price they must charge is the subsidy they forgo, which falls as one over network hash: an edge at scale and nothing more.
- A memory-hard prototype on every vendor. Not yet. The 256 MB cache closed the shortcut on Apple silicon (computing items runs 4.8x slower than loading them, measured 3 October 2026). The same ratio on NVIDIA and on a discrete AMD card is Open.
- Finality in the first month. No. No checkpoint locks until the 30-day window has 30 days of history. The first month of mainnet is proof of work with a 12-hour depth, and the text above says so wherever a day count appears. diff --git a/tools/ci/ledger-text-check.mjs b/tools/ci/ledger-text-check.mjs index 2e024ae2b..a8d673506 100644 --- a/tools/ci/ledger-text-check.mjs +++ b/tools/ci/ledger-text-check.mjs @@ -15,14 +15,17 @@ const REQUIRED = { ['X7', 'hello@igneum.network'], // restored with the home page on 6 October 2026 (the owner: "revert it but polish it") ['G4', 'admin keys in consensus'], - ['C2', 'since 2019 (approximate)'], + ['C2', '2019 (approximate)'], + ['X34', 'Antminer X9 shipped in July 2026: 1 MH/s at 2,472 W, about USD 5,600'], ['X8', 'No listing is arranged, promised or sought by the project'], ['X31', 'The public testnet is weeks away: three seed nodes and the public RPC are up, and it opens when the go checklist closes.'], ], 'litepaper.html': [ ['X3', 'Live rows arrive with the public testnet.'], ['X31', 'The public testnet is weeks away: three seed nodes and the public RPC are up, and it opens when the go checklist closes.'], - ['C2', 'since 2019 (approximate)'], + ['C2', '2019 (approximate)'], + ['X34', 'Antminer X9 ships from July 2026 at 1 MH/s and 2,472 W, about USD 5,600, and RandomX 2.0 shipped on 25 March 2026'], + ['X34', 'with no chip publicly shipped until Bitmain'], ['M2', 'computing items on the fly runs 4.8x slower than loading them'], ['M4', 'ProgPoW, as KAWPOW on Ravencoin since 2020'], ['M7', 'The hash is a lottery, not a general-purpose cryptographic hash'], @@ -55,7 +58,7 @@ const REQUIRED = { ['G3', 'there is no team page'], ['G4', 'no admin keys in consensus'], ['G6', 'Pools can be bypassed on transaction choice'], - ['C2', 'precedent, not proof'], + ['X34', 'About seven years without a public chip, then Bitmain'], ['C3', 'Chips arrived, as on Kaspa, whose hash was designed to welcome them'], ['C3', 'Kaspa has run in production since 2021 (approximate)'], ['C5', 'Inclusion is not confirmation on either chain'],