What Igneum does not claim.

Here are the limits, stated before anyone else states them.

• A proof in seconds. Not at launch. Proving a full block today needs a cluster of 100 to 200 consumer GPUs, approximate, so Igneum launches with proofs within about a minute and tightens as hardware improves. Users still see their transaction land in one second.
• A chip is impossible. No. A chip wired for one program is a bad bet, because the program moves before it ships. A programmable chip is not stopped by the moving target: everything it needs is public at genesis and every drawn parameter is firmware to it (an address permute, a rotator, an immediate table), so the defence against it is the latency-shadow work (class v4) and the price per joule, not the schedule (the Horizon lane analysis, 6 October 2026, section 5.4; ledger M32). The published model (5 October 2026) prices the strongest chip we can name, one with the whole cache on-die computing dataset items on the fly, at 0.92x the hash rate of an RTX 5090 per unit of silicon with a 3x fixed-function allowance, approximate. The same model, drawn out to the chip that stores the dataset (6 October 2026): The strongest recompute chip we can price, holding the whole 256 MiB cache on-die, reaches under 1x per chip against an RTX 5090. A memory-controller chip that stores the whole dataset reaches 1.2x per chip and, in our model, 5x to 9x per joule; the Ethash chips of this class reached 2.1x to 4.8x. The lever against it, program work in the latency shadow, is measured and in its gates: it brings the chip to 2.1x to 3.9x, the range running from a chip core as costly per operation as the GPU’s (k = 1) to the core Bitmain claimed for its withdrawn Antminer X9 (k about 0.33, never measured); the ladder’s second rung takes that bracket to about 2.8x. Sources: the chip model analysis (6 October 2026); the Ethash rows of the ASIC history (Linzhi Phoenix 2020, Jasminer X4 2021, Antminer E9 2022); Counter ASIC 3.0 item 8 (100,000 ops per hash: the chip's per-joule edge over the RTX 5090 falls from 5.6x to 2.1x on GDDR7 at a chip core equal to the GPU's (k = 1) and to 3.9x at the X9’s claimed core (k about 0.33, never measured), the 5090 at 0.2% less rate, gates G1 to G6 in progress). No hash has stayed free of chips forever; Igneum does not claim to. Monero’s RandomX has held for about seven years; the one chip announced against it, Bitmain’s Antminer X9, was withdrawn in mid-May 2026 before any unit shipped, its claimed core (k about 0.33) never measured. That record says nothing about the price of a chip with the 256 MB cache on its die; that price is a cost model, not a measurement.
• A guaranteed income floor. No. External proving is a small market today. Igneum's miners' electricity cost in it is close to power, but the price they must charge is the subsidy they forgo, which falls as one over network hash: an edge at scale and nothing more.
• A memory-hard prototype on every vendor. Not yet. The 256 MB cache closed the shortcut on Apple silicon (computing items runs 4.8x slower than loading them, measured 3 October 2026). The same ratio on NVIDIA and on a discrete AMD card is Open.
• Finality in the first month. No. No checkpoint locks until the 30-day window has 30 days of history. The first month of mainnet is proof of work with a 12-hour depth, and the text above says so wherever a day count appears.
• A cryptography team. Not yet. One founder working with AI systems wrote the design and the code; external reviewers are named and paid before gate 3, and every security claim here is a design claim until then.
• Finality that no amount of hardware can break. 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).
• Finality that never pauses. 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.
• A finished protocol. 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.

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 hello@igneum.network, or open an issue on the public specification repository: github.com/igneum-network/spec/issues. Post reaches Igneum Labs LTD, Unit IH-00-01-01-OF-01, Level 01, Innovation One, Dubai International Financial Centre.