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Site 2.0 wipe: the litepaper rewrite and the page sweep's second pass merged; the evidence chip row per the coordinator (no testnet or mainnet line, class v5's state coupling under evaluation (Deliverable 3), the coexistence model as the pass criterion, linked, the window sentence and bracket provisional); no /bench link; no numbered devnet on any served page; the litepaper pins X3 and X31 retired

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Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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<div class="derived"><p>Here are the limits, stated before anyone else states them.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>A proof in seconds.</strong> 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.</li>
<li><strong>A chip is impossible.</strong> 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). Igneum remains competitive on accessible commodity GPUs even when specialised mining hardware is assumed to exist, remain compatible and seek profit; its security does not rely on identifying that hardware or retiring it through emergency changes. Class v6 adopts the 64-register window and retains it across every rotation. Current modelling places the strongest specialised designs assessed against the GPU tier at about 2.3x to 3.3x energy-efficiency advantage a node ahead (2.0x to 2.9x on the GPU's own node), a bracket that is approximate and provisional until the placed gated core rows land. The long-program and select-tree proposals were rejected. Economic resistance depends on development cost, deployment economics and productive hardware lifetime; family transitions receive an obsolescence benefit only where a loss of competitiveness is demonstrated; programmable multi-epoch designs are included in the assessment. The labels: the bracket modelled, approximate and provisional (the GPU side measured on the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 at their core locks under class v4, 8 October 2026; the chip core synthesised on ASAP7 and scaled to N3, claimed, its placed gated row pending; its memory modelled). Class v5 makes the dataset the chain’s own state, so a chip that stores it or recomputes it is wrong on every item (designed, 7 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 (the published model, 5 October 2026: 0.92x per unit of silicon with a 3x fixed-function allowance, approximate). Sources: the class v6 close, section 10 (8 October 2026); the ASIC history’s Ethash rows; the chip model analysis (6 October 2026). No hash has stayed free of chips forever; Igneum does not claim to. Monero’s RandomX has held its miners on commodity hardware for about seven years: one chip shipped against it, Bitmain’s Antminer X5 (September 2023), an observed comparison, not a ceiling; the one announced beyond it, the Antminer X9, was withdrawn in mid-May 2026 before any unit shipped, its claimed core never measured; RandomX v2 was released on 25 March 2026 with its activation pending. 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.</li>
<li><strong>A chip is impossible.</strong> No. Igneum assumes a chip exists. 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 chip and economy analysis of 6 October 2026, section 5.4; ledger M32). Igneum remains competitive on accessible commodity GPUs even when specialised mining hardware is assumed to exist, remain compatible and seek profit; its security does not rely on identifying that hardware or retiring it through emergency changes. Class v6 adopts the 64-register window and retains it across every rotation. Current modelling places the strongest specialised designs assessed against the GPU tier at about 2.3x to 3.3x energy-efficiency advantage a node ahead (2.0x to 2.9x on the GPU's own node), a bracket that is approximate and provisional until the placed gated core rows land. The long-program and select-tree proposals were rejected. Economic resistance depends on development cost, deployment economics and productive hardware lifetime; family transitions receive an obsolescence benefit only where a loss of competitiveness is demonstrated; programmable multi-epoch designs are included in the assessment. The labels: the bracket modelled, approximate and provisional (the GPU side measured on the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 at their core locks under class v4, 8 October 2026; the chip core synthesised on ASAP7 and scaled to N3, claimed, its placed gated row pending; its memory modelled). Class v5 makes the dataset the chain’s own state, so a chip that stores it or recomputes it is wrong on every item (designed, 7 October 2026; under evaluation (Deliverable 3), not counted as a defence until justified or dropped). The strongest recompute chip we can price, holding the whole 256 MiB cache on-die, reaches under 1x per chip against an RTX 5090 (the published model, 5 October 2026: 0.92x per unit of silicon with a 3x fixed-function allowance, approximate). Sources: the class v6 close, section 10 (8 October 2026); the ASIC history’s Ethash rows; the chip model analysis (6 October 2026). No hash has stayed free of chips forever; Igneum does not claim to. Monero’s RandomX has held its miners on commodity hardware for about seven years: one chip shipped against it, Bitmain’s Antminer X5 (September 2023), an observed comparison, not a ceiling; the one announced beyond it, the Antminer X9, was withdrawn in mid-May 2026 before any unit shipped, its claimed core never measured; RandomX v2 was released on 25 March 2026 with its activation pending. 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.</li>
<li><strong>A guaranteed income floor.</strong> 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.</li>
<li><strong>A memory-hard prototype on every vendor.</strong> 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.</li>
<li><strong>Finality in the first month.</strong> 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.</li>
@ -255,9 +255,13 @@
<li><strong>Finality that no amount of hardware can break.</strong> No. A miner holding a third of the last 30 days of blocks can split finality during a network partition, and two thirds can lock a bad checkpoint for a double-spend bounded by the 12-hour finality depth. Reaching a third takes at least ten days of producing every block on the chain, in public; an attacker matching the honest network needs twenty days for a third and never reaches two thirds. That is harder than attacking Bitcoin, where a majority can reorganise at once, and it is the limit of proof of work without stake or an outside chain. Igneum chose those limits on purpose. The floor is also bounded in time: an honest partition that lasts long enough for each side's own new blocks to reach two thirds of its window locks on both sides, about ten days of a 30-day window at an even split, and an operator must then resolve it (measured on a test network, 4 October 2026).</li>
<li><strong>Finality that never pauses.</strong> No. A lock needs two thirds of all 30-day mining weight. Whenever less than two thirds of that weight is connected and signing, finality pauses until it returns or ages out of the window, up to 30 days. The chain keeps running on proof of work and the node reports the pause.</li>
<li><strong>A label that costs nothing.</strong> No. Some investors and exchanges read "GPU-mined" as 2021 whatever the proofs do, and nothing here measures that cost. The only evidence will be whether the first miner apps and verifiable-compute apps sign despite the label.</li>
<li><strong>A chain you can debug today.</strong> Not yet. The node does not serve debug_traceTransaction, eth_subscribe or eth_getProof, and there is no public RPC, faucet or explorer for the devnet. They come in a fixed order (docs and templates, then the tracing and subscription RPCs, then a public RPC, listing and faucet, then the explorer) and no outside team is invited to build before the second step is done.</li>
<li><strong>A chain you can debug today.</strong> Not yet. The node does not serve debug_traceTransaction, eth_subscribe or eth_getProof. The explorer, the faucet and the reference apps run on the devnet; the tracing and subscription RPCs are still owed.</li>
<li><strong>A veto on job results.</strong> No. A segment proof is checked against every node's own execution; a proving job for another chain is not, because no full node can re-run an arbitrary program, so a soundness bug in the proof system in force reaches the requesting contract. A job output can mint nothing and touch no system contract, and an app that acts irreversibly on a job result keeps its own fallback.</li>
<li><strong>A delay function that outlives a quantum computer.</strong> No. The class-group delay between a locked checkpoint and the next program seed falls to the same machine that would forge the vote keys; it is flagged in the specification, not yet sized, and the fallback is a hash-chain delay behind the same version byte that moves the signature scheme, so both flip in one class change. A grindable hourly seed is a liveness nuisance against the lottery, not a break of finality.</li>
<li><strong>Proof verification in consensus.</strong> Not yet. Today, under proving v0, every producer verifies off the consensus path, and consensus checks the record's statement against native execution. Enforcement in consensus (verifier_in_consensus, proof_rule_active_from) is Open, and it is the prerequisite of the no-rescue network exercise (Deliverable 5) and of the proving economy being a protocol guarantee.</li>
<li><strong>Proving on every card.</strong> No. NVIDIA proves; AMD and Apple mine. The proving stack is judged on the full pipeline: inputs, proving, aggregation, verification, payment, memory and the mining income forgone.</li>
<li><strong>What proofs do not give.</strong> Proven execution is not finality. EVM compatibility is not Ethereum security. ZK is not privacy.</li>
<li><strong>A ranking.</strong> No. Igneum makes no leading or number-one claim. Benchmarks against Ravencoin's KAWPOW, Ergo and Firo's reference miner are owed work; no result exists yet.</li>
<li><strong>A finished protocol.</strong> The sustained-mining finality rule is the newest piece and the one that external review will try hardest to break. The specification, the review and the benchmarks are published as they happen.</li>
</ul>
<p>Everything in this document is subject to the gates on the roadmap. Nothing in it is an offer to sell anything. Found an error, or a criticism this document does not answer? Email <a href="mailto:hello@igneum.network">hello@igneum.network</a>, or open an issue on the public specification repository: <a href="https://git.igneum.network/igneum-network/spec/issues" rel="noopener">git.igneum.network/igneum-network/spec/issues</a>. Post reaches Igneum Labs LTD, Unit IH-00-01-01-OF-01, Level 01, Innovation One, Dubai International Financial Centre.</p></div>

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<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, viewport-fit=cover">
<title>Igneum Litepaper: how the chain works</title>
<meta name="description" content="The Igneum litepaper. The hourly GPU lottery, blocks proven by miners, GHOSTDAG ordering, miner-only finality, the 4 billion cap. No premine, no stake.">
<meta name="description" content="The Igneum litepaper. A GPU-secured network for Ethereum-compatible applications and verifiable computation. GPU mining, proven execution, GHOSTDAG ordering, miner-only finality, the 4 billion cap. No premine, no stake.">
<link rel="canonical" href="https://igneum.network/litepaper">
<meta name="theme-color" content="#0C0C0E">
<!-- share:start -->
@ -295,14 +295,14 @@ body.all .pager{display:none}
<header class="cover">
<div>
<div class="breadcrumb"><a href="/">Igneum</a><span>/</span><span>The litepaper</span></div>
<div class="eyebrow"><span class="line"></span>The litepaper · version 0.2</div>
<div class="eyebrow"><span class="line"></span>The litepaper · Igneum 2.0</div>
<h1>Mined by GPUs.<br>Proven by fire.</h1>
<div class="tag">A proof-of-work chain whose miners also prove every block, run Ethereum's apps, and are protected from specialised chips by a program that changes every hour.</div>
<div class="tag">A GPU-secured network for Ethereum-compatible applications and verifiable computation.</div>
</div>
<div class="meta">
<span>Published <b>3 October 2026</b> · updated <b>7 October 2026</b></span>
<span>Published <b>3 October 2026</b> · updated <b>8 October 2026</b></span>
<span>Coin <b>IGN</b> · cap <b>4,000,000,000</b></span>
<span>Status <b>Devnet 3 live, testnet armed</b></span>
<span>Status <b>The Igneum 2.0 devnet is starting</b></span>
<span>Method <b>one founder with AI systems</b> · external review before gate 3</span>
<span>This is not an offer to sell anything</span>
</div>
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<article>
<section id="abstract">
<h2>Abstract</h2>
<p class="lead">Igneum is a proof-of-work blockchain built for graphics cards, where NVIDIA cards also prove every block with zero-knowledge proofs and sell proving to other chains. Igneum remains competitive on accessible commodity GPUs even when specialised mining hardware is assumed to exist, remain compatible and seek profit; its security does not rely on identifying that hardware or retiring it through emergency changes. Class v6 adopts the 64-register window and retains it across every rotation. Current modelling places the strongest specialised designs assessed against the GPU tier at about 2.3x to 3.3x energy-efficiency advantage a node ahead (2.0x to 2.9x on the GPU's own node), a bracket that is approximate and provisional until the placed gated core rows land. The long-program and select-tree proposals were rejected. Economic resistance depends on development cost, deployment economics and productive hardware lifetime; family transitions receive an obsolescence benefit only where a loss of competitiveness is demonstrated; programmable multi-epoch designs are included in the assessment. <a href="#chip-model">The chip model</a>: every number labelled measured, modelled or claimed, the harness and the scoring rules beside it.</p>
<p>It runs the Ethereum virtual machine, so anything built for Ethereum runs on Igneum unchanged. Transactions are included in about one second, proven within about a minute at launch, and locked by miners within about two. There is no premine, no pre-sale, no treasury taken from emission, no stake anywhere in consensus, and no dependence on any other chain. Mining stays open to anyone with a GPU because the mining program changes every hour, so a chip built for one program is useless for the next, and a chip for the whole program space is a GPU without the graphics parts. No scheduled human release is needed to keep it that way. Writing new code, including an emergency fix to the proof system, is the one thing that takes a person, and it activates only on miner signalling.</p>
<p class="lead">A GPU-secured network for Ethereum-compatible applications and verifiable computation. Igneum is a proof-of-work chain built for graphics cards. AMD, Apple and NVIDIA cards mine; NVIDIA cards also prove its blocks with zero-knowledge proofs. Igneum remains competitive on accessible commodity GPUs even when specialised mining hardware is assumed to exist, remain compatible and seek profit; its security does not rely on identifying that hardware or retiring it through emergency changes. Class v6 adopts the 64-register window and retains it across every rotation. Current modelling places the strongest specialised designs assessed against the GPU tier at about 2.3x to 3.3x energy-efficiency advantage a node ahead (2.0x to 2.9x on the GPU's own node), a bracket that is approximate and provisional until the placed gated core rows land. The long-program and select-tree proposals were rejected. Economic resistance depends on development cost, deployment economics and productive hardware lifetime; family transitions receive an obsolescence benefit only where a loss of competitiveness is demonstrated; programmable multi-epoch designs are included in the assessment. <a href="#chip-model">The chip model</a>: every number labelled measured, modelled or claimed, the harness and the scoring rules beside it.</p>
<p>It runs the Ethereum virtual machine through revm, so contracts built for Ethereum deploy with familiar tools; the differences (block context, randomness, two-dimensional fees) are documented. Transactions are included in about one second, proven within about a minute at launch, and locked by miners within about two (designed targets). There is no premine, no pre-sale, no treasury taken from emission, no stake anywhere in consensus, and no dependence on any other chain. Mining is built to stay open to anyone with a GPU. The argument rests on the scoring rule's result against placed adversary designs and on the economics, reported separately as energy advantage, economic advantage and response capability. The hourly program is an optional improvement, not the defence. Writing new code, including an emergency fix to the proof system, is the one thing that takes a person, and it activates only on miner signalling.</p>
<div class="stats">
<div class="stat"><div class="v">1 / s</div><div class="k">blocks, rising to 10</div></div>
<div class="stat"><div class="v">~60 s</div><div class="k">to a proof at launch</div></div>
<div class="stat"><div class="v">1 / s</div><div class="k">blocks, rising to 10 (designed)</div></div>
<div class="stat"><div class="v">~60 s</div><div class="k">to a proof at launch (designed)</div></div>
<div class="stat"><div class="v">0</div><div class="k">premine or stake</div></div>
<div class="stat"><div class="v">100%</div><div class="k">to miners and provers</div></div>
</div>
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<h2>Precedents, and what Igneum adds</h2>
<p>Every piece of Igneum has a precedent somewhere. We know of no chain that combines them. The table names the closest precedent for each piece, what Igneum adds, and how far each piece has got. It will be corrected when shown wrong.</p>
<div class="tbl"><table>
<thead><tr><th>Piece</th><th>Closest precedent</th><th>What Igneum adds</th><th>State, 7 Oct 2026</th></tr></thead>
<thead><tr><th>Piece</th><th>Closest precedent</th><th>What Igneum adds</th><th>State, 8 Oct 2026</th></tr></thead>
<tbody>
<tr><td>A mining program that regenerates itself, for GPUs</td><td>RandomX on Monero since 2019, for CPUs, a program per hash; one chip shipped against it, Bitmain’s Antminer X5 (September 2023), a board of RISC-V chips at 1.46x per joule over a desktop CPU, on silicon believed mining privately from about 2021; the X9 was withdrawn in May 2026 with zero units; RandomX v2 was released on 25 March 2026 with its activation pending. ProgPoW, as KAWPOW on Ravencoin since 2020, changes the maths inside a fixed program shape every few blocks on GPUs (approximate)</td><td>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</td><td>Measured: hourly swaps on Apple, NVIDIA and AMD cards on the live devnet, 4 October 2026</td></tr>
<tr><td>The mining card does paid, useful, verifiable work</td><td>Primecoin's prime chains in 2013 were not useful. Aleo ran proving as consensus and the fastest prover won (both approximate)</td><td>Proving kept apart from the lottery; shards assigned by sortition, not by speed</td><td>Implemented: proving v0 and v1 on Devnet 3 from block zero (7 October 2026), v0 on the first devnet since 5 October 2026. The job market for other chains is Designed</td></tr>
<tr><td>A proof-of-work chain where every block is proven</td><td>zkEVMs run as rollups on proof-of-stake Ethereum. Conflux has run GPU-mined EVM apps on a DAG since 2020, without proofs (approximate)</td><td>Proven state on a proof-of-work base layer, produced by the miners themselves</td><td>Implemented in part: shards proven and paid on the devnet. The aggregated block proof checked in consensus is Designed</td></tr>
<tr><td>Finality held by miners and not moved by hour-long rentals</td><td>Decred votes with stake. Horizen penalises hidden chains. Kaspa limits merge depth (approximate)</td><td>Vote weight is 30 days of blocks per key. Hashrate that appeared today has no vote</td><td>Implemented: rule v3 live on Devnet 3 from block zero, first lock 7 October 2026; rule v2 ran the first devnet from its first lock on 4 October 2026. External review is owed at gate 3</td></tr>
<tr><td>A mining program that regenerates itself, for GPUs</td><td>RandomX on Monero since 2019, for CPUs, a program per hash; one chip shipped against it, Bitmain’s Antminer X5 (September 2023), a board of RISC-V chips at 1.46x per joule over a desktop CPU, on silicon believed mining privately from about 2021; the X9 was withdrawn in May 2026 with zero units; RandomX v2 was released on 25 March 2026 with its activation pending. ProgPoW, as KAWPOW on Ravencoin since 2020, changes the maths inside a fixed program shape every few blocks on GPUs (approximate)</td><td>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</td><td>Measured: hourly program swaps on Apple, NVIDIA and AMD cards, 4 October 2026</td></tr>
<tr><td>The mining card does paid, useful, verifiable work</td><td>Primecoin's prime chains in 2013 were not useful. Aleo ran proving as consensus and the fastest prover won (both approximate)</td><td>Proving kept apart from the lottery; shards assigned by sortition, not by speed</td><td>Implemented: proving v0 and v1 on the devnet from block zero, on NVIDIA cards. The job market for other chains is Designed</td></tr>
<tr><td>A proof-of-work chain where every block is proven</td><td>Proven-execution EVM chains run as rollups on proof-of-stake Ethereum. Conflux has run GPU-mined EVM apps on a DAG since 2020, without proofs (approximate)</td><td>Proven state on a proof-of-work base layer, produced by the miners themselves</td><td>Implemented in part: shards proven and paid on the devnet. Proof verification enforced in consensus is Open</td></tr>
<tr><td>Finality held by miners and not moved by hour-long rentals</td><td>Decred votes with stake. Horizen penalises hidden chains. Kaspa limits merge depth (approximate)</td><td>Vote weight is 30 days of blocks per key. Hashrate that appeared today has no vote</td><td>Implemented: rule v3 live on the devnet from block zero. External review is owed at gate 3</td></tr>
<tr><td>100% of emission to the people running the hardware</td><td>Kaspa's fair launch. Zcash and Decred fund developers from emission (approximate)</td><td>No fee to any team, foundation or fund in the protocol. The miner software's optional 1% dev fee is the one payment to the project, off with one flag</td><td>Implemented in consensus: the 80/20 coinbase on the devnet</td></tr>
<tr><td>A chain your browser verifies by itself</td><td>Light clients trust a committee, as Ethereum's trust a sync committee (approximate)</td><td>At launch, one execution proof plus a certificate the client is given. The consensus proof that makes the checkpoint self-verifying is phase two</td><td>Designed. The home page's card verifies a devnet certificate in the browser today, with the voter list taken from a node</td></tr>
</tbody>
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<text x="66" y="72" font-size="13" font-weight="600" fill="var(--ink)">1. Mining lottery</text>
<text x="66" y="90" fill="var(--ink)">A random GPU program picks who makes the next block</text>
<text x="66" y="106" fill="var(--quiet)">New program every hour: a chip wired for one program is useless</text>
<text x="66" y="106" fill="var(--quiet)">A new program every hour; the chip model scores the rest</text>
</g>
<g>
<rect x="50" y="152" width="400" height="72" rx="8" fill="var(--surface)" stroke="var(--line)" stroke-width="1.25"></rect>
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<text x="66" y="280" font-size="13" font-weight="600" fill="var(--ink)">3. EVM execution</text>
<text x="66" y="298" fill="var(--ink)">Blocks carry transactions only; the proof computes the state</text>
<text x="66" y="314" fill="var(--quiet)">Solidity, wallets and tooling work unchanged</text>
<text x="66" y="314" fill="var(--quiet)">Familiar Solidity, wallets and tooling; differences documented</text>
</g>
<g>
<rect x="50" y="360" width="400" height="72" rx="8" fill="var(--tint)" stroke="var(--ember)" stroke-width="2"></rect>
<text x="66" y="384" font-size="13" font-weight="600" fill="var(--ink)">4. Miners prove the block</text>
<text x="66" y="402" fill="var(--ink)">Shards proven on consumer GPUs, aggregated into one proof</text>
<text x="66" y="402" fill="var(--ink)">Shards proven on NVIDIA cards, aggregated into one proof</text>
<text x="66" y="418" fill="var(--quiet)">Lands within about a minute at launch, paid from gas</text>
</g>
<g>
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<g>
<rect x="504" y="360" width="232" height="72" rx="8" fill="var(--surface)" stroke="var(--line)" stroke-width="1.25"></rect>
<text x="520" y="384" font-size="13" font-weight="600" fill="var(--ink)">External proving jobs</text>
<text x="520" y="402" fill="var(--ink)">Rollups and bridges pay Igneum</text>
<text x="520" y="418" fill="var(--quiet)">Same GPUs, same proof format</text>
<text x="520" y="402" fill="var(--ink)">Designed: rollups and bridges buy proofs</text>
<text x="520" y="418" fill="var(--quiet)">Same NVIDIA cards, same proof format</text>
</g>
<g fill="var(--quiet)"><text x="260" y="142">winning block</text><text x="260" y="246">ordered blocks</text><text x="260" y="350">state transitions</text><text x="260" y="454">aggregated proof</text></g>
</svg>
<div class="cap">Five layers plus the external proving market. A block flows down the column; outside demand feeds the same miners from the side.</div>
</div>
<h3>Live on Devnet 3, 7 October 2026</h3>
<p>Devnet 3 (<span data-rm="network.id">igneum-devnet-4</span>, chain id <span data-rm="network.chain_id">4464</span> since its class v5 floor at DAA <span data-rm="mining.class_since_daa">68,400</span>, 4463 from genesis to the floor; the chain’s current state is the <a href="/release.json">release manifest</a>) made its first block at 18:06 UK on 7 October 2026 with every upgrade on from block zero, and locked its first checkpoint at 20:02 UK. The first devnet ran from 3 October 2026 and took each upgrade by height. Coins on Devnet 3 have no value and the chain may be reset. What is on it:</p>
<h3>Live on the devnet</h3>
<p>The Igneum 2.0 devnet is the network. Its coins have no value and the chain may be reset. What is on it:</p>
<div class="tbl"><table>
<thead><tr><th>Layer</th><th>State</th><th>Since</th></tr></thead>
<tbody>
<tr><td>Mining lottery</td><td>Class v4 (sub-version 3) from the first block: the latency-shadow program, a new program every hour on Apple, NVIDIA and AMD cards, compiled ahead, the era VDF armed, the ladder at rung 0</td><td class="num">block zero, 7 Oct 2026</td></tr>
<tr><td>Blocks</td><td>One a second is the target; the live page reads the rate from the observer</td><td class="num">block zero, 7 Oct 2026</td></tr>
<tr><td>Difficulty</td><td>Rule v2, a 600-second reference window, from the first block (the first devnet switched to it by height at DAA 33,000 on 4 Oct 2026)</td><td class="num">block zero, 7 Oct 2026</td></tr>
<tr><td>Finality</td><td>Rule v3: a checkpoint every 30 s of chain, locked at two thirds of all 30-day weight, the weight table frozen at the last lock during a pause. First lock 20:02 UK, 7 Oct 2026. No coin is staked. The only thing at stake is 30 days of public work: a vote key's weight is its blue blocks over the window, and equivocation strips it for 30 days</td><td class="num">block zero, 7 Oct 2026</td></tr>
<tr><td>Proving</td><td>v0 and v1 from the first block: shards are assigned to miners' keys, proven on their cards, aggregated into segment records and carried in blocks; fees calibrated</td><td class="num">block zero, 7 Oct 2026</td></tr>
<tr><td>Ember</td><td>The one-click miner, version 0.3.22 on channel devnet-3 (7 Oct 2026); the app window still says Igneum Miner</td><td class="num">4 Oct 2026, first install</td></tr>
<tr><td>Wallet</td><td>Igneum Wallet 0.1.5 on macOS (0.1.1 first shipped 5 Oct 2026)</td><td class="num">7 Oct 2026</td></tr>
<tr><td>Mining lottery</td><td>Class v4 (sub-version 3) from the first block: the latency-shadow program, a new program every hour on Apple, NVIDIA and AMD cards, compiled ahead, the era VDF armed, the ladder at rung 0</td><td class="num">block zero</td></tr>
<tr><td>Blocks</td><td>One a second is the target; the live page reads the rate from the observer</td><td class="num">block zero</td></tr>
<tr><td>Difficulty</td><td>Rule v2, a 600-second reference window, from the first block</td><td class="num">block zero</td></tr>
<tr><td>Finality</td><td>Rule v3: a checkpoint every 30 s of chain, locked at two thirds of all 30-day weight, the weight table frozen at the last lock during a pause. No coin is staked. The only thing at stake is 30 days of public work: a vote key's weight is its blue blocks over the window, and equivocation strips it for 30 days</td><td class="num">block zero</td></tr>
<tr><td>Proving</td><td>v0 and v1 from the first block: shards are assigned to miners' keys, proven on their NVIDIA cards, aggregated into segment records and carried in blocks; fees calibrated</td><td class="num">block zero</td></tr>
<tr><td>Ember</td><td>The one-click miner, on the devnet channel</td><td class="num">4 Oct 2026, first install</td></tr>
<tr><td>Wallet</td><td>Igneum Wallet on macOS</td><td class="num">5 Oct 2026, first shipped</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table></div>
<p class="src"><b>Measured:</b> the 0.3.22 release record (7 October 2026: genesis, first block, the gate lines and the first lock); engineering log, "first hourly program swap on the live devnet", "difficulty rule v2 activated on the live devnet at DAA 33,000", "first finality lock on the live devnet" (4 October 2026, the first devnet). The block rate and the first lock are rows 7 and 10 of the evidence table.</p>
<p>Two caveats, stated here before anyone else states them. Consensus does not yet verify a carried proof; it checks the record's statement against native execution and its signature, and the in-consensus verifier switches on when the proven share of blocks reads one. And the devnet is the project's own machines, its rented fleet and a few outside laptops. Nothing here has been reproduced by anyone outside the project yet; the evidence page says so row by row.</p>
<p class="src"><b>Source:</b> the facts page carries the network row; the block rate and the lock are rows of the evidence table.</p>
<p>Two caveats, stated here before anyone else states them. Consensus does not yet verify a carried proof. Today, under proving v0, every producer verifies off the consensus path, and consensus checks the record's statement against native execution and its signature. Open: proof verification enforced in consensus (verifier_in_consensus, proof_rule_active_from) is the prerequisite of the no-rescue network exercise (Deliverable 5) and of the proving economy being a protocol guarantee. And the devnet is the project's own machines, its rented fleet and a few outside laptops. Nothing here has been reproduced by anyone outside the project yet; the evidence page says so row by row.</p>
</section>
<section id="mining">
<h2>Mining: a program that never holds still</h2>
<p>Every 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.</p>
<h2>Mining: commodity GPUs, scored against a chip</h2>
<p>Every 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 assume its algorithm keeps chips away. It assumes a specialised chip exists, seeks profit and stays compatible, and it states how far ahead that chip gets.</p>
<p>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 dependent reads spread over a multi-gigabyte dataset that changes daily, so the program waits on memory latency, not on maths or bandwidth. Measured: an RTX 5090 hashes at 95 GB/s of useful 4-byte loads against 1,638 GB/s of sequential writes (engineering log, the RTX 5090 entries). 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: 0.61 ms per warp on one Apple M5 Max core for class v2 and 2.1 ms for class v3 (the mixer at x8, 5 October 2026, one core at load average 5.5, worst cold unit 2.15 ms), 3.4x the class v2 verifier; the 10 ms gate leaves 4.8x (4.6x on the worst cold unit); a 2019-class laptop core is not yet measured.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="tbl"><table>
@ -458,23 +458,23 @@ body.all .pager{display:none}
<tr><td>Every hour</td><td>A new random program</td><td>No, the miner compiles whatever arrives</td></tr>
<tr><td>Every day</td><td>A new dataset</td><td>No</td></tr>
<tr><td>Every six months</td><td>A new instruction mix and memory pattern drawn by the chain from rules fixed at genesis, and a new family of instructions unlocked from a reserve written at genesis, so the program space widens every era. A schedule change against fixed datapaths and human forks, not a surprise: a programmable chip reads every drawn parameter as firmware</td><td>No</td></tr>
<tr><td>Continuously</td><td>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</td><td>No</td></tr>
<tr><td>Continuously</td><td>The dataset grows on a schedule fixed at genesis, slowly enough that consumer cards keep up for years. Each step is scored against the burden it puts on ordinary cards (Deliverable 3); growth is not counted on to retire a chip</td><td>No</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table></div>
<p>Three ideas carry the chip resistance. <strong>The hash rewrites itself.</strong> 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). <strong>It waits on memory, not maths.</strong> Every hash is a chain of random reads into a table too big for a chip to carry. Measured (8 October 2026; lane D’s family harness at the acceptance rule’s own 2^20 sample over 4,900 drawn eras, and the chained-cache pass’s reading of the night before): every hash’s 128 dependent reads land across the whole dataset and the distinct-index floor holds at 0.995 on every accepted program; about half of epochs carry one load site whose address bit at the era’s stride rotation is biased, which prices about 1.6 percent of a hash’s reads to a chip storing half the dataset and nothing to a chip storing all of it; the next class folds the product’s low bits before the rotation, so no era lands a biased bit on an address bit. The wait is the same physics for everyone. <strong>Miners hold the switch.</strong> 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.</p>
<p>What carries the chip resistance is the scoring rule's result on the placed adversary rows, plus the economics, reported separately in the chip model below. Three properties feed it. <strong>Rotation is an option, not the defence.</strong> A new program every hour, drawn from the chain, its memory pattern with it, and rules that change on a schedule fixed at launch. These schedule changes defeat a chip wired for one datapath and need no human fork, but against a programmable chip that stores the dataset every drawn parameter is firmware, so the security argument does not rest on them. What meets that chip is the latency-shadow work (class v4) and the price per joule (the chip and economy analysis of 6 October 2026, section 5.4; ledger M32). <strong>It waits on memory, not maths.</strong> Every hash is a chain of random reads into a table too big for a chip to carry. Measured (8 October 2026; lane D’s family harness at the acceptance rule’s own 2^20 sample over 4,900 drawn eras, and the chained-cache pass’s reading of the night before): every hash’s 128 dependent reads land across the whole dataset and the distinct-index floor holds at 0.995 on every accepted program; about half of epochs carry one load site whose address bit at the era’s stride rotation is biased, which prices about 1.6 percent of a hash’s reads to a chip storing half the dataset and nothing to a chip storing all of it; the next class folds the product’s low bits before the rotation, so no era lands a biased bit on an address bit. The wait is the same physics for everyone. <strong>Miners hold the switch.</strong> 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.</p>
<p><strong>The work that waits can grow.</strong> Class v4 adds a block of latency-shadow arithmetic to every hash, about 100,000 integer operations that run while the memory reads are in flight, so a chip that stores the whole dataset still has to pay for a core. That size sits on a ladder fixed at genesis, six rungs from about 100,000 to about 1,000,000 operations, and it moves one rung at a time only when 90 percent of blue blocks in each of seven consecutive days ask for it; it can never move two rungs inside a week and never past a rung the reference verifier cannot check under 10 ms with its sibling thread busy (measured on the build server, 6 October 2026: the first three rungs pass at 8.8, 8.9 and 9.2 ms, the fourth misses by 0.08 ms on a loaded box and stays out until a quiet re-measurement, the two doublings are out at 12.4 and 15.0 ms). What it buys against a chip is scored under the rule in the chip model below. What it costs, per rung, is measured too: the Apple tier gives up 3 points of rate at the first step and 6 more at the second, the RTX 5090 nothing until the second; so the miners who pay for a step are the ones who take it (<a href="/ledger#M34">ledger M34</a>).</p>
<h3 id="chip-model">The chip model</h3>
<p><b>Igneum remains competitive on accessible commodity GPUs even when specialised mining hardware is assumed to exist, remain compatible and seek profit; its security does not rely on identifying that hardware or retiring it through emergency changes.</b> Class v6 adopts the 64-register window and retains it across every rotation. Current modelling places the strongest specialised designs assessed against the GPU tier at about 2.3x to 3.3x energy-efficiency advantage a node ahead (2.0x to 2.9x on the GPU's own node), a bracket that is approximate and provisional until the placed gated core rows land. The long-program and select-tree proposals were rejected. Economic resistance depends on development cost, deployment economics and productive hardware lifetime; family transitions receive an obsolescence benefit only where a loss of competitiveness is demonstrated; programmable multi-epoch designs are included in the assessment.</p>
<p><b>The labels.</b> The bracket is modelled and provisional: its floor is the clock-gated base core and its ceiling the first placed core, which came in 64 percent above synthesis (wires and the clock tree); the honest figure is the placed gated core’s and replaces the bracket when its row lands. The GPU side is measured: an RTX 5080 at its 1,100 MHz core lock, 2.06 microjoules per hash, and an RTX 5090 at its 1,300 MHz lock, 2.33 microjoules per hash, both under class v4, on the project’s own rigs and rented pods, 8 October 2026; the card’s cost of the window is measured too (a rented RTX 5090 and RTX 4090 at stock, 8 October 2026: within 5 percent per load with the liveness chain, no register spill). The chip side is synthesised and claimed: the clock-gated sequencer core with the 64-register window on ASAP7, scaled to N3 on the foundry’s headline factors (k about 0.37 at N3 and 0.51 node for node for the base core, the gated window adding about 0.13 of k against an adversary with a flop register file; the window’s liveness measured at 61 of 64 values necessary, its cost to the card measured under 5 percent); the window’s k is synthesis-derived and not a lower bound, and the multi-family adversary lane’s first core (its state in a macro) reads the window’s defence as close to nothing, a disagreement between two models that the placed rows settle. The chip’s memory is modelled: the GDDR7 board of the chip model. The placed gated figure is expected near 2.6x to 3.1x a node ahead and 2.3x to 2.7x node for node (approximate) and is served when its row lands.</p>
<p>Three statements, kept separate. The baseline is the hash as it stands under the scoring rule; rotation is an optional improvement to that baseline, not the mechanism the claim rests on.</p>
<div class="tbl"><table><thead><tr><th>Statement</th><th>What it says</th><th>Label and date</th></tr></thead><tbody>
<tr><td>Energy resistance</td><td>The bracket above: about 2.3x to 3.3x for the strongest specialised design a node ahead of the GPU tier, 2.0x to 2.9x on the GPU’s own node, provisional until the placed gated core row lands; two nodes ahead follows from that row. The honest tier moves to the next node with every GPU generation; a chip must tape out again.</td><td>modelled on measured cards, 8 October 2026, approximate and provisional; the node column is claimed scaling</td></tr>
<tr><td>Economic resistance</td><td>Whether a chip gets built depends on development cost, deployment economics and productive hardware lifetime. The first cut of the profitability surface: the price at which a project pays scales as the project cost over its share of the chain times its discounted life, and moves by under 5 percent with the per-joule edge; a fixed-lane chip under rotation needs 4x the price a programmable one needs. No threshold is the headline: the coexistence model that prices the conditions (<code>docs/analysis/class-v6/coexistence-model.md</code>) is owed and is served when it exists.</td><td>modelled, first cut, 8 October 2026; conditional until the cut lands</td></tr>
<tr><td>Response capability</td><td>Rotation is an optional improvement, not the mechanism. A passed rotation boundary proves the rotation works, not that hardware dies. The schedule: a new program every hour, a parameter era every week, a family epoch every 180 days, an emergency vote when miners call one.</td><td>measured per boundary, 8 October 2026</td></tr>
<tr><td>Energy resistance</td><td>The bracket above: about 2.3x to 3.3x for the strongest specialised design a node ahead of the GPU tier, 2.0x to 2.9x on the GPU’s own node, provisional until the placed gated core row lands; two nodes ahead follows from that row. The honest tier moves to the next node with every GPU generation; a chip must tape out again. Whole machine per tier (synthesis with the SRAM band and node factors, claimed; placed rows to follow): the complete GDDR7 machine about 1.8x the RTX 5090 at its lock per joule node for node and 2.1x a node ahead; 1.6x and 1.9x the RTX 5080; 2.8x and 3.3x the Ada, Ampere and RX 9070 XT cohort; about 1.5x the Apple tier, reported, never headlined.</td><td>modelled on measured cards, 8 October 2026, approximate and provisional; the node column is claimed scaling; the per-tier line claimed, 8 October 2026</td></tr>
<tr><td>Economic resistance</td><td>Whether a chip gets built depends on development cost, deployment economics and productive hardware lifetime. The first cut of the profitability surface: the price at which a project pays scales as the project cost over its share of the chain times its discounted life, and moves by under 5 percent with the per-joule edge; a fixed-lane chip under rotation needs 4x the price a programmable one needs. No threshold is the headline: the five-year coexistence model (Deliverable 4; its first run is <code>docs/analysis/class-v6/coexistence-model.md</code>, every row modelled) replaces any capex wall: the GDDR7 board passes all six of its success conditions at a one to three year life; an N2 SRAM die fails five once it exists with development sunk, and the only condition holding it is that nobody pays to build it; the larger half of a chip's edge is capital cost per accepted hash, not joules.</td><td>modelled, the coexistence model's first run, 8 October 2026</td></tr>
<tr><td>Response capability</td><td>Rotation is an optional improvement, not the mechanism. A passed rotation boundary proves the rotation works, not that hardware dies. The schedule: a new program every hour, a parameter era every week, a family epoch every 180 days, an emergency vote when miners call one. Rotation costs a chip versatility, not life: the family bank is firmware plus about 43 percent of core cells, and no transition carries an obsolescence credit (modelled).</td><td>measured per boundary, 8 October 2026; the family-bank cost modelled, 8 October 2026</td></tr>
</tbody></table></div>
<p>What a miner sees from this. Class v4 costs a 5090 145 W more unlocked, 88 W more at a 1,400 MHz core lock and 82 W at the best operating points (class v4 at 1,200 MHz, class v3 at 1,300; the knee is 1,300 MHz on both), for 0.2 percent more rate (measured, 7 October 2026; the 80 W read on 6 October was at the app's tuned cap); an M5 Max 16 W more for 1.5 percent, an RX 9070 XT and an RTX 4070 nothing (measured, 6 October 2026). The ladder that sets how much work rides in the shadow starts at rung 0 at genesis and climbs by miner signal; its third rung is inadmissible today because a server core verifies it in 10.85 ms, over the gate (measured, 7 October 2026). Devnet 3 runs class v4 from its first block (7 October 2026); the first devnet started on class v3 and reaches class v4 by miner signal at a published height. Classes rotate on findings and at least yearly; a class change is a release activated by block height. Class v5 crosses on Devnet 3 by height; class v6 is the design in progress (opened 8 October 2026), with four layers as its spine: per-era draws of the parameters a release now fixes, a dataset whose size tracks the chain state, scheduled family epochs by height, and the acceptance floor generalised to every era’s draw. The next test of the model is an internal adversarial pass, not an independent review: three lanes that have never worked on the hash code attack the mixer, the chained cache and the acceptance rule with only what an outsider has (the public kit, the frozen object, the spec, the harnesses) and publish the break or the bound they reach. No outside review has run yet.</p>
<p>No hash has stayed free of chips forever. Igneum does not claim to. It states the gain its own model finds and the response the rotation makes, and both carry their labels. The precedents, as sourced (nameplate and community tables, about 20 percent either way; every figure with its URL and date in the close): Monero has run on RandomX since November 2019, its rules stable since then and its programs varying per hash; one chip shipped against it, Bitmain’s Antminer X5 (September 2023), 46 months after the fork, at 6.37 J per kH at the wall against a stated CPU measurement, an observed comparison, not a ceiling. Bitmain opened Antminer X9 pre-orders on 26 December 2025 for July 2026 delivery, then withdrew the product in mid-May 2026 and refunded buyers before any unit shipped; none has been independently benchmarked. RandomX v2 was released on 25 March 2026 with its mainnet activation pending. Ethash ran 36 months to a first chip worse than a GPU; the iPollo V2H reads about 14x today. Kaspa ran 21 months to its first chip, at 167x to 725x. The commodity cohort Igneum protects is the discrete-GPU population; the Apple row is reported beside it, never as the headline.</p>
<p><b>The scoring rule and the harness.</b> The edge is the minimum over workloads of the maximum over free adversarial designs of the GPU’s joules per hash over the adversary’s, under four conditions: the 10 percent GPU-cost budget at the lock, the verifier limit, cross-vendor correctness and hardware accessibility. The rejected designs stand as negative controls with their measured rows: the long program, the select tree, the wide read, the scratchpad. The next programme: the connected-state experiment, the mixed integer and FP32 candidate, the multi-family programmable adversary; rotation is not expected to deliver the missing joule. <a href="https://git.igneum.network/igneum-network/igneum/src/branch/master/docs/design/class-v6-rotating-family.md">The scoring rules and every row, section 10</a>. <a href="https://git.igneum.network/igneum-network/igneum/src/branch/class-v5/docs/design/class-v5-harness/">The harness</a> and <a href="https://git.igneum.network/igneum-network/igneum/src/branch/class-v5/docs/design/class-v5-stored-state.md">its readings</a> (measured, 8 October 2026): the acceptance floor at 0.995 refuses nine of nine hot sets (0.9809 to 0.9919) and 2.435 percent of 4,600 drawn programs, 0 of 61 in the era reading (section 14); the attack families F8, F4, F9 and F1 pass, F8 with a residue of 61 of 64 (section 13); the attempts census and the attempt-3 read (section 0).</p>
<p>What a miner sees from this. Class v4 costs a 5090 145 W more unlocked, 88 W more at a 1,400 MHz core lock and 82 W at the best operating points (class v4 at 1,200 MHz, class v3 at 1,300; the knee is 1,300 MHz on both), for 0.2 percent more rate (measured, 7 October 2026; the 80 W read on 6 October was at the app's tuned cap); an M5 Max 16 W more for 1.5 percent, an RX 9070 XT and an RTX 4070 nothing (measured, 6 October 2026). The ladder that sets how much work rides in the shadow starts at rung 0 at genesis and climbs by miner signal; its third rung is inadmissible today because a server core verifies it in 10.85 ms, over the gate (measured, 7 October 2026). The devnet runs class v4 from its first block. Classes rotate on findings and at least yearly; a class change is a release activated by block height. Class v5 is built to cross by height; its dataset keyed by the chain's own state is under evaluation (Deliverable 3) and is not counted as a defence until justified. Class v6 is the design in progress (opened 8 October 2026), with four layers as its spine: per-era draws of the parameters a release now fixes, a dataset whose size tracks the chain state (under evaluation, Deliverable 3), scheduled family epochs by height, and the acceptance floor generalised to every era’s draw. The next test of the model is an internal adversarial pass, not an independent review: three lanes that have never worked on the hash code attack the mixer, the chained cache and the acceptance rule with only what an outsider has (the public kit, the frozen object, the spec, the harnesses) and publish the break or the bound they reach. No outside review has run yet.</p>
<p>No hash has stayed free of chips forever. Igneum does not claim to. It states the gain its own model finds, the economics and the response capability, each separately, and each carries its label. The precedents, as sourced (nameplate and community tables, about 20 percent either way; every figure with its URL and date in the close): Monero has run on RandomX since November 2019, its rules stable since then and its programs varying per hash; one chip shipped against it, Bitmain’s Antminer X5 (September 2023), 46 months after the fork, at 6.37 J per kH at the wall against a stated CPU measurement, an observed comparison, not a ceiling. Bitmain opened Antminer X9 pre-orders on 26 December 2025 for July 2026 delivery, then withdrew the product in mid-May 2026 and refunded buyers before any unit shipped; none has been independently benchmarked. RandomX v2 was released on 25 March 2026 with its mainnet activation pending. Ethash ran 36 months to a first chip worse than a GPU; the iPollo V2H reads about 14x today. Kaspa ran 21 months to its first chip, at 167x to 725x. The commodity cohort Igneum protects is the discrete-GPU population; the Apple row is reported beside it, never as the headline.</p>
<p><b>The scoring rule and the harness.</b> The edge is the minimum over workloads of the maximum over free adversarial designs of the GPU’s joules per hash over the adversary’s, under four conditions: the 10 percent GPU-cost budget at the lock, the verifier limit, cross-vendor correctness and hardware accessibility. The rejected designs stand as negative controls with their measured rows: the long program, the select tree, the wide read, the scratchpad. The two architectural experiments are closed as failures and stay as regression controls: the mixed integer and FP32 branch (measured, 8 October 2026: 15 to 26 percent more card energy per hash against the 10 percent budget) and the connected-state reorganisation (8 October 2026: only the window width reaches the chip). The multi-family programmable adversary (Deliverable 3) is open; rotation is not expected to deliver the missing joule. <a href="https://git.igneum.network/igneum-network/igneum/src/branch/master/docs/design/class-v6-rotating-family.md">The scoring rules and every row, section 10</a>. <a href="https://git.igneum.network/igneum-network/igneum/src/branch/class-v5/docs/design/class-v5-harness/">The harness</a> and <a href="https://git.igneum.network/igneum-network/igneum/src/branch/class-v5/docs/design/class-v5-stored-state.md">its readings</a> (measured, 8 October 2026): the acceptance floor at 0.995 refuses nine of nine hot sets (0.9809 to 0.9919) and 2.435 percent of 4,600 drawn programs, 0 of 61 in the era reading (section 14); the attack families F8, F4, F9 and F1 pass, F8 with a residue of 61 of 64 (section 13); the attempts census and the attempt-3 read (section 0).</p>
<p>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.</p>
</section>
@ -486,27 +486,41 @@ body.all .pager{display:none}
<tbody>
<tr><td>Hardware it is built for</td><td>CPUs. GPUs run it badly on purpose</td><td>GPUs. Any card, any vendor. Bit-exact on Apple, NVIDIA and AMD, measured</td></tr>
<tr><td>Random program</td><td>Per hash, interpreted in a virtual machine</td><td>Per hour, compiled to native GPU code. Per hash, the 128 dataset addresses change with the nonce</td></tr>
<tr><td>Dataset</td><td>About 2 GB, the same size since 2019, approximate</td><td>2 GB, growing (the proposed schedule, fixed at the testnet genesis: 2 GB, doubling at years 4, 12 and 28); a 4 GB card mines about four years, an 8 GB card about twelve, approximate</td></tr>
<tr><td>Dataset</td><td>About 2 GB, the same size since 2019, approximate</td><td>2 GB, growing (the proposed schedule, fixed at genesis: 2 GB, doubling at years 4, 12 and 28); a 4 GB card mines about four years, an 8 GB card about twelve, approximate</td></tr>
<tr><td>Light verification</td><td>256 MB cache on a CPU, milliseconds</td><td>256 MB cache on a CPU (512 MB from year 4), one warp under 10 ms, the gate. Measured 2.1 ms on one Apple M5 Max core for class v3 (3.4x class v2's 0.61 ms); a 2019-class core not yet</td></tr>
<tr><td>Changes over time</td><td>None. A fixed design, unchanged for seven years</td><td>A new program every hour, its memory pattern with it; era draws and reserved families on a schedule fixed at genesis. Nobody touches it</td></tr>
<tr><td>Seed grinding</td><td>Not applicable, the program comes from the hash input</td><td>Closed by a verifiable delay between seed and program</td></tr>
<tr><td>Useful work</td><td>None. Hashing only</td><td>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</td></tr>
<tr><td>Useful work</td><td>None. Hashing only</td><td>NVIDIA cards prove: from 8 GB on the patched server, 12 GB and up beside the miner, 24 GB on the stock server (measured on eleven rented cards, RTX 3060 to RTX 5090, 6 October 2026). Selling proofs to other chains is Designed, not built. AMD and Apple cards mine and do not prove; a prover for them lands when a zkVM ships one</td></tr>
<tr><td>Track record</td><td>About seven years with one shipped chip, Bitmain’s Antminer X5 (September 2023), at 1.46x per joule over a desktop CPU; the one announced beyond it, Bitmain’s Antminer X9, was withdrawn in May 2026 with zero units; RandomX v2 released 25 March 2026, activation pending</td><td>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 (git.igneum.network/igneum-network/spec). The node, the miner and the wallet follow to the same host as the repository is published</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table></div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 a live network 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.</p>
</section>
<section id="proving">
<h2>Proving: the miners are the provers</h2>
<p>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. Wrapped for light clients, a phone checks it in milliseconds; the wrapping cost is a phase two measurement. Measured so far, the certificate half only: the browser verifier on the home page checks a devnet finality certificate, one BLS aggregate signature over 16 keys and 21 header hashes, in 139 to 155 ms cold and 58 to 68 ms warm in a phone-sized tab on a laptop core (5 October 2026). No phone has been measured, and no wrapped block proof exists yet.</p>
<p class="lead"><strong>A GPU-secured network for Ethereum-compatible applications and verifiable computation.</strong></p>
<h3 id="architecture">The proof architecture</h3>
<p>Igneum is not an Ethereum L2. Ethereum does not enforce its state or hold its data, so Igneum carries its own consensus security, data availability and cross-chain verification. The architecture is three decisions, kept separate, and one source of extra demand. EVM-compatible execution is what developers build against, through revm. SP1 is the one well-tested proving backend, behind the versioned proving interface; a zkEVM here means the EVM implementation compiled as a program SP1 proves. Igneum's own GPU-mined consensus is where security comes from. External customers are the source of additional proving demand: designed, not built, and out of every revenue assumption.</p>
<div class="tbl"><table>
<thead><tr><th>Decision</th><th>Choice</th><th>State, 8 Oct 2026</th></tr></thead>
<tbody>
<tr><td>What developers build against</td><td>EVM-compatible execution (revm), with a documented set of differences: block context, randomness, two-dimensional fees</td><td>Implemented on the devnet</td></tr>
<tr><td>How execution is proved</td><td>SP1, one well-tested backend behind the versioned proving interface; program identities, verifier versions and security parameters pinned in the protocol; a second backend only where justified</td><td>Implemented: proving v0 and v1 on the devnet. The pinning is Designed</td></tr>
<tr><td>Where security comes from</td><td>Igneum's own GPU-mined consensus: the lottery, GHOSTDAG ordering and miner-only finality</td><td>Implemented on the devnet; external review owed</td></tr>
<tr><td>Additional proving demand</td><td>External customers buying proofs for their own systems</td><td>Designed, not built; out of revenue assumptions</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table></div>
<p><strong>Proven execution is not finality. EVM compatibility is not Ethereum security. ZK is not privacy.</strong></p>
<p>A proof says the state follows from the ordered blocks; the miners' lock decides which blocks are final. Running Ethereum's bytecode does not bring Ethereum's validators. Published state data is public, and privacy needs its own application or protocol design. None of these choices, by itself, answers specialised mining hardware; the chip model is a separate obligation.</p>
<p>Igneum blocks are proven with zero-knowledge proofs, and NVIDIA miners produce them. AMD and Apple cards mine; they do not prove today. Proving is a useful GPU workload that is cheaply verifiable by construction. A proof is right or it is not. Wrapped for light clients, a phone checks it in milliseconds; the wrapping cost is a phase two measurement. Measured so far, the certificate half only: the browser verifier on the home page checks a devnet finality certificate, one BLS aggregate signature over 16 keys and 21 header hashes, in 139 to 155 ms cold and 58 to 68 ms warm in a phone-sized tab on a laptop core (5 October 2026). No phone has been measured, and no wrapped block proof exists yet.</p>
<h3>How a block gets proven</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Proving: every NVIDIA card from 8 GB proves; 12 GB and up mine and prove; 24 GB on the stock server. Measured on eleven rented cards, RTX 3060 to RTX 5090, 6 October 2026: the RTX 3060 (12 GB) mines at 23.78 MH/s and proves the v1 shard beside its miner at an 8.9 GB peak in 37.5 s; the RTX 4060 (8 GB) proves it alone at 7.4 GB in 18.4 s; the RTX 4090 (24 GB) proves it on the stock SP1 server in 5.6 s at 17.4 GB. The patched server that fits the smaller cards is not yet in the shipped app. AMD and Apple cards mine. A prover for them lands when a zkVM ships one.</p>
<p>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 NVIDIA 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 (designed). 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.</p>
<p>Proving is NVIDIA's today: from 8 GB on the patched server, 12 GB and up beside the miner, 24 GB on the stock server. Measured on eleven rented cards, RTX 3060 to RTX 5090, 6 October 2026: the RTX 3060 (12 GB) mines at 23.78 MH/s and proves the v1 shard beside its miner at an 8.9 GB peak in 37.5 s; the RTX 4060 (8 GB) proves it alone at 7.4 GB in 18.4 s; the RTX 4090 (24 GB) proves it on the stock SP1 server in 5.6 s at 17.4 GB. The patched server that fits the smaller cards is not yet in the shipped app. AMD and Apple cards mine. A prover for them lands when a zkVM ships one. These rows are the proving stage only: the full pipeline is judged, inputs, proving, aggregation, verification, payment, memory and the mining income forgone, and a fast shard does not settle it.</p>
<h3>The proving budget</h3>
<p>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. Measured on 5 October 2026 (an RTX 5090 under SP1 6.8.1's GPU prover, the shard size the chain adopts from its fee switch, 30,000 proving gas, about 4.7 million prover cycles): one full shard proves in 4.3 seconds and needs 20.4 GB of GPU memory with the card to itself, so a 24 GB card proves full shards and a 12 GB or 16 GB card does not on this prover build, whose floor is 13.9 GB for even an empty shard; mining and proving on one card needs 32 GB today (the prototype-size shard beside the miner peaked at 30.1 GB) and 24 GB once the adopted shard size is live (22.2 GB beside the miner, 13.2 seconds a shard, measured on the 32 GB card; a 24 GB card has not run it yet). The old 12 GB gate on the roadmap was withdrawn on 5 October until a prover build with a smaller floor was measured; on 6 October a patched server proved the same shard at 7.4 to 8.0 GB alone on eleven rented cards from the RTX 3060 to the RTX 5090 (the real-card table), so the gate returns as measured and the patched server is not yet in the shipped app. 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.</p>
<p>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. Measured on 5 October 2026 (an RTX 5090 under SP1 6.8.1's GPU prover, the shard size the chain adopts from its fee switch, 30,000 proving gas, about 4.7 million prover cycles): one full shard proves in 4.3 seconds and needs 20.4 GB of GPU memory with the card to itself, so a 24 GB card proves full shards and a 12 GB or 16 GB card does not on this prover build, whose floor is 13.9 GB for even an empty shard; mining and proving on one card needs 32 GB today (the prototype-size shard beside the miner peaked at 30.1 GB) and 24 GB once the adopted shard size is live (22.2 GB beside the miner, 13.2 seconds a shard, measured on the 32 GB card; a 24 GB card has not run it yet). The old 12 GB gate on the roadmap was withdrawn on 5 October until a prover build with a smaller floor was measured; on 6 October a patched server proved the same shard at 7.4 to 8.0 GB alone on eleven rented cards from the RTX 3060 to the RTX 5090 (the real-card table), so the gate returns as measured and the patched server is not yet in the shipped app. 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. Shards are assigned and proven on the devnet from block zero. 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. SP1 is the one backend. A replacement is adopted only where justified, by a miner-signalled release, never as an interchangeable second backend, and the chain runs for ever on the current one if none is adopted.</p>
<h3>Proving for everyone else</h3>
<p>The same miners accept proving jobs from other chains. Rollups post a job, a miner wins it, proves it, and is paid. The job market is permissionless and is Designed, not yet built. At launch a job is paid on the customer's own chain, in the customer's currency, to a payout contract keyed by miner address, because Igneum cannot yet see Ethereum. Settlement in IGN, with 10% of each fee burned, follows when the proof bridge lets Igneum see the payment, in phase two. The Igneum miner client can also bid on other proving networks and take the best price, where a miner chooses to hold their collateral: Boundless provers post ZKC and Succinct provers stake PROVE (approximate, from their documentation). The proving market is small today. Igneum does not depend on it. We know of no other proof-of-work chain selling proofs to other chains. Live rows arrive with the public testnet. The public testnet is armed: three seed nodes and the public RPC are up, and it opens on the go word.</p>
<p>The job market for other chains is Designed, not built, and stays out of every revenue assumption until it is. The order: Igneum's own execution first; then one external customer's exact workload with repeat paid jobs; further workloads only where the fleet has a demonstrated edge. As designed, a customer posts a job, a miner wins it, proves it, and is paid, and the market is permissionless. At launch a job is paid on the customer's own chain, in the customer's currency, to a payout contract keyed by miner address, because Igneum cannot yet see Ethereum. Settlement in IGN, with 10% of each fee burned, follows when the proof bridge lets Igneum see the payment, in phase two. The Igneum miner client can also bid on other proving networks and take the best price, where a miner chooses to hold their collateral: Boundless provers post ZKC and Succinct provers stake PROVE (approximate, from their documentation). The proving market is small today. Igneum does not depend on it. We know of no proof-of-work chain that sells proofs to other chains.</p>
</section>
<section id="finality">
@ -516,7 +530,7 @@ body.all .pager{display:none}
<h3>Finality</h3>
<p>Every 30 seconds of chain a checkpoint forms, deep enough past the tip that the DAG will not reorder it. Every miner with at least 100 blocks in the last 30 days signs it, and the checkpoint locks when signatures representing two thirds of all the mining weight of those 30 days arrive. Once a checkpoint is locked it overrides the heaviest chain, so fresh hashrate cannot reorganise past it. Two thirds of 30-day weight can. In the chain's first 30 days no checkpoint locks at all: the rule waits until the window holds 30 days of history (Implemented, the first-month gate, measured on test networks on 4 and 5 October 2026), so the chain runs on proof of work and its 12-hour finality depth the way every new proof-of-work chain does. On the devnet, whose window is two hours, the first lock came two hours after genesis, at 77.4% of all weight from 17 vote keys (4 October 2026).</p>
<div class="pull">The word sustained is the whole defence. Block rewards go to whoever mines, new or old. The right to lock history is earned.</div>
<p>A miner's vote weight is simply the blocks it has mined over the trailing 30 days, measured by work, so splitting into many keys buys nothing and joining a pool costs nothing. Hashrate that arrived today holds almost none of it. Even an attacker producing every block on the chain, with honest miners gone, would need ten days of mining in public to hold a third of the weight, and twenty to hold two thirds. An attacker matching the honest network needs twenty days for a third and never reaches two thirds while the honest miners keep mining. Rental is priced by the hour. The only route left is to drive honest miners off the chain and hold two thirds for a month on the public hashrate charts, which is the same limit Bitcoin lives with, with a month's warning attached. Pools carry their hashers' votes, so vote concentration equals pool concentration, and it is public.</p>
<p>A miner's vote weight is simply the blocks it has mined over the trailing 30 days, measured by work, so splitting into many keys buys nothing and joining a pool costs nothing. Hashrate that arrived today holds almost none of it. Even an attacker producing every block on the chain, with honest miners gone, would need ten days of mining in public to hold a third of the weight, and twenty to hold two thirds. An attacker matching the honest network needs twenty days for a third and never reaches two thirds while the honest miners keep mining. Rental is priced by the hour. The only route left is to drive honest miners off the chain and hold two thirds for a month on the public hashrate charts, which is the same limit Bitcoin lives with, with a month's warning attached. Pools carry their hashers' votes, so vote concentration equals pool concentration, and it is public (today's behaviour, as built). The pin replaces it: vote keys stay with the miner at protocol level: the member's retained voting key is committed into its work, payment aggregation is separate and verifiable, and pool identity substitution is resisted (a pin of Igneum 2.0, pools and participation; not yet shipped).</p>
<p>Two further rules close the gaps. A lock needs two thirds of all 30-day weight, so finality pauses whenever less than two thirds of that weight is connected and signing, until it returns or ages out of the window, up to 30 days, and the chain runs on proof of work meanwhile. The node reports the pause. A key that stops signing is reported as absent within two hours, which is how operators see a pause coming. Beneath the latest lock the depth to rely on is the finality depth: a node never switches to a chain forked more than 12 hours of median time back, and a certified checkpoint shortens that to its own age. Kaspa's one-hour merge depth is a limit on which old blocks a new block may merge, not a reorganisation bound. Signing two different checkpoints at the same height is equivocation, provable by anyone, and it strips the key of its vote for 30 days.</p>
<h3>What is not here</h3>
<p>No coin is staked. The only thing at stake is 30 days of public work: a vote key's weight is its blue blocks over the window, and equivocation strips it for 30 days. No coin-holder class votes on anything. No anchoring into Bitcoin or any other chain. Nothing in Igneum's consensus depends on anything outside Igneum.</p>
@ -524,7 +538,8 @@ body.all .pager{display:none}
<section id="building">
<h2>Building on Igneum</h2>
<p>Anything that runs on Ethereum runs on Igneum unchanged. Same Solidity, same bytecode, same wallets, same tools, a different chain id. Builders get Ethereum semantics with one-second inclusion, finality in about two minutes, and gas priced for a chain that is not congested.</p>
<p class="lead"><strong>A GPU-secured network for Ethereum-compatible applications and verifiable computation.</strong></p>
<p>Contracts built for Ethereum deploy with the same Solidity, the same bytecode, the same wallets and tools, and a different chain id. Compatibility is shown, not assumed: representative contracts, wallet fee estimation, indexing, failed transactions and receipts are tested as a product deliverable, and the differences are documented (block context, randomness, two-dimensional fees). Builders get Ethereum semantics with one-second inclusion, finality in about two minutes, and gas priced for a chain that is not congested.</p>
<p>Three things Igneum offers at the base layer that we know no other EVM chain offers.</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Proving as a native primitive.</strong> A contract can request a proof of any computation and pay for it in gas, and the miners produce it. A game proves a fair shuffle. A lending market proves its solvency. A rollup elsewhere posts a job and gets its proof back. We know of no other EVM chain with a prover network in its base layer.</li>
@ -535,7 +550,7 @@ body.all .pager{display:none}
<h3>Why build here</h3>
<p>Not for speed. Fast EVM chains filled with copied Ethereum contracts and emptied when incentives stopped. Three things no L2 can offer. Keep your Ethereum deployment.</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Proofs priced by the subsidy forgone.</strong> A contract requests a proof of any computation and the miners produce it. Their cards already run and are paid by emission, so a job has to beat the lottery income the card forgoes while it proves. That is the price a prover must charge, as a formula with network hash as the input: per shard, (card hash ÷ network hash) × 0.8 × 31.688 IGN × shard seconds, plus electricity, which is under a cent per billion cycles on every card. It falls as one over network hash: at the devnet's 1.16 GH/s a quote is 100 to 300x the published market rate; a card proving beside its miner is competitive near 100 GH/s (the Horizon economy lane, 6 October 2026, sections 3.1 and 4.1, approximate beyond the one card measured; ledger E20). Verification is folded into the chain's own proof; you ship no verifier. The job's base fee rises with the backlog, published at the phase 4 job market.</li>
<li><strong>Proofs priced by the subsidy forgone.</strong> A contract requests a proof of any computation and the miners produce it. Their cards already run and are paid by emission, so a job has to beat the lottery income the card forgoes while it proves. That is the price a prover must charge, as a formula with network hash as the input: per shard, (card hash ÷ network hash) × 0.8 × 31.688 IGN × shard seconds, plus electricity, which is under a cent per billion cycles on every card. It falls as one over network hash: at the devnet's 1.16 GH/s a quote is 100 to 300x the published market rate; a card proving beside its miner is competitive near 100 GH/s (the economy analysis of 6 October 2026, sections 3.1 and 4.1, approximate beyond the one card measured; ledger E20). Verification is folded into the chain's own proof; you ship no verifier. The job's base fee rises with the backlog, published at the phase 4 job market.</li>
<li><strong>Users who were not paid to arrive.</strong> Every miner is a funded wallet. Pools, payout contracts, hardware finance and hashrate forwards have customers before any consumer app does. Block rewards can pay straight to a contract.</li>
<li><strong>A share of fees, with the number stated.</strong> 20% of every priority fee goes to the contracts whose code ran, per call frame, to the payee registered at deployment. Libraries are paid at their code address. Factories pass their registration to what they deploy. At launch fee levels this is a property, not an income: a million 100,000-gas calls a day at a 1 gwei tip pays about 7,300 IGN a year, with 1 gwei taken as a billionth of an IGN (the base unit is Open). It grows with traffic and nothing else.</li>
</ol>
@ -578,7 +593,7 @@ body.all .pager{display:none}
<thead><tr><th>Share</th><th>Goes to</th><th>Why</th></tr></thead>
<tbody>
<tr><td class="num">80%</td><td>The miner who wins the block</td><td>Pays the hashrate that secures the chain</td></tr>
<tr><td class="num">20%</td><td>The proving pool: shard provers and aggregators</td><td>For a standing prover population that does not have to hash. On the devnet today the coinbase's 20% output goes to an unspendable script tagged <code>igneum-proving-pool-v0</code> and is burned there. Provers are paid from a separate escrow in the execution state, credited by rule with the same 20% of each blue block's subsidy and released per shard against valid proof records (Implemented, proving v0, since 5 October 2026). Caveat: consensus does not yet verify the carried proof, it checks the record's statement against native execution and its signature, so today a block producer could claim shard pay with a false proof (ledger P21; the in-consensus verifier is built and switches on when the proven share of blocks reads one). Note: unclaimed pool credit is today stranded in the escrow, no rule returns it; the fix rolls an unproven shard's credit into the next proven segment's pool (0.3.16). Open: the single coinbase payout that replaces the burn, and whether it reclaims the share burned so far</td></tr>
<tr><td class="num">20%</td><td>The proving pool: shard provers and aggregators</td><td>For a standing prover population that does not have to hash. On the devnet today the coinbase's 20% output goes to an unspendable script tagged <code>igneum-proving-pool-v0</code> and is burned there. Provers are paid from a separate escrow in the execution state, credited by rule with the same 20% of each blue block's subsidy and released per shard against valid proof records (Implemented, proving v0, since 5 October 2026). Caveat: consensus does not yet verify the carried proof, it checks the record's statement against native execution and its signature, so today a block producer could claim shard pay with a false proof (ledger P21; the in-consensus verifier is built; its enforcement, verifier_in_consensus and proof_rule_active_from, is Open and is the prerequisite of the no-rescue network exercise, Deliverable 5). Note: unclaimed pool credit is today stranded in the escrow, no rule returns it; the fix rolls an unproven shard's credit into the next proven segment's pool (designed). Open: the single coinbase payout that replaces the burn, and whether it reclaims the share burned so far</td></tr>
<tr><td class="num">0%</td><td>Treasury, foundation, team or stake</td><td>There is no coin-holder class in consensus and no tax on emission</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table></div>
@ -599,7 +614,7 @@ body.all .pager{display:none}
</table></div>
<p class="src"><b>Sources:</b> specification sections 2.5 and 5.1 to 5.4; the engineering log for the devnet receipts and the dev-fee count.</p>
<h3>Security after the subsidy</h3>
<p>The cap stays at 4 billion. There is no tail emission. The schedule is a bet, not a measurement: a halving halves emission income overnight if price and fees do nothing. Kaspa's steeper monthly reduction kept its hashrate while its price rose (approximate). Long term, security is paid for by the proving market and by fees. Outside customers buy proofs as dollars-priced work settled in IGN, and 90% of every job goes to the provers who delivered it, so a prover's income does not depend on emission. The table shows the first year in which the block subsidy on its own pays miners less than the power of about 3,000 consumer cards, at three flat prices. The prices are inputs chosen to span two orders of magnitude. The model runs a 300 W card at 124 MH/s on electricity at USD 0.12 per kWh. One rule sits beside the cap. If external proving revenue is under one fifth of the block subsidy over any 90-day window after year 5, the question of a tail reward goes to the miners' signalling vote. The protocol never changes emission by itself.</p>
<p>The cap stays at 4 billion. There is no tail emission. The schedule is a bet, not a measurement: a halving halves emission income overnight if price and fees do nothing. Kaspa's steeper monthly reduction kept its hashrate while its price rose (approximate). Long term, security has to be paid by fees and, if it is built and bought, the proving market. The external market is Designed, not built, and is out of the numbers below. As designed, outside customers buy proofs as dollars-priced work settled in IGN, and 90% of every job goes to the provers who delivered it. The table shows the first year in which the block subsidy on its own pays miners less than the power of about 3,000 consumer cards, at three flat prices. The prices are inputs chosen to span two orders of magnitude. The model (modelled, 3 October 2026) runs a 300 W card at 124 MH/s on electricity at USD 0.12 per kWh. One rule sits beside the cap. If external proving revenue is under one fifth of the block subsidy over any 90-day window after year 5, the question of a tail reward goes to the miners' signalling vote. The protocol never changes emission by itself.</p>
<div class="tbl"><table>
<thead><tr><th>Price per IGN</th><th>First year the subsidy alone pays under the power of 3,000 cards</th><th>Subsidy to miners that year</th></tr></thead>
<tbody>
@ -633,26 +648,26 @@ body.all .pager{display:none}
<tbody>
<tr><td>Block reward</td><td>Emission, 80% to the winner</td><td>Yes</td></tr>
<tr><td>In-chain proving</td><td>The 20% proving pool plus the proving share of every block's gas (on the devnet, paid from the execution-state escrow; see Economics)</td><td>Yes, mostly</td></tr>
<tr><td>External proving jobs</td><td>Rollups and apps on other chains, priced in their money</td><td>No, but the market is small today and is upside, not a promise</td></tr>
<tr><td>External proving jobs</td><td>Rollups and apps on other chains, priced in their money (Designed, not built)</td><td>No, but the market is not built and is upside, not a promise</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table></div>
<p>A block pays its miner whether or not anyone buys a proof that day. The lottery pays 80 percent of every block from emission; proving is the second income, never the only one. Every useful-work chain on record dropped its miners the day the work stopped paying; Igneum’s miners are paid for the block first.</p>
<p>The size of that third stream today, in numbers: all of Ethereum L1's proving is about USD 36 a day at the September 2026 tracker cost (USD 0.005 a block, 7,200 blocks a day; the tracker figure is a secondary source), against about USD 13,700 a day of Igneum's year-1 emission at USD 0.005 per IGN (31.688 IGN a block, 86,400 blocks a day; the price is an input, not a forecast). So external proving is a small second income at launch and the lottery pays the bills; for proving to become the main income the paid demand would have to grow about 1,000x in dollars (the Horizon lane analysis, 6 October 2026, section 3.11; ledger E19).</p>
<p>The honest bear-market case rests on cost. A miner's card is already running and the power is often domestic, so Igneum miners' electricity cost in the proving market is close to power. The price they must charge is another matter: the price a prover must charge is the subsidy it forgoes while it proves, which falls as one over network hash, so the edge over data-centre provers appears only once the network's hash is large (near 100 GH/s for a card proving beside its miner) and is nothing more. Which of the two in-chain streams pays more per GPU-second depends on the size of the fleet: on the devnet of 4 October 2026, three machines at 275 million hashes a second, a second of hashing paid about 4.9x a second of proving the pool share; at 10,000 cards the same arithmetic favours proving by about 930x. That is arithmetic on measured devnet rates, approximate, not a market measurement.</p>
<p>The size of that third stream today, in numbers: all of Ethereum L1's proving is about USD 36 a day at the September 2026 tracker cost (USD 0.005 a block, 7,200 blocks a day; the tracker figure is a secondary source), against about USD 13,700 a day of Igneum's year-1 emission at USD 0.005 per IGN (31.688 IGN a block, 86,400 blocks a day; the price is an input, not a forecast). So external proving is a small second income at launch and the lottery pays the bills; for proving to become the main income the paid demand would have to grow about 1,000x in dollars (the chip and economy analysis of 6 October 2026, section 3.11; ledger E19).</p>
<p>The honest bear-market case rests on cost. A miner's card is already running and the power is often domestic, so Igneum miners' electricity cost in the proving market is close to power. The price they must charge is another matter: the price a prover must charge is the subsidy it forgoes while it proves, which falls as one over network hash, so the edge over data-centre provers appears only once the network's hash is large (near 100 GH/s for a card proving beside its miner) and is nothing more. Which of the two in-chain streams pays more per GPU-second depends on the size of the fleet: measured on 4 October 2026, three machines at 275 million hashes a second, a second of hashing paid about 4.9x a second of proving the pool share; at 10,000 cards the same arithmetic favours proving by about 930x. That is arithmetic on measured devnet rates, approximate, not a market measurement.</p>
<h3>Hardware</h3>
<p>The dataset starts at 2 GB and grows (the proposed schedule, fixed at the testnet genesis: 2 GB, doubling at years 4, 12 and 28, the average of half a gigabyte a year), so a 4 GB card mines for about four years and an 8 GB card for about twelve, approximate. 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). NVIDIA and AMD both work, because the mining program is generated for the architecture both share and the proof system is hash-based. Apple's chips are GPUs with unified memory, so Macs mine too, at about a fifth of a flagship card: Measured, 26.7 against 123 million hashes a second, an Apple M5 Max beside an RTX 5090 on the live devnet, 4 October 2026. A Mac is a poor miner per dollar. There is no CPU mining lane, on purpose, because CPU mining is what botnets farm. Nodes, wallets and exchanges need no GPU at all.</p>
<p>The dataset starts at 2 GB and grows (the proposed schedule, fixed at genesis: 2 GB, doubling at years 4, 12 and 28, the average of half a gigabyte a year), so a 4 GB card mines for about four years and an 8 GB card for about twelve, approximate. NVIDIA cards prove: from 8 GB on the patched server, 12 GB and up beside the miner, 24 GB on the stock server (measured on eleven rented cards, RTX 3060 to RTX 5090, 6 October 2026). NVIDIA and AMD cards both mine, because the mining program is generated for the architecture both share; only NVIDIA cards prove today. Apple's chips are GPUs with unified memory, so Macs mine too, at about a fifth of a flagship card: Measured, 26.7 against 123 million hashes a second, an Apple M5 Max beside an RTX 5090, mining side by side, 4 October 2026. A Mac is a poor miner per dollar. There is no CPU mining lane, on purpose, because CPU mining is what botnets farm. Nodes, wallets and exchanges need no GPU at all.</p>
<h3>What a miner's hour looks like</h3>
<p>The card hashes the lottery continuously. When the client sees a shard or an external job it can win, it switches the card to proving for a few seconds, posts the proof, and goes back to hashing. The client does the switching and the miner sees one balance.</p>
<p>The card hashes the lottery continuously. On an NVIDIA card, when the client sees a shard it can win (or, once the job market is built, an external job), it switches the card to proving for a few seconds, posts the proof, and goes back to hashing. The client does the switching and the miner sees one balance.</p>
<p>The protocol carries no fee: no dev fund, no cut to any team. Ember, the miner software, takes an optional 1% dev fee, the way other GPU miners do. One block template in 100 is requested with the dev address instead of yours, by a counter, not a random draw, so it is exactly 1 in 100 and anyone can check it from the source or from the chain. One flag turns it off (<code>--dev-fee 0</code>, a switch in the app, a line in the HiveOS config). The miner prints the fee and the address when it starts. Any other client is welcome.</p>
<h3>One click, for everyone else</h3>
<p>Farm operators get a HiveOS package. Everyone else gets Igneum Ember: install it on Windows, macOS or Linux, press Start, and the card is mining to a key the app made for you. It is the same client with a face on it. Implemented, Ember 0.3.22 (7 October 2026): the app shows the key once and has you save it before mining starts, or takes an address you already have; the dashboard shows each card's hash rate, blocks found and accepted by the node, the node's height and peers, the next hourly program, the finality votes sent, and a proving tile with shards assigned, submitted and paid and the verifier state; the chain label reads Devnet 3 and the welcome screen says nothing is bought or sold; NVIDIA cards are capped at 80% of their default power limit for stability, with a sweep that looks for the best hash per watt, not yet measured on a card; proving the shards the chain assigns is a switch in Settings (proving v0), beside the 1% dev fee switch, finality voting, and signed updates that install themselves at a quiet moment with a switch to turn that off. It shows no earnings in IGN or in any currency, and it has no hardware-wallet path. Roadmap, Designed and not in the app: earnings per block in IGN with the network named, a figure in your currency, mining paused while you game, and a hardware wallet for your key. Ember is downloaded only from this domain, with the version and size on the button and the hash in the signed manifest the app checks. The next section says what is shipped and what is still a design. Nobody from Igneum will ever ask for your seed. Mining never runs in a browser, because browser compute is slow and browser mining has meant malware since Coinhive. The browser is for the dashboard, and for verifying the chain.</p>
<h3 id="testnet-terms">Testnet terms</h3>
<p><strong>No value.</strong> Testnet IGN cannot be sold, bought or redeemed, now or at mainnet. There is no airdrop, no points scheme and no promise tied to testnet balances. Mainnet starts from an empty genesis.</p>
<p><strong>Resets.</strong> The chain restarts from a fresh genesis when a consensus rule changes. Every reset is announced at least seven days ahead on the site and in the app. Balances, contracts and history do not carry over. The devnet that runs today resets without notice.</p>
<p>Farm operators get a HiveOS package. Everyone else gets Igneum Ember: install it on Windows, macOS or Linux, press Start, and the card is mining to a key the app made for you. It is the same client with a face on it. Implemented in Ember (7 October 2026): the app shows the key once and has you save it before mining starts, or takes an address you already have; the dashboard shows each card's hash rate, blocks found and accepted by the node, the node's height and peers, the next hourly program, the finality votes sent, and a proving tile with shards assigned, submitted and paid and the verifier state; the chain label names the devnet and the welcome screen says nothing is bought or sold; NVIDIA cards are capped at 80% of their default power limit for stability, with a sweep that looks for the best hash per watt, not yet measured on a card; proving the shards the chain assigns is a switch in Settings (proving v0), beside the 1% dev fee switch, finality voting, and signed updates that install themselves at a quiet moment with a switch to turn that off. It shows no earnings in IGN or in any currency, and it has no hardware-wallet path. Roadmap, Designed and not in the app: earnings per block in IGN with the network named, a figure in your currency, mining paused while you game, and a hardware wallet for your key. Ember is downloaded only from this domain, with the version and size on the button and the hash in the signed manifest the app checks. The next section says what is shipped and what is still a design. Nobody from Igneum will ever ask for your seed. Mining never runs in a browser, because browser compute is slow and browser mining has meant malware since Coinhive. The browser is for the dashboard, and for verifying the chain.</p>
<h3 id="devnet-terms">Devnet terms</h3>
<p><strong>No value.</strong> Devnet IGN cannot be sold, bought or redeemed, now or at mainnet. There is no airdrop, no points scheme and no promise tied to devnet balances. Mainnet starts from an empty genesis.</p>
<p><strong>Resets.</strong> The devnet may restart from a fresh genesis, without notice. Balances, contracts and history do not carry over.</p>
<p><strong>What the app sends home.</strong> The app version, a random machine id made at install, your operating system, the node version, the hash rate, and the app, node and miner logs (which name the address the card mines to). They go to the project's log intake, a service Igneum runs on its host, and are read by the maintainers to find faults. Never your seed phrase, never a key, never a file you did not make with the app. Nothing is sold or shared.</p>
<p>Wallet set-up for MetaMask: <a href="/metamask">chain id, RPC and the one-click button</a>. The miner software takes an optional 1% fee, off with one flag; the protocol carries no fee to anyone.</p>
<h3>Fair launch, announced</h3>
<p>Launch date and miner software published a month ahead. Pools live on testnet. HiveOS support on day one. The founders mine from genesis like everyone else, with disclosed addresses and the same software. Nobody has coins before block one. The first 30 days of mainnet run on proof of work alone, with no locked checkpoint, while vote weights build; anyone crediting deposits in that month should treat Igneum as plain proof of work with a 12-hour depth.</p>
<p>Launch date and miner software published a month ahead. Pools live before launch. HiveOS support on day one. The founders mine from genesis like everyone else, with disclosed addresses and the same software. Nobody has coins before block one. The first 30 days of mainnet run on proof of work alone, with no locked checkpoint, while vote weights build; anyone crediting deposits in that month should treat Igneum as plain proof of work with a 12-hour depth.</p>
</section>
<section id="ember">
@ -682,12 +697,12 @@ body.all .pager{display:none}
<tr><td>1. Compiler race every hour</td><td>At every hourly program the worker compiles up to 17 variants of the kernel (unroll, load path, register budget, threads per block), checks each bit for bit against the base kernel, times each for 2 s with mining paused, and keeps the fastest for the hour. The hash output is bit for bit the same</td><td>Shipped in the Metal and CUDA workers</td><td>+17.3% on the genesis seed and +21.2% on the hourly seed, Apple M5 Max, Metal, 14 variants, under load, ratios only. The RTX 5090 race is built and not yet run</td></tr>
<tr><td>2. Per-card auto-tune from the fleet</td><td>Every race writes a record to the fleet log. The best variant per card model is aggregated and sent back to every machine inside the signed update manifest, so a new card starts from the fleet's best and keeps racing</td><td>Shipped. The fleet is small, so no table yet</td><td>No fleet table yet</td></tr>
<tr><td>3. Hash per watt</td><td>Steps an NVIDIA card's power cap from 100% to 50% of its default in 10% steps, holds each for 60 s, and keeps the best MH per watt. The tile shows live MH per watt. The sweep never restarts the worker, so the hour's program is never lost</td><td>In the app for NVIDIA cards. AMD and Apple: not supported</td><td>The first sweep on a card is pending. The RTX 5090 drew 290 W at p95 under a 460 W cap, so the cap did not bind</td></tr>
<tr><td>4. Template latency</td><td>The miner subscribes to new templates instead of polling, the node builds the next template ahead, and the workers switch without draining the batch. Target under 50 ms from a new block to the card working on it, solo against the local node</td><td>In 0.3.6</td><td>Switched p50 46 to 52 ms, p90 118 to 130 ms, 3-node fast-time network, CPU miners, 0 rejected</td></tr>
<tr><td>5. Never lose a second</td><td>The next hour's program is compiled ahead and swapped in place. The watchdog, the restarts, the CPU re-check of every found hash and per-worker health on every tile keep the card hashing</td><td>Shipped</td><td>Swap 0.01 ms on the Mac and 0.00 ms on the RTX 5090, 0 rejected, live devnet. Fake-worker guards: trip 0.0 s, worker back in 2.0 s; a silent worker restarted at 60 s</td></tr>
<tr><td>4. Template latency</td><td>The miner subscribes to new templates instead of polling, the node builds the next template ahead, and the workers switch without draining the batch. Target under 50 ms from a new block to the card working on it, solo against the local node</td><td>Shipped</td><td>Switched p50 46 to 52 ms, p90 118 to 130 ms, 3-node fast-time network, CPU miners, 0 rejected</td></tr>
<tr><td>5. Never lose a second</td><td>The next hour's program is compiled ahead and swapped in place. The watchdog, the restarts, the CPU re-check of every found hash and per-worker health on every tile keep the card hashing</td><td>Shipped</td><td>Swap 0.01 ms on the Mac and 0.00 ms on the RTX 5090, 0 rejected, mining live. Fake-worker guards: trip 0.0 s, worker back in 2.0 s; a silent worker restarted at 60 s</td></tr>
<tr><td>6. Prove it in public</td><td>Every measured rate, with the card, the miner version, the date and the log entry it came from, on one page</td><td>Live</td><td><a href="/miners">The bench table</a></td></tr>
</tbody>
</table></div>
<p class="src"><b>Measured:</b> engineering log, "miner performance: variant racing" (lever 1), "first hourly program swap on the live devnet" and "miner fault guards and the app watchdog" (lever 5), 4 October 2026; the 0.3.6 release plan, the miner-latency gate (lever 4), 5 October 2026; the efficiency-sweep plan, the RTX 5090 log of 4 October 2026 (lever 3). Levers 2 and 3 are shipped code with no fleet measurement yet.</p>
<p class="src"><b>Measured:</b> engineering log, "miner performance: variant racing" (lever 1), "first hourly program swap" and "miner fault guards and the app watchdog" (lever 5), 4 October 2026; the miner-latency gate (lever 4), 5 October 2026; the efficiency-sweep plan, the RTX 5090 log of 4 October 2026 (lever 3). Levers 2 and 3 are shipped code with no fleet measurement yet.</p>
<h3>The software's fee, not the protocol's</h3>
<p>The protocol is fee-free: no dev fund, no fee to any team, foundation or fund. Ember takes a 1% software dev fee, the norm for GPU miners: default-on, switchable, 1 percent of the producer share (the 80% of emission that pays the block's miner; the proving pool is paid per record and carries none of it). One block template in 100 is requested with the dev address instead of yours, by a counter, never a random draw, so it is exactly 1 in 100 and anyone can check it from the source or from the chain. A fee block still carries your vote key, so it still adds to your finality weight. Ember prints the fee and the address when it starts, shows it in Settings next to a switch, and <code>--dev-fee 0</code> turns it off, as does <code>DEV_FEE=0</code> in a HiveOS flight sheet. Any other client is welcome.</p>
<p class="src"><b>Measured:</b> engineering log, "the software dev fee measured on a test network", 4 October 2026: 9 fee blocks in 785 from two fee-paying miners, 0 from the control at <code>--dev-fee 0</code>, the chain and the miners' counters equal.</p>
@ -718,17 +733,17 @@ body.all .pager{display:none}
<tr><td>Next</td><td>Touch ID and Windows Hello to unlock. In progress, not live. Windows build: next</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table></div>
<p class="src"><b>Source:</b> Igneum Wallet 0.1.1, 5 October 2026, now 0.1.5 on the downloads host (the wallet source: the vault, HD key, finality, QR and updater modules and the README). Verified: the over-the-air path end to end on one Mac against a test manifest. Not yet run: the Windows path, the rollback paths, a Developer ID signature.</p>
<p class="src"><b>Source:</b> Igneum Wallet, first shipped 5 October 2026, on the downloads host (the wallet source: the vault, HD key, finality, QR and updater modules and the README). Verified: the over-the-air path end to end on one Mac against a test manifest. Not yet run: the Windows path, the rollback paths, a Developer ID signature.</p>
</section>
<section id="governance">
<h2>Governance</h2>
<p>Igneum is governed by the hashrate that powers it. Pools carry their hashers' votes, so pool concentration is the governance risk, and it is public: on the devnet the top three vote keys held 34.5% of 8,090 blocks on 4 October 2026, measured.</p>
<p>Igneum is governed by the hashrate that powers it. Today, as built, pools carry their hashers' votes, so pool concentration is the governance risk, and it is public: on the devnet the top three vote keys held 34.5% of 8,090 blocks on 4 October 2026, measured.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Nothing needs a scheduled upgrade.</strong> The mining program, the dataset and the finality rules run themselves for ever. If the community ever ships an improvement, a better proof system or a block-rate step, it is published with test vectors at least three months ahead and activates only when 90% of blocks signal readiness. Developers can write code. Only miners can turn it on.</li>
<li><strong>Miners set what genesis leaves open.</strong> 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. There is no fund to vote on and no fee to any team, foundation or fund.</li>
<li><strong>Pools can be bypassed on transaction choice.</strong> Igneum ships Stratum v2 job declaration from day one, so a miner chooses its own transactions when its pool supports it. Pools can decline, and vote keys stay with the pool. Designed: the pool protocol is specification section 9, not yet run by any pool.</li>
<li><strong>There are no admin keys in consensus.</strong> Nothing in consensus can be paused, upgraded or reversed by any key. There is no foundation allocation to vote with and no stake to buy. The genesis apps are contracts, and each publishes its own upgrade and key policy before launch; the bridge's is the one to read. Designed, open item O-5.4. On the devnet the activation heights and one execution-state restart (6 October 2026) reach every node through the signed update manifest, so on the devnet the release key acts as the operator; the sentence above holds for mainnet consensus only once that path is closed, and the public testnet terms will say which parameters still travel that way.</li>
<li><strong>Pools can be bypassed on transaction choice.</strong> Igneum ships Stratum v2 job declaration from day one, so a miner chooses its own transactions when its pool supports it. Pools can decline. Designed: the pool protocol is specification section 9, not yet run by any pool. Vote keys stay with the miner at protocol level: the member's retained voting key is committed into its work, payment aggregation is separate and verifiable, and pool identity substitution is resisted (a pin of Igneum 2.0, pools and participation; not yet shipped).</li>
<li><strong>There are no admin keys in consensus.</strong> Nothing in consensus can be paused, upgraded or reversed by any key. There is no foundation allocation to vote with and no stake to buy. The genesis apps are contracts, and each publishes its own upgrade and key policy before launch; the bridge's is the one to read. Designed, open item O-5.4. On the devnet the activation heights and one execution-state restart (6 October 2026) reach every node through the signed update manifest, so on the devnet the release key acts as the operator; the sentence above holds for mainnet consensus only once that path is closed, and the network's terms will say which parameters still travel that way.</li>
<li><strong>The chain runs without its founders.</strong> Blocks, proofs and finality need no one. A second independent node client is the first priority after launch, and anyone can build it.</li>
</ul>
</section>
@ -741,35 +756,21 @@ body.all .pager{display:none}
<tbody>
<tr><td>1. Specification</td><td class="num">Under way; closes when the specification is out for external review</td><td>Mining generator, shard proving, finality rules, written for external review</td><td></td></tr>
<tr><td>2. Prove the proving</td><td class="num">Under way; closes at its gate</td><td>Mining program prototype on GPU and CPU, shard proving benchmark on consumer cards. So far: an RTX 5090 proves a shard in 10.9 s compressed; a CPU verifies a warp in 0.61 ms (class v2) to 2.1 ms (class v3). A mid-range card has not been measured</td><td>A mid-range GPU proves a shard in under 20 s and a CPU verifies a hash in 10 ms</td></tr>
<tr><td>3. Devnet</td><td class="num">Devnet 3 live since 7 October 2026; closes at its gate</td><td>BlockDAG node with the new mining program and EVM execution. Live now on Devnet 3, every upgrade on from block zero: class v4, the era VDF, difficulty v2, finality v3 (first lock 20:02 UK, 7 October 2026), proving v0 and v1, the ladder at rung 0, calibrated fees, Ember 0.3.22 on every machine. Measured on the first devnet on 6 October 2026: proofs landed a median of about 380 s behind the tip (the observer, /live), against the 60 s gate; Devnet 3's proof lag and proven share are read from the observer as the fleet publishes them</td><td>1 block a second held with proofs under 60 s behind the tip</td></tr>
<tr><td>4. Finality and job market</td><td class="num">Closes when the finality design passes external review and one rollup signs for the testnet</td><td>Sustained-mining finality, external proving jobs, miner client with auto-switching</td><td>Finality design passes external review and one rollup signs for testnet</td></tr>
<tr><td>5. Public testnet</td><td class="num">Armed: opens on the go word</td><td>One-click miner app on Windows, macOS and Linux, HiveOS, pools, the first rollup as a proving customer, no coin yet</td><td>1,000 independent miners run 30 days and rollup proofs are delivered on time</td></tr>
<tr><td>6. Mainnet fair launch</td><td class="num">After the testnet has passed its gate: 1,000 independent miners for 30 days and rollup proofs on time</td><td>Genesis with no premine, 30-day ramp. No listing is arranged, promised or sought by the project</td><td></td></tr>
<tr><td>3. Devnet</td><td class="num">Under way; closes at its gate</td><td>BlockDAG node with the new mining program and EVM execution, every upgrade on from block zero: class v4, the era VDF, difficulty v2, finality v3, proving v0 and v1, the ladder at rung 0, calibrated fees, Ember on every machine. The devnet's proof lag and proven share are read from the observer as the fleet publishes them</td><td>1 block a second held with proofs under 60 s behind the tip</td></tr>
<tr><td>4. Finality and job market</td><td class="num">Closes when the finality design passes external review and one external customer pays for repeat proving jobs</td><td>Sustained-mining finality, external proving jobs, miner client with auto-switching</td><td>Finality design passes external review and one external customer pays for repeat jobs of its exact workload</td></tr>
<tr><td>5. No-rescue network exercise</td><td class="num">Open; starts once proof verification is enforced in consensus</td><td>No founder-operated mining, proving, aggregation or distribution. Epoch boundaries crossed, signing interrupted, the network partitioned, major operators removed, hostile proof submissions, independently written clients, a withholding prover replaced. One-click miner, HiveOS, pools, no coin yet</td><td>Specified behaviour with no emergency algorithm change and no privileged intervention; 1,000 independent miners run 30 days</td></tr>
<tr><td>6. Mainnet fair launch</td><td class="num">After phase 5 has passed its gate</td><td>Genesis with no premine, 30-day ramp. No listing is arranged, promised or sought by the project</td><td></td></tr>
</tbody>
</table></div>
<p>Dates slip. Gates do not. Phase two decides everything. If consumer GPUs cannot prove shards fast enough, Igneum says so and does not launch on promises.</p>
<h3>The 0.3.6 release plan, 5 October 2026</h3>
<p>The proving activation of 5 October 2026 set the next release. The table is the plan as written; Ember has since reached 0.3.22 (7 October 2026), and each item's state is in the engineering log.</p>
<div class="tbl"><table>
<thead><tr><th>Item</th><th>Why</th></tr></thead>
<tbody>
<tr><td>Ember's node runs the proof verifier</td><td>On 5 October no node on the network ran one, so a producer stored proofs and never paid them. The app now points its node at the shipped prover host</td></tr>
<tr><td>The Windows package ships the prover host</td><td>A PC needed a 20-minute setup by hand before it could prove</td></tr>
<tr><td>The proving tile shows the verifier state</td><td>A node that relays proofs but never pays them says so, on the tile and on the live page</td></tr>
<tr><td>Template latency</td><td>Lever 4 above: subscribe, pre-warm, switch without draining. Switched p50 46 to 52 ms on the gate run</td></tr>
<tr><td>Instant jobs</td><td>A job published to the fleet reached a machine up to 10 minutes later. The app now holds an outbound connection and fetches the moment a job is published, 3 to 6 s expected, not yet measured</td></tr>
<tr><td>Testnet parameters behind a height switch</td><td>The testnet identity and the fee floors adopted on 5 October 2026, so the devnet is never forked by a node update</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table></div>
<p class="src"><b>Source:</b> the 0.3.6 release plan, 5 October 2026. The latency number is the plan's gate run on a 3-node fast-time network with CPU miners; the instant-jobs latency is an estimate until the first measured row.</p>
</section>
<section id="miners-ask">
<h2>Questions miners ask</h2>
<h3>Kaspa was GPU-mined too, and IceRiver shipped a chip within two years.</h3>
<p>Kaspa never promised chip resistance, and its hash was one fixed function, simple enough to put on silicon. Igneum's program is different every hour, its dataset grows past any fixed memory, and its program space widens every era, with no human involved. The public benchmark with a leaderboard ships with the public testnet, and its source is public with the repository then, so you run it on your own card and post the number. The in-house adversarial pass and the public benchmark are where a chip design that beats a GPU by more than 2x would show. And if a chip ever appears, miners are the ones who signal the response.</p>
<p>Kaspa never promised chip resistance, and its hash was one fixed function, simple enough to put on silicon. Igneum does not claim a chip cannot be built. It assumes one exists and scores it: the chip model states the energy advantage, the economic advantage and the response capability separately. The public benchmark with a leaderboard is owed work, and so is the comparison against operating GPU networks: Ravencoin's KAWPOW, Ergo and Firo's reference miner. No result exists yet. The in-house adversarial pass and the public benchmark are where a stronger chip design would show. And if a chip ever appears, miners are the ones who signal the response.</p>
<h3>Don't ASICs make a chain safer?</h3>
<p>Three parts. First, what the chain asks hash to do. Hash picks who makes the next block. It does not protect history. A checkpoint locks when signatures reach two thirds of the weight of the last 30 days of blocks (specification section 3). A locked checkpoint is never reorganised by any amount of hash: fork choice runs among the tips that pass through every certified checkpoint. Rented hash has no weight today. It can mine blocks. It cannot rewrite anything older than a lock. A renter with 60% of the network holds 0.0% of the vote on day one (the finality simulator, table B); one matching the whole honest network reaches a third of the weight on day 20 and never two thirds. The lock is fast: median 1,018 ms behind the checkpoint on the three-node test network (engineering log, the finality harness), and on the live devnet the first lock came two hours after genesis, once the window was full. Reorganisations under the lock are shallow: at 1, 2 and 5 blocks a second the deepest honest reorganisation measured was 2, 3 and 7 blocks against a determination depth of 20 (ledger F7, round 2, the fast-time network with 100-ms links); across five continents blocks reached every node at p50 343 ms and p99 666 ms (the 12-node cloud network, 4 October 2026).</p>
<p>Three parts. First, what the chain asks hash to do. Hash picks who makes the next block. It does not protect history. A checkpoint locks when signatures reach two thirds of the weight of the last 30 days of blocks (specification section 3). A locked checkpoint is never reorganised by any amount of hash: fork choice runs among the tips that pass through every certified checkpoint. Rented hash has no weight today. It can mine blocks. It cannot rewrite anything older than a lock. A renter with 60% of the network holds 0.0% of the vote on day one (the finality simulator, table B); one matching the whole honest network reaches a third of the weight on day 20 and never two thirds. The lock is fast: median 1,018 ms behind the checkpoint on the three-node test network (engineering log, the finality harness), and with a two-hour window the first lock came two hours after genesis, once the window was full. Reorganisations under the lock are shallow: at 1, 2 and 5 blocks a second the deepest honest reorganisation measured was 2, 3 and 7 blocks against a determination depth of 20 (ledger F7, round 2, the fast-time network with 100-ms links); across five continents blocks reached every node at p50 343 ms and p99 666 ms (the 12-node cloud network, 4 October 2026).</p>
<p>Second, the cost the ASIC argument skips. Kaspa's hash went to a handful of chip owners within months: the IceRiver KS0 shipped in July 2023, 17 to 20 months after launch; hashrate went from under 100 PH/s to over 700 PH/s in months and the GPU share was negligible by late 2023 (the ASIC history, row 23, approximate for the share). Bitcoin's hash comes from two manufacturers and a few pools (approximate, from memory). The first chip's owner mines in secret with an edge for months: on Monero, 85% of the hashrate vanished at the April 2018 fork, and chips were found at over 85% again four months after the next fork (row 16). A chip does not add security to a chain; it moves the chain's security to whoever owns the chip first.</p>
<p>Third, the honest part. A young GPU chain's hash is cheap to rent, and we publish the number beside the chain's own. The locks are what make that rental unable to buy a double-spend: a deposit under a lock stays, whatever the renter mines on top. Ethereum Classic (January 2019 and August 2020), Bitcoin Gold (May 2018 and January 2020) and Vertcoin (October to December 2018, December 2019) were reorganised with rented hash (the ASIC history rows 6 and 7 for Bitcoin Gold and Vertcoin; the Ethereum Classic dates approximate, from memory); Verge's 2018 reorganisations used a timestamp flaw in its multi-algorithm rule as well as hash (approximate). On those chains the rented hash rewrote history because nothing but hash held it. Here the same rental mines blocks for its hour and leaves the locks where they were. The exception is stated above: in the first 30 days of mainnet no checkpoint locks, the chain is plain proof of work with a 12-hour depth, and a rental can reorganise inside that depth; anyone crediting deposits in that month treats it so.</p>
<div class="tbl"><table>
@ -786,9 +787,9 @@ body.all .pager{display:none}
<p>Correct, and it is the first thing the external review will be paid to break. The specification is public; reviewers will be named and paid before gate 3, and the public benchmark carries the metrics they test against. Until then every finality claim here is a design claim backed by simulations and by the devnet, and the chain runs on plain GHOSTDAG without the rule, so it can be fixed without stopping the chain.</p>
<h3>Who are you?</h3>
<p>One founder, pseudonymous, working with AI systems. The design, the hostile reviews, the code, the simulators and this document were produced that way, and the commit history says so. The software is shipped by Igneum Labs LTD, Unit IH-00-01-01-OF-01, Level 01, Innovation One, Dubai International Financial Centre. The design remains the work of one founder working with AI systems, reviewed in public through the ledger. What that does and does not mean: the measurements are measurements, reproducible from the commands in the engineering log; the simulators are code anyone can run; the design claims stay design claims until people with names have tried to break them. Every criticism the project expects is kept in a ledger with its honest answer, and the entries that were right are marked conceded; the ledger is public at /ledger. No cryptographer is hired yet; the plan budgets one for phases 1 and 2, and external reviewers are named and paid before gate 3.</p>
<p>The founders mine from genesis with disclosed addresses and the same software as everyone else, and hold no coins before block one. The team is pseudonymous and there is no team page. The mining addresses are published at the public testnet; the code history is published with the repository.</p>
<p>The founders mine from genesis with disclosed addresses and the same software as everyone else, and hold no coins before block one. The team is pseudonymous and there is no team page. The mining addresses are published before launch; the code history is published with the repository.</p>
<h3>Where is the miner?</h3>
<p>On the devnet now. Igneum Ember runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, a HiveOS package exists, and the devnet's coins have no value. The public benchmark with a leaderboard ships with the public testnet. Pools come with it. The public testnet is armed: three seed nodes and the public RPC are up, and it opens on the go word. All of it before any coin exists. Nothing is asked of a miner before they can run something. The <a href="#ember">Ember section</a> says what is shipped and what is still owed.</p>
<p>On the devnet now. Igneum Ember runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, a HiveOS package exists, and the devnet's coins have no value. The public benchmark with a leaderboard and the pools are owed before launch. All of it before any coin exists. Nothing is asked of a miner before they can run something. The <a href="#ember">Ember section</a> says what is shipped and what is still owed.</p>
<h3>Will my card still pay in a bear market?</h3>
<p>Block reward and in-chain proving move with the price. Proving for other chains is priced in the customer's money, and it is a small market today. What Igneum can promise is that its miners' electricity cost in that market is close to power, because the card is already running on domestic power; the price they must charge is the subsidy they forgo, which falls as one over network hash. That is an edge over data-centre provers at scale and nothing more.</p>
</section>
@ -800,7 +801,7 @@ body.all .pager{display:none}
<h3>What does a one-minute proof mean for my app?</h3>
<p>Nothing you wait for. Your transaction executes in about a second. A miner lock arrives in about two minutes and that is the finality your contract sees. The proof follows and makes the state unforgeable. Liquidations and trades act on executed state at once, as on any chain. A bridge built on Igneum waits for the lock, about two minutes.</p>
<h3>Which stablecoin, and is there liquidity?</h3>
<p>None is bridged at genesis, and no bridge is official. The project will ask Circle for native USDC during the public testnet; whether it is issued is Circle's decision. Anyone may run a bridge at their own risk until the proof bridge arrives with the consensus proof in phase two. The DEX is seeded at launch by the founders' own mined coins and by miners, and every miner is a funded wallet.</p>
<p>None is bridged at genesis, and no bridge is official. The project will ask Circle for native USDC before launch; whether it is issued is Circle's decision. Anyone may run a bridge at their own risk until the proof bridge arrives with the consensus proof in phase two. The DEX is seeded at launch by the founders' own mined coins and by miners, and every miner is a funded wallet.</p>
<h3>What do I get for being early?</h3>
<p>20% of the priority fee on every transaction that runs your code, paid to you every block, which at launch fee levels is small and stated as such above. A place in the wallet's Apps tab and the explorer from day one. First access to the proving precompile and the job market. And a user base that was not paid to arrive: the miners.</p>
<h3>How do I deploy?</h3>
@ -830,7 +831,7 @@ body.all .pager{display:none}
<p>Here are the limits, stated before anyone else states them.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>A proof in seconds.</strong> 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.</li>
<li><strong>A chip is impossible.</strong> 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). Igneum remains competitive on accessible commodity GPUs even when specialised mining hardware is assumed to exist, remain compatible and seek profit; its security does not rely on identifying that hardware or retiring it through emergency changes. Class v6 adopts the 64-register window and retains it across every rotation. Current modelling places the strongest specialised designs assessed against the GPU tier at about 2.3x to 3.3x energy-efficiency advantage a node ahead (2.0x to 2.9x on the GPU's own node), a bracket that is approximate and provisional until the placed gated core rows land. The long-program and select-tree proposals were rejected. Economic resistance depends on development cost, deployment economics and productive hardware lifetime; family transitions receive an obsolescence benefit only where a loss of competitiveness is demonstrated; programmable multi-epoch designs are included in the assessment. The labels: the bracket modelled, approximate and provisional (the GPU side measured on the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 at their core locks under class v4, 8 October 2026; the chip core synthesised on ASAP7 and scaled to N3, claimed, its placed gated row pending; its memory modelled). Class v5 makes the dataset the chain’s own state, so a chip that stores it or recomputes it is wrong on every item (designed, 7 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 (the published model, 5 October 2026: 0.92x per unit of silicon with a 3x fixed-function allowance, approximate). Sources: the class v6 close, section 10 (8 October 2026); the ASIC history’s Ethash rows; the chip model analysis (6 October 2026). No hash has stayed free of chips forever; Igneum does not claim to. Monero’s RandomX has held its miners on commodity hardware for about seven years: one chip shipped against it, Bitmain’s Antminer X5 (September 2023), an observed comparison, not a ceiling; the one announced beyond it, the Antminer X9, was withdrawn in mid-May 2026 before any unit shipped, its claimed core never measured; RandomX v2 was released on 25 March 2026 with its activation pending. 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.</li>
<li><strong>A chip is impossible.</strong> No. Igneum assumes a chip exists. 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 chip and economy analysis of 6 October 2026, section 5.4; ledger M32). Igneum remains competitive on accessible commodity GPUs even when specialised mining hardware is assumed to exist, remain compatible and seek profit; its security does not rely on identifying that hardware or retiring it through emergency changes. Class v6 adopts the 64-register window and retains it across every rotation. Current modelling places the strongest specialised designs assessed against the GPU tier at about 2.3x to 3.3x energy-efficiency advantage a node ahead (2.0x to 2.9x on the GPU's own node), a bracket that is approximate and provisional until the placed gated core rows land. The long-program and select-tree proposals were rejected. Economic resistance depends on development cost, deployment economics and productive hardware lifetime; family transitions receive an obsolescence benefit only where a loss of competitiveness is demonstrated; programmable multi-epoch designs are included in the assessment. The labels: the bracket modelled, approximate and provisional (the GPU side measured on the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 at their core locks under class v4, 8 October 2026; the chip core synthesised on ASAP7 and scaled to N3, claimed, its placed gated row pending; its memory modelled). Class v5 makes the dataset the chain’s own state, so a chip that stores it or recomputes it is wrong on every item (designed, 7 October 2026; under evaluation (Deliverable 3), not counted as a defence until justified or dropped). The strongest recompute chip we can price, holding the whole 256 MiB cache on-die, reaches under 1x per chip against an RTX 5090 (the published model, 5 October 2026: 0.92x per unit of silicon with a 3x fixed-function allowance, approximate). Sources: the class v6 close, section 10 (8 October 2026); the ASIC history’s Ethash rows; the chip model analysis (6 October 2026). No hash has stayed free of chips forever; Igneum does not claim to. Monero’s RandomX has held its miners on commodity hardware for about seven years: one chip shipped against it, Bitmain’s Antminer X5 (September 2023), an observed comparison, not a ceiling; the one announced beyond it, the Antminer X9, was withdrawn in mid-May 2026 before any unit shipped, its claimed core never measured; RandomX v2 was released on 25 March 2026 with its activation pending. 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.</li>
<li><strong>A guaranteed income floor.</strong> 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.</li>
<li><strong>A memory-hard prototype on every vendor.</strong> 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.</li>
<li><strong>Finality in the first month.</strong> 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.</li>
@ -838,9 +839,13 @@ body.all .pager{display:none}
<li><strong>Finality that no amount of hardware can break.</strong> No. A miner holding a third of the last 30 days of blocks can split finality during a network partition, and two thirds can lock a bad checkpoint for a double-spend bounded by the 12-hour finality depth. Reaching a third takes at least ten days of producing every block on the chain, in public; an attacker matching the honest network needs twenty days for a third and never reaches two thirds. That is harder than attacking Bitcoin, where a majority can reorganise at once, and it is the limit of proof of work without stake or an outside chain. Igneum chose those limits on purpose. The floor is also bounded in time: an honest partition that lasts long enough for each side's own new blocks to reach two thirds of its window locks on both sides, about ten days of a 30-day window at an even split, and an operator must then resolve it (measured on a test network, 4 October 2026).</li>
<li><strong>Finality that never pauses.</strong> No. A lock needs two thirds of all 30-day mining weight. Whenever less than two thirds of that weight is connected and signing, finality pauses until it returns or ages out of the window, up to 30 days. The chain keeps running on proof of work and the node reports the pause.</li>
<li><strong>A label that costs nothing.</strong> No. Some investors and exchanges read "GPU-mined" as 2021 whatever the proofs do, and nothing here measures that cost. The only evidence will be whether the first miner apps and verifiable-compute apps sign despite the label.</li>
<li><strong>A chain you can debug today.</strong> Not yet. The node does not serve debug_traceTransaction, eth_subscribe or eth_getProof, and there is no public RPC, faucet or explorer for the devnet. They come in a fixed order (docs and templates, then the tracing and subscription RPCs, then a public RPC, listing and faucet, then the explorer) and no outside team is invited to build before the second step is done.</li>
<li><strong>A chain you can debug today.</strong> Not yet. The node does not serve debug_traceTransaction, eth_subscribe or eth_getProof. The explorer, the faucet and the reference apps run on the devnet; the tracing and subscription RPCs are still owed.</li>
<li><strong>A veto on job results.</strong> No. A segment proof is checked against every node's own execution; a proving job for another chain is not, because no full node can re-run an arbitrary program, so a soundness bug in the proof system in force reaches the requesting contract. A job output can mint nothing and touch no system contract, and an app that acts irreversibly on a job result keeps its own fallback.</li>
<li><strong>A delay function that outlives a quantum computer.</strong> No. The class-group delay between a locked checkpoint and the next program seed falls to the same machine that would forge the vote keys; it is flagged in the specification, not yet sized, and the fallback is a hash-chain delay behind the same version byte that moves the signature scheme, so both flip in one class change. A grindable hourly seed is a liveness nuisance against the lottery, not a break of finality.</li>
<li><strong>Proof verification in consensus.</strong> Not yet. Today, under proving v0, every producer verifies off the consensus path, and consensus checks the record's statement against native execution. Enforcement in consensus (verifier_in_consensus, proof_rule_active_from) is Open, and it is the prerequisite of the no-rescue network exercise (Deliverable 5) and of the proving economy being a protocol guarantee.</li>
<li><strong>Proving on every card.</strong> No. NVIDIA proves; AMD and Apple mine. The proving stack is judged on the full pipeline: inputs, proving, aggregation, verification, payment, memory and the mining income forgone.</li>
<li><strong>What proofs do not give.</strong> Proven execution is not finality. EVM compatibility is not Ethereum security. ZK is not privacy.</li>
<li><strong>A ranking.</strong> No. Igneum makes no leading or number-one claim. Benchmarks against Ravencoin's KAWPOW, Ergo and Firo's reference miner are owed work; no result exists yet.</li>
<li><strong>A finished protocol.</strong> The sustained-mining finality rule is the newest piece and the one that external review will try hardest to break. The specification, the review and the benchmarks are published as they happen.</li>
</ul>
<p>Everything in this document is subject to the gates on the roadmap. Nothing in it is an offer to sell anything. Found an error, or a criticism this document does not answer? Email <a href="mailto:hello@igneum.network">hello@igneum.network</a>, or open an issue on the public specification repository: <a href="https://git.igneum.network/igneum-network/spec/issues" rel="noopener">git.igneum.network/igneum-network/spec/issues</a>. Post reaches Igneum Labs LTD, Unit IH-00-01-01-OF-01, Level 01, Innovation One, Dubai International Financial Centre.</p>

6
site/randomx.html
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@ -250,15 +250,15 @@
<tbody>
<tr><td>Hardware it is built for</td><td>CPUs. GPUs run it badly on purpose</td><td>GPUs. Any card, any vendor. Bit-exact on Apple, NVIDIA and AMD, measured</td></tr>
<tr><td>Random program</td><td>Per hash, interpreted in a virtual machine</td><td>Per hour, compiled to native GPU code. Per hash, the 128 dataset addresses change with the nonce</td></tr>
<tr><td>Dataset</td><td>About 2 GB, the same size since 2019, approximate</td><td>2 GB, growing (the proposed schedule, fixed at the testnet genesis: 2 GB, doubling at years 4, 12 and 28); a 4 GB card mines about four years, an 8 GB card about twelve, approximate</td></tr>
<tr><td>Dataset</td><td>About 2 GB, the same size since 2019, approximate</td><td>2 GB, growing (the proposed schedule, fixed at genesis: 2 GB, doubling at years 4, 12 and 28); a 4 GB card mines about four years, an 8 GB card about twelve, approximate</td></tr>
<tr><td>Light verification</td><td>256 MB cache on a CPU, milliseconds</td><td>256 MB cache on a CPU (512 MB from year 4), one warp under 10 ms, the gate. Measured 2.1 ms on one Apple M5 Max core for class v3 (3.4x class v2's 0.61 ms); a 2019-class core not yet</td></tr>
<tr><td>Changes over time</td><td>None. A fixed design, unchanged for seven years</td><td>A new program every hour, its memory pattern with it; era draws and reserved families on a schedule fixed at genesis. Nobody touches it</td></tr>
<tr><td>Seed grinding</td><td>Not applicable, the program comes from the hash input</td><td>Closed by a verifiable delay between seed and program</td></tr>
<tr><td>Useful work</td><td>None. Hashing only</td><td>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</td></tr>
<tr><td>Useful work</td><td>None. Hashing only</td><td>NVIDIA cards prove: from 8 GB on the patched server, 12 GB and up beside the miner, 24 GB on the stock server (measured on eleven rented cards, RTX 3060 to RTX 5090, 6 October 2026). Selling proofs to other chains is Designed, not built. AMD and Apple cards mine and do not prove; a prover for them lands when a zkVM ships one</td></tr>
<tr><td>Track record</td><td>About seven years with one shipped chip, Bitmain’s Antminer X5 (September 2023), at 1.46x per joule over a desktop CPU; the one announced beyond it, Bitmain’s Antminer X9, was withdrawn in May 2026 with zero units; RandomX v2 released 25 March 2026, activation pending</td><td>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 (git.igneum.network/igneum-network/spec). The node, the miner and the wallet follow to the same host as the repository is published</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table></div>
<p>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.</p></div>
<p>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 a live network 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.</p></div>
<div class="onward"><a href="/litepaper#mining" class="btn">How mining works</a><a href="/litepaper#chip-model" class="btn">The chip model</a><a href="/provenance" class="btn">Built on the shoulders</a></div>
</div>
</section>

2
tools/ci/ledger-text-check.mjs
View file

@ -17,10 +17,8 @@ const REQUIRED = {
['X35', 'its security does not rely on identifying that hardware or retiring it through emergency changes'],
],
'litepaper.html': [
['X3', 'Live rows arrive with the public testnet.'],
['G4', 'admin keys in consensus'],
['X8', 'No listing is arranged, promised or sought by the project'],
['X31', 'The public testnet is armed: three seed nodes and the public RPC are up, and it opens on the go word.'],
['C2', 'Monero has run on RandomX since November 2019'],
['X34', 'was withdrawn in mid-May 2026 before any unit shipped; RandomX 2.0 shipped on 25 March 2026'],
['X36', 'Bitmain opened Antminer X9 pre-orders on 26 December 2025 for July 2026 delivery, then withdrew the product in mid-May 2026 and refunded buyers before any unit shipped; none has been independently benchmarked.'],