igneum/docs/commercial/prover-customer-brief.md

Igneum proving: brief for a first customer at testnet

Version 0.1, 3 October 2026. For a rollup or bridge team considering Igneum as a proving supplier. One page. Everything below is subject to the gates on the public roadmap, and nothing in it is an offer to sell anything.

What Igneum is

A proof-of-work chain mined on consumer GPUs, where the same cards prove every Igneum block with zero-knowledge proofs and take proving jobs from other chains. The miners are the provers. At public testnet they are a network of independent GPU owners, 1,000 of them by the testnet gate, already paid by the chain to keep their cards on, so external jobs are marginal work for them.

What you get

Item	What it is	Status today
Proofs for your chain	Your batches or blocks proven by Igneum's GPU prover network and returned to the address you name	Designed. No shard has been proven on a card yet
Price in dollars	Jobs are priced in dollars per proof, at or above the subsidy the prover forgoes while it proves, which is a formula with network hash as the input, never a fixed number: per shard, (card hash ÷ network hash) × 0.8 × 31.688 IGN × shard seconds, plus electricity (under a cent per billion cycles on every card). The price falls as one over network hash: at the devnet's 1.16 GH/s a quote is 100 to 300x the published market rate, and a card proving beside its miner is competitive near 100 GH/s (the Horizon economy lane, docs/analysis/horizon/economy-and-utility.md sections 3.1 and 4.1, 6 October 2026; approximate beyond the one card measured; ledger E20). At launch the fee is paid on your own chain, in your currency, to a payout contract keyed by miner address, because Igneum cannot yet see your chain. Settlement in the coin follows when the proof bridge exists	Spec section 5.4
Delivery rule	A job is claimed with a bond that is slashed on a late or bad proof; a job nobody proves by its deadline expires and refunds in full. At launch your chain's own bond and slashing apply to the miner who claimed the job	Design document, execution layer, sections 5.2 and 6. Bond size and timeout are open (O-5.6)
A versioned interface	Jobs run against the ProofSystem trait, version 1 of which is SP1. A later version is a release with its own test-vector set and a three-month overlap, so your integration survives a prover swap	Design document, execution layer, section 5.6
Verification you can run	A job proof is a single proof your contract verifies on your own chain; Igneum's own segment proofs recursively verify it, so no relayer or committee is in the path	Designed

Every payment route

One row per route, so operator income and protocol income never blur. Rows 1 to 5 are the protocol. Row 6 is the project's software, outside the protocol, and is never added to the other five. Rules: specification sections 2.5 and 5.1 to 5.4; the fuller version with the diagram is docs/design/payment-routes.md.

Route	Currency	Recipient	Fee	Burn
1. Emission, per block	IGN, new coins on the published schedule	80% the block's miner, 20% the proving pool for the provers of that block	None	None. Implemented in consensus on the devnet
2. Base fee, both gas dimensions	IGN	Nobody	The base fee the chain sets per block	All of it. Implemented on the devnet
3. Priority fee	IGN	80% the block's miner and provers; 20% the apps whose code ran, per call frame	The tip the sender sets	The share of any frame in an unregistered contract. Implemented on the devnet
4. External job, at launch	Your currency, on your chain	The miner who delivered, through a payout contract keyed by miner address	Priced in dollars per proof, at or above the subsidy the prover forgoes (the formula in network hash in the "Price in dollars" row, never a fixed number); your chain's own bond and slashing apply	None; Igneum cannot see the payment. Designed
5. External job, after the proof bridge	IGN, on Igneum	90% the provers who delivered	The job fee	10%. Designed, phase two
6. The official client's dev fee	IGN	The project, as operator income, never the protocol	1 block template in 100 requested with the dev address; off with one flag	None. Implemented, measured on a test network 4 October 2026

What you must do

1. Integrate against the versioned prover interface: the guest program hash (program_id) your batches are proven under, the public-input layout, and the proof encoding for version 1.
2. Supply test vectors: at least 100 historical batches or blocks with the expected public inputs and outputs, so Igneum's provers and your verifier agree before any job carries value.
3. Name the deadline and the maximum proving budget per job (the maxPgas of the interface), and the address on your chain that receives proofs.
4. Sign for testnet. Phase 4's gate is "one rollup signs for testnet"; a signed letter of intent with no payment is what the gate asks for.

Timeline, tied to the public roadmap

Phase	When	What it means for you
2. Prove the proving	Nov 2026 to Jan 2027	The shard benchmark on consumer cards. If a mid-range GPU cannot prove a shard in under 20 s, Igneum says so and the project stops. You see the numbers, pass or fail
4. Finality and job market	Apr to Jul 2027	External proving jobs exist on the devnet. Integration work happens here. Gate: one rollup signs for testnet
5. Public testnet	Aug to Oct 2027	Your proofs delivered by the live prover network. Gate: rollup proofs delivered on time, measured and published. No coin exists yet
6. Mainnet	Nov 2027	Jobs priced in dollars, paid on your chain at first, settled in the coin once the proof bridge exists

Dates from site/journey.json. Each gate is published whether it passes or fails.

Risks, stated plainly

• Prototype prover. The devnet runs a stub that signs claims. No SP1 shard has been proven on any card in Igneum's repository yet. Phase 2 measures it.
• Testnet. Proofs at testnet come from a network that is itself being tested. Expect missed deadlines and interface changes; the version number exists for that.
• No coin value. There is no coin at testnet and nothing in this brief is a sale of one. Mainnet settlement in the coin depends on the proof bridge, which is phase two of the execution design.
• Soundness. A soundness bug in the proof system is a risk for every SP1 user, Igneum included. Igneum's own blocks carry a native-execution veto; your chain's verifier should keep whatever fallback it has today.
• Market size. Rollup proving spend is small today, low millions of dollars a year, approximate. Igneum's edge is cost, because the cards already run on domestic power. That is an edge and nothing more.

Candidate first customers

Taiko is the first target (CLAUDE.md). The rest are approximate, from memory as of the design date, and need a conversation to confirm.

Candidate	Why, in one line
Taiko	Named first target. Based rollup with a permissionless multi-proof design that already accepts SP1 proofs, so the interface is close to what exists. Approximate
Scroll	zkEVM rollup with its own prover stack and a public interest in outsourced proving capacity. Approximate
Linea	Consensys zkEVM with an in-house prover; a second supplier is a resilience story for them. Approximate
zkSync Era and ZK Stack chains	A family of chains on one prover design; one integration could serve several. Approximate
Polygon CDK and Agglayer chains	CDK chains with a type-1 prover path built on SP1, so the guest program may already match version 1. Approximate
Aztec	Rollup proving for a privacy chain; client proofs stay with users, the rollup proof is outsourceable. Approximate
OP Stack chains using OP Succinct	SP1 fault proofs on OP Stack chains are exactly the job shape Igneum's version 1 runs. Approximate
SP1 light-client bridges	Bridges built on SP1 light clients (the Helios class) need a steady proof supply at a known price. Approximate
Igra and Kasplex	EVM layers on Kaspa, the chain Igneum's node is forked from; shared tooling and a shared miner community. Approximate
Starknet	A different proof system today, so a longer road; worth one conversation about the versioned interface. Approximate

Contact

Through the repository once it is public (January 2027) or the team page at public testnet. Igneum is honest about what is measured and what is planned; ask for the bench log.