We publish the spec before the code because we want it to be the thing that gets criticized, broken, and improved. If you find something wrong, we want to know.
Why post-quantum matters now (harvest-now-decrypt-later), why we picked ML-DSA-65 specifically, the alternatives we rejected (Falcon-512, SLH-DSA, hybrid schemes), and the honest cost accounting — signatures are ~52× larger than Ed25519 and that drives every other architectural choice.
Key Decisions
Citations
Read the full document →Four locked-in design decisions told as one story. Cross-contract calls are async message-passing. Contracts are immutable by default, with proxy upgradeability opt-in and labeled. Source verification is a single hash compare — no compiler to trust.
Key Decisions
Citations
Read the full document →HTTP peer fan-out for block sync and vote gossip, Tendermint-style BFT with a rotating ~100-validator committee, Sparse Merkle Tree state over LevelDB, Hardened JavaScript VM, and a JSON-RPC interface compatible with the Ethereum tooling ecosystem. Tuned for the median consumer PC.
Key Decisions
Citations
Read the full document →Anyone holding VLD can delegate their stake to a consensus validator and share in the rewards — and the slashing risk. The shared-slashing model is what forces delegators to actually care about validator quality. No liquid staking in v1: it keeps the centralization vector closed.
Read the full document →Key Decisions
The non-negotiables: Node.js reference node, JavaScript contracts, post-quantum signatures, consumer-hardware tuning with a Pi 4 supported floor, single-binary CLI install, and a bounded bandwidth budget. The non-goals are equally important: no raw-TPS chase, no EVM bytecode compat, no ZK in v1, no sharding, no bridges.
Key Decisions
Twenty-plus locked-in technical decisions, each with the reasoning, the alternatives we considered, and what we would revisit. The honest record of how the protocol got designed.
Tendermint-style BFT, ~100 validators in rotating committee.
1B max supply, EIP-1559 burn, decaying inflation schedule.
Under active tuning; 2s on current testnet.
4-phase rollout: devnet → public testnet → incentivized → mainnet.
SSZ (Simple Serialize), inherited from beacon-chain research.
Structurally impossible via async message-passing between contracts.
Storage access tiered to reward small modular contracts over monoliths.
We publish the specification before the implementation because the specification is the thing we want criticized. If you spot a flaw in the cryptography, the consensus, the contract model, or the economics — get in touch. The earlier we hear it, the more useful it is.