igneum/docs/plans/funding.md

Funding plan

Status 7 October 2026 (evening): the cryptanalysis row and the brief section are the INTERNAL adversarial pass, not an independent review (the project lead: nothing goes outside); no firm, price or engagement is named anywhere in this file. Status 4 October 2026: PLACEHOLDER. the project lead has parked funding for now; the figures below are estimates for planning only and nothing here is committed or funded beyond what the table states as already covered.

3 October 2026. What the project costs to build, review, run and defend, what pays for it today, what waits on revenue, and what pauses if revenue is late. Every dollar figure is approximate unless it cites a price list, and the basis is stated in the row. Nothing here is a sale of anything and no figure is a price of the coin.

1. What funds the project

Source	What it is	Status
The founder's own means	Private money and the founder's own time. The amount committed is not published and this plan does not pretend to know the ceiling	The only source today
The official client's 1% fee	The official miner client charges 1% of a miner's rewards to the operating company (litepaper, "What a miner's hour looks like"). It is a client setting, not a protocol rule; any miner can run another client and pay nothing	Zero until there is mining with value, which is mainnet (November 2027 on the roadmap); then unknown, because it is hashrate times coin price times 1% times the share of miners on the official client
The team's own mining, proving and apps	The team mines from genesis like anyone, runs provers in the job market and collects the 20% app share on contracts it deploys (spec 5.5)	Zero until mainnet; competitive, not guaranteed
Protocol treasury, protocol fee, emission share	None exists and none will (spec 5.5, 5.6)	Zero, by rule
Token sale, pre-sale, allocation, grant from a foundation	None	Zero, by rule

So until mainnet every cost below is the founder's. After mainnet the 1% fee and the team's open-market earnings join, and both depend on a chain that has not launched and a coin that has no value today.

2. The table

Columns: estimated cost with its basis; what is funded today; what depends on future revenue; what happens if revenue arrives late. "Revenue" means the 1% fee and the team's open-market earnings after mainnet, and nothing else.

Item	Estimated cost (approximate) and basis	Funded today	Depends on future revenue	If revenue is late
Development: founder and agents through mainnet (13 months)	No dollar figure: the founder's time and the agent tooling the founder already pays for. Basis: CLAUDE.md team section; docs/fud-fixes.md row 29 (method disclosed)	Founder's own means	No	Continues
Development: a contracted cryptographer for phases 1 and 2 (lottery hash soundness, VDF code against chiavdf, seed derivation; docs/fud-fixes.md row 71, O-1.4, O-4.1)	USD 80,000 to 150,000 for about six months part time. Basis: from memory of contract rates for applied cryptography, approximate	Founder's own means	No	Scope shrinks to the gate 1 review of the fair-lottery properties only; the VDF review moves to the audit row
Development: the second independent node client	Not in the 13-month plan (docs/fud-fixes.md rows 31, 47). Basis: decision pending	Not funded	Yes, entirely	Does not start
Independent review: finality rule v2 (gate 3, phase 4, the rule external review is paid to break)	USD 50,000 to 100,000. Basis: a focused review of one consensus rule plus its simulation by two reviewers over a few weeks, from memory, approximate	Founder's own means	No	Not pausable: the roadmap says the phase 4 gate is "finality design passes external review". If it cannot be paid, phase 4 does not close and the dates move
Independent audit: the node fork (consensus delta, p2p, difficulty, header validation, the pow engine) before public testnet	USD 60,000 to 120,000. Basis: the delta is listed row by row in docs/fork-divergence.md; the base is rusty-kaspa, already audited upstream, approximate	Founder's own means, second in order after the finality review	Partly: a second pass after the attack harness closes its stubs	The single pass is kept; the second pass waits. Public testnet does not open without the first pass
Cryptanalysis of the lottery hash: the mixer M_r, the chained cache and the acceptance rule, with the frozen class v4 sub-version 3 object as the target (Counter ASIC 3.0 item 3). INTERNAL ADVERSARIAL PASS, NOT AN INDEPENDENT REVIEW (the project lead's correction through main, 7 October 2026, evening: nothing goes outside, no firms, no paid lots, no briefs to anyone; the rule set is docs/plans/cryptanalysis/in-house-pass.md and the brief is the last section of this file)	No cash. Agent time the founder already pays for, plus box time on igneum-build-2: 24 box-hours for first results (three lanes, 8 each, one 32-core slot per lane), a proposed ceiling of 48 before main's word; a box-hour costs nothing beyond the box's monthly rent (docs/plans/build-server.md). The former estimate for two external reviews (USD 80,000 to 160,000, from the 2019 RandomX price points) is withdrawn and never totalled	Founder's own means (the box and the agents)	No	Nothing pauses. The only outside check is the disclosure prize (USD 50,000, approved 7 October 2026, STAGED: escrowed before it is named, the entity address on its documents, the project lead's publish word; rule 3). Testnet-1 opens with the pass's state (plans, results, bounds) on the download page, labelled internal; mainnet's gate on this item is the published internal reports plus the staged prize, never a claim of independent review
Independent audit: execution layer and proving integration (revm driver, two-dimensional gas, proof records, the veto, the ProofSystem version 1 integration) before mainnet	USD 80,000 to 150,000. Basis: an EVM-integration audit of a new client's execution path, from memory, approximate	Not funded	Yes	Mainnet moves until it is paid. Mainnet does not ship with an unaudited execution layer
Independent audit: the official client and release process (spec 08: reproducible builds, release key, update path)	USD 20,000 to 40,000. Basis: a short application security review, from memory, approximate	Not funded	Yes	The one-click app ships at testnet unaudited and says so on the download page; the audit lands before mainnet or the app does not carry the mainnet release key
Infrastructure: the 20-node cloud devnet	USD 476 per month for 20 nodes (Hetzner API prices of 3 October 2026, net, docs/plans/cloud-devnet.md); about USD 6,000 for the 13 months, plus rented GPU hours for the hourly-compile and shard measurements at USD 0.22 to 0.74 per card hour (RunPod, 3 October 2026): under USD 1,000 over phase 2	Founder's own means	No	Node count drops to 8 (two per location); the rented GPU hours are replaced by the project's own cards
Infrastructure: seed nodes, site, observer database, domains	Seed nodes USD 50 to 80 per month for three to five (docs/plans/seed-nodes.md); the site and the observer's database are on free or near-free tiers today, approximate; 15 domains at the registrar's renewal price, approximate USD 500 per year	Founder's own means	No	Three seeds not five; nothing else changes
Incident response: an on-call second engineer from public testnet, an emergency-release drill, the soundness-bug path of spec 5.7 and design 5.5 rehearsed	USD 3,000 to 6,000 per month retainer from August 2027; about USD 40,000 through the first mainnet quarter. Basis: a part-time retainer at contract rates, from memory, approximate	Not funded	Yes	The founder is the on-call engineer alone; the drill still runs, because it costs time and not money; the retainer starts when the fee pays it
Challenge reward: the chip bounty (O-1.17), paid to anyone who shows a chip design that beats a GPU by more than 2x	USD 50,000 standing. Basis: sized to pay for a credible design study with a measured operation count, not a tapeout; the amount is a decision, not a market rate	Not funded; the terms and the payer are the entity's (docs/fud-fixes.md row 50)	Yes: the bounty is announced with the January 2027 benchmark and escrowed when the entity has the money	Announced at a lower standing amount (USD 10,000) and raised when revenue allows; a bounty that cannot be paid is not announced
Challenge reward: the finality break bounty (litepaper "Questions miners ask")	USD 25,000 standing. Basis: as above	Not funded	Yes	As above
Challenge reward: the reproduction reward of docs/benchmarks/proving-e2e.md 8.1 (a fixed, equal, disclosed amount per unrelated operator)	USD 1,000 per operator per workload set, three operators, about USD 3,000 per campaign. Basis: covers electricity and a day of attention, approximate	Not funded	Yes	Reproduction is asked for without a reward; the standard allows that
Legal: counsel on the entity, the promotions question, the testnet payment terms, the no-custody structure of the job market (docs/fud-fixes.md rows 46, 58, 59)	USD 20,000 to 50,000. Basis: from memory, approximate	Founder's own means	No	Continues; it gates public text, not code

3. Totals

Bucket	Approximate total	Funded today
Development (cryptographer; founder time unpriced)	USD 80,000 to 150,000	Yes
Independent review and audits	USD 210,000 to 410,000	The finality review and the first node pass: USD 110,000 to 220,000. The execution and client audits, USD 100,000 to 190,000: no
Infrastructure	USD 8,000 to 10,000 through mainnet	Yes
Incident response	USD 40,000 through the first mainnet quarter	No
Challenge rewards	USD 78,000 standing plus USD 3,000 per campaign	No
Legal	USD 20,000 to 50,000	Yes
Total	USD 440,000 to 740,000 through the first mainnet quarter, plus standing bounties	About USD 220,000 to 430,000 funded; about USD 220,000 to 310,000 unfunded, all of it after public testnet

The unfunded half is the half that comes after the chain exists and before and just after it launches: the execution audit, the client audit, incident response and the bounties. Each row says what pauses. Two things never pause and instead move the date: the finality review (phase 4 gate) and the execution audit (mainnet). The plan is to delay rather than to launch unreviewed.

4. What the 1% fee could be, and why it is not counted

The fee is 1% of the producer share on the official client, default on and switchable: the fee template moves only the producer payout (80% of emission), and the proving pool is paid per record and carries none of it. Rewards in year one are 963 million IGN (ramp included, docs/analysis/security-budget.md), so the producer share is 770 million. At USD 0.005, 0.02 and 0.10 per IGN the fee's ceiling, with every miner on the official client, is USD 38,520, 154,080 and 770,400 a year (corrected 6 October 2026 from 48,000, 193,000 and 963,000, which took 1% of all rewards and overstated the ceiling by a quarter; the Horizon economy lane, docs/analysis/horizon/economy-and-utility.md section 4.4). Those are inputs, not expectations, and the share of miners on the official client is unknown. Nothing in section 2 is funded against them.

5. Rules

1. No item is paid from emission or from a protocol fee, because neither exists.
2. A review or audit that is paid for is published whole, pass or fail, and linked from docs/evidence.md.
3. A bounty is announced only when it is escrowed.
4. This plan is revised when a number changes; the git history of this file is the record.
5. The chip bounty's trigger is daily issuance in dollars, not a date (Counter ASIC 3.0 item 4b, 6 October 2026): the bounty is escrowed and the benchmark page is live before daily issuance crosses USD 20,000 a day. Daily issuance is blocks per day times the subsidy (spec 2.5, site/lib/emission.mjs: 3,168,808,781 sompi per DAA second in period 0, so 2,737,851 IGN a day after the 30-day ramp, 273,785 on day 0; 1,368,925 a day in period 1, years 3 and 4), times the price. The history (docs/analysis/asic-resistance-history.md section 2.5) puts the first public chip on compute-bound hashes at USD 21,000 to 31,000 of daily issuance (Kadena, Radiant, Handshake) and Vorick's 2018 rule at about USD 55,000 a day; USD 20,000 sits under the lowest observed arrival, so the escrow lands before any chain in that table got its chip. The operating entity watches the number (owed: an "issuance per day in dollars against the USD 20,000 line" row in the 08:00 daily report) and the detector (tools/observer/detector.mjs) runs from the public testnet, where issuance in dollars is zero and the clock has not started. The prices at which the line is crossed, so the number is concrete:

Daily issuance line	Period 0 (year 1 to 2, after the ramp): price per IGN	Period 1 (years 3 to 4)	Period 2 (years 5 to 6)
USD 20,000 (the rule)	USD 0.0073	USD 0.0146	USD 0.0292
USD 30,000 (the top of the compute-bound arrivals)	USD 0.0110	USD 0.0219	USD 0.0438
USD 55,000 (Vorick)	USD 0.0201	USD 0.0402	USD 0.0804

What it means per tier: nothing changes in the protocol at the line; a home miner on any card can read the live benchmark page and the bounty terms, so a chip's existence becomes something its designer is paid to disclose rather than to hide; a pool user sees the same page. If the entity cannot fund the escrow when the line approaches, rule 3 holds (nothing is announced) and the detector plus the epoch-length signal (docs/plans/epoch-length.md section 11) are the response that costs no money.

The cryptanalysis brief (Counter ASIC 3.0 item 3): the in-house adversarial pass

7 October 2026, evening, the crypto-engage lane, on the project lead's correction through main. Label on every public sentence: internal adversarial pass, not an independent review. Nothing here is commissioned, paid or mailed; nobody outside is contacted. The rule set, the lanes, the budget and the clock are docs/plans/cryptanalysis/in-house-pass.md; this section is the brief the lanes are measured against. The 6 October brief that this replaces named firms and prices; it is in this file's git history and nowhere else.

B1. The target

Piece	Value
The frozen object	igneum-pow at 017e70376489251e18564c0abce7e466e606c8b3 on ca3-v4-amend (tag audit-freeze-2026-10-07), byte-identical on master since cf7d6ccb; class v4 sub-version 3, object byte 7
The rules in it	(a') dataflow freshness to a fixpoint; the shared-operand rule in the draw; (c'') the per-site distinct-index ratio at 0.98 over 2^20 evaluations; the 256-attempt cap; the deterministic last-resort draw
The dataset	Spec 1.8: ChaCha12 cache fill in 2^16 segments of 64 chained lines (256 MiB at genesis); the ARX-multiply mixer with per-day ROT, MUL, RC drawn from a 64-bit SplitMix64 seed; m = 8, 72 applications per item, 8 dependent cache reads; 128 dataset loads per hash
The kit	packs-ca3-v4-sub3 zip sha256 4f2445c50c58d76a5544023492d8b858d0b07c5e372d31f9c90c4ce51f829154: the eight packs of proto-cuda/packs-ca3-v4/ at the frozen commit; the shared devnet's epoch-0 id a785001687d8688a; Devnet 3's epoch-0 id fce15bf61030be57 (no pack cut)
What each lane gets	The crate, the spec, the chip model (docs/analysis/chip-model-v3.md 1, 2, 5, 6), the packs, the harnesses tools/attack/f8-uniform and the F4 census, the operating scripts; nothing of the defender's (in-house-pass.md 3.2)

B2. The questions, ranked by what a break hands a chip

The chip is the on-die-cache recompute chip of docs/analysis/chip-model-v3.md. Each lane states a BREAK (a method with its measured or counted gain, reproducible from the command and the seed) or a BOUND (what was searched, with what tools, how far it reached, the margin left).

Rank	Lane	Break	The chip-model number it moves
1	adv-mixer	A structural shortcut in M_r: the 8 keyed applications between two cache reads evaluated in fewer than 8x the single-application cost (the multiply layer folding across applications, a differential, linear or rotational-XOR property surviving several applications, an algebraic form of the composition)	ops per item below 9,360; every gain column
2	adv-cache	A time-memory trade-off below the honest arithmetic: a line (s, j) in fewer than j + 1 block evaluations without an earlier line of the segment, or a relation through the XOR chaining and the feed-forward; the storage-against-recompute curve from f = 1/64 to 1	the SRAM column, equal silicon, the node class
3	adv-mixer	Weak parameter draws: ROT, MUL, RC + rk classes that weaken a day, their fraction over at least 2^24 day keys and the per-day gain; the day key is a public calendar today	ops per hash on the weak days; the fraction
4	adv-cache, adv-accept	Non-uniformity: the line index over 2^22 lines on at least 2^28 derivations; a hot subset of items across the hashes of an epoch	the SRAM column; items per hash
5	adv-accept	An acceptance bypass that steers addresses: a program that passes every part of the rule and reads a hot set on the live dataset; the stand-in gap; attempt grinding under the 256-attempt cap and the last-resort draw; header grinding for DRAM locality	items per hash; the honest denominator
6	adv-accept, adv-mixer	Seed and day-key grinding: influencing the epoch seed or the day key to select a program or a weak day	the probability in rank 3

Known gaps, stated to the defender and not to the lanes (the lanes find them or they do not): the four-seed unattributed tail of the item read map (p10 1.50x, p8 1.38x, p34 1.25x, p4 1.22x of the window model); the 39 edge disagreements of 100,000 between the closed-form stand-in and the live dataset; the weak-day class on LUT adders routed to class v5.

B3. The gates (what a PASS row must state)

Rank	A lane's row passes when the report states
1	No method found to evaluate 8 keyed applications in fewer than 8x the single-application cost after a stated search with named tools (differential and linear trails, rotational-XOR, SAT or MILP on reduced rounds); the round margin: the largest number of applications the best distinguisher or shortcut reaches, against the 8 between reads and the 72 per item
2	No derivation of line (s, j) in fewer than j + 1 block evaluations without an earlier line; the curve from f = 1/64 to 1 drawn with ops per item at each point
3	A census of at least 2^24 day keys; the fraction in every class the lane names weak, each with its per-day gain; a redraw rule proposed if the fraction with any gain above 1.1x exceeds 2^-20 per day (the threshold is proposed, not decided)
4	The line-index distribution on at least 2^28 derivations with the largest bucket within 6 sigma of uniform; the distinct-lines census per hash and per warp on at least 10^6 nonces of three programs; the cross-hash item histogram of one epoch
5	A search over at least 10^6 seeds for passing programs with a hot set under 1 percent of items finds none; the stand-in gap reproduced and bounded; the header-grinding search cost against its locality gain bounded (a GPU measurement is BLOCKED tonight and says so)
6	A written argument or a finding
The whole	Every row carries box-hours and tools; every number its command, seed and log path; the report is publishable whole under the internal label

B4. The soundness suite the lanes may re-run

cargo test --release in igneum-pow on the box (103 of 103 at the frozen commit, CI green); tests/packs.rs against the eight packs; tests/mixer.rs fuzz, stats, edge and determinism; tests/scratch.rs; the acceptance's own vectors (igneum-pow accept --seed ...). What the suite does not do, and the lanes must: bound the cost of M_r from below, draw the partial-store curve, census the parameter draws, look across hashes for a hot set.

B5. What a finding moves

Case	What moves	Cost
A BREAK confirmed by the defender before the public testnet's vectors freeze	A parameter or a shape on the v4 seam or a class v5 rule; the packs and the 96-vector sets re-cut through the seam, the verifier re-measured against the 10 ms gate, the suite re-run, the cross-vendor fingerprints re-taken	hours of agent work; one PC job per vendor; no chain event
A BREAK confirmed after the testnet's first miner	A class change behind its activation height with the six gates and the two-publish rollout of docs/plans/counter-asic-2-rollout.md	an announced reset on the testnet; on mainnet the governance event the plan exists to avoid
Only BOUNDS	The chip model's "ops per hash" input carries an internal effort bound in place of "no cryptanalysis", labelled internal, never "reviewed"	the box-hours only

B6. Timing and the consequences per user tier

Timing: the pass runs now, before the public testnet genesis (item 3 of docs/plans/counter-asic-3.md). The go checklist's row 9a reads: "9a. The in-house adversarial pass's three reports in hand and published whole, labelled internal, before the last announced reset of testnet-1; the disclosure prize staged until escrow and the word; mainnet never opens without the published reports." The internal reports are not a review and the download page never calls them one.

What a found shortcut would mean per tier is unchanged from the 6 October analysis: no card's hash rate changes; its share of the issuance and the chain's safety margin do. The worst case priced there (a chip at 7.4x with the fixed-function factor, chips at 85 percent of the hashrate within four months as in the Monero precedent, history row 16, approximate) gives every home card, rig and pool user about 0.15x of today's reward per card; the verifier is unchanged; the security budget is unchanged in dollars and paid to chips. What is being done: this pass before the vectors freeze, the class v5 path, the staged disclosure prize, and the share-pattern detector of Counter ASIC 3.0 item 4.

What the spend means against this file's totals: nothing. No dollar row is added to section 3; the former USD 80,000 to 160,000 estimate is withdrawn. The box-hours ride the box's existing rent.