Abstract
Igneum is a proof-of-work blockchain mined on graphics cards, where the same cards prove every block with zero-knowledge proofs and sell proving to other chains.
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 itself changes every hour, so there is nothing for a specialised chip to be built for. Nothing in it ever needs a human to keep it that way.
What has never been done before
Every piece of Igneum has a precedent somewhere. The combination has none, and six of the pieces are firsts on their own.
| First | Closest precedent | What Igneum adds |
|---|---|---|
| A mining program that regenerates itself, for GPUs | RandomX does it for CPUs on Monero, since 2019 | Whole-program regeneration on GPUs. ProgPoW and Ravencoin's KAWPOW randomised the maths inside a fixed program shape in 2020; Igneum regenerates the whole program hourly over a growing dataset, with automatic eras |
| The mining card does paid, useful, verifiable work | Primecoin's prime chains in 2013 were not useful. Aleo's proving-as-consensus centralised | Proving is useful, verifiable in milliseconds, and kept apart from the lottery |
| A proof-of-work chain where every block is proven | zkEVMs exist only as rollups on proof-of-stake Ethereum. Conflux has run GPU-mined EVM apps on a DAG since 2020, without proofs | Proven state on a proof-of-work base layer, produced by the miners themselves |
| Finality held by miners and immune to hour-long rentals | Decred votes with stake. Horizen penalises hidden chains. Kaspa limits depth | Sustained-mining weight: hashrate that appeared today has no vote |
| 100% of emission to the people running the hardware | Kaspa's fair launch, with no utility. Zcash and Decred fund developers from emission | Fair launch, utility, and no fee to any team, foundation or fund |
| A chain your browser verifies by itself | Light clients trust a committee | At launch, one execution proof plus the votes on the latest locked checkpoint. The single-proof client that also proves canonicity is phase two and the roadmap says so |
The problem
Three things are wrong at once, and Igneum is built where they meet.
GPU mining has no home
Ethereum left proof of work in 2022 and stranded the largest fleet of general-purpose compute ever assembled. Every chain that took it in since has either been taken over by chips, as Kaspa was within about two years, or has stayed small, as Ergo and Ravencoin have. Miners burn electricity on a lottery and are paid in inflation. When the price falls they switch off, and the chain's security goes with them.
Proving is centralised
Rollups, bridges and soon Ethereum itself need zero-knowledge proofs of every batch and every block. Today those proofs come from a few private GPU clusters run by the rollup teams or by a handful of proving companies. The work is a commodity, a proof is correct or it is not, and the cheapest correct proof should win. It does not, because the people with the cheapest GPUs are not in the market.
Small proof-of-work chains get attacked
When rental markets can hire more hashrate than a chain has for an hour, double-spends against exchanges are cheap. Ethereum Classic, Bitcoin Gold and Vertcoin were all hit this way. Every one of them let hashrate that appeared a minute ago rewrite history.
Igneum gives the GPU fleet paid, useful, verifiable work. It gives the proving market its cheapest supplier. And it makes the right to rewrite history something that must be earned over a month of public mining, not rented for an hour.
Igneum at a glance
Five layers. The lottery decides who makes blocks. Proving decides nothing about consensus, which is what keeps the fastest prover from owning the chain. The two are kept apart on purpose.
Mining: a program that never holds still
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.
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 random reads over a multi-gigabyte dataset that changes daily, so the program is bound by memory bandwidth. 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 about ten milliseconds by simulating one warp, so nobody needs a GPU except to mine.
| Clock | What changes | Miner update needed? |
|---|---|---|
| Every hash | The data path depends on the nonce, so no two hashes run the same sequence | No |
| Every hour | A new random program | No, the miner compiles whatever arrives |
| Every day | A new dataset | No |
| Every six months | 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 | No |
| Continuously | 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 killed Bitmain's E3 miner in 2020 this way, with nobody doing anything | No |
Everything above is automatic. Nobody writes a new program, nobody schedules a fork, and Igneum runs for ever on the generator fixed at genesis, exactly as Monero has run on RandomX since 2019 with no chip built. The generator is designed so that the best hardware for any program it can emit is a graphics card. A chip that dropped the graphics parts and kept the parallel cores and the memory would gain under 2x, approximate, which is below what pays for a tapeout, and that is the same margin that has protected Monero for seven years. On top of that, the widening program space and the growing dataset mean a chip designed for this year's Igneum meets a harder Igneum next year without anyone lifting a finger.
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 so that day never comes, and it does not depend on it.
Monero's idea, finished for GPUs
RandomX has kept chips off Monero since 2019 by making the mining program random, so the only hardware that runs it well is the hardware everyone already owns. Igneum takes the same principle to graphics cards and adds what RandomX never had.
| Property | RandomX, Monero | Igneum |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware it is built for | CPUs. GPUs run it badly on purpose | GPUs. Any card, any vendor. Bit-exact on Apple and NVIDIA, measured |
| Random program | Per hash, interpreted in a virtual machine | Per hour, compiled to native GPU code, with a per-hash random data path |
| Dataset | About 2 GB, the same size since 2019, approximate | 2 GB at genesis, growing every year past any chip's memory |
| Light verification | 256 MB cache on a CPU, milliseconds | 256 MB cache on a CPU, one warp under 10 ms, the measured gate |
| Changes over time | None. A fixed design, unchanged for seven years | Automatic era draws and a reserve of instruction families that unlock by height. Nobody touches it |
| Seed grinding | Not applicable, the program comes from the hash input | Closed by a verifiable delay between seed and program |
| Useful work | None. Hashing only | The same card proves every block and sells proofs to other chains |
| Track record | No chip in seven years | Zero years. Every number above is measured and logged with the commands that produced it, and the repository opens with the public benchmark in January 2027 |
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: the prototype's dataset is still a simple formula a miner could compute instead of loading, which the next build replaces with a 256 MB cache construction, so the rates will change and are not mining rates. 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. AMD is the next test.
Proving: the miners are the provers
Every Igneum block is proven with a zero-knowledge proof, and the miners produce it. Proving is the one useful GPU workload that is cheaply verifiable by construction. A proof is right or it is not, and a phone can check it in milliseconds.
How a block gets proven
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. Miners claim shards with a small bond, prove 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, a block with a wrong state cannot exist. Invalid transactions are skipped by rule, the way Kaspa skips conflicting spends.
The proving budget
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. Shard size will be set so a 12 GB card proves one shard in about 20 seconds. That number is the first gate on the roadmap and has not been measured yet; once it has, 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.
Proving for everyone else
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. Jobs taken through Igneum's own market are paid in IGN and 10% of each fee is burned. The Igneum miner client also bids on other proving networks, where jobs are paid in those networks' currencies, and takes the best price. The proving market is small today. Igneum does not depend on it. No other proof-of-work chain has a seat in it.
Speed and finality, powered by miners alone
Speed
Igneum orders blocks with GHOSTDAG, the BlockDAG consensus proven on Kaspa. Blocks arrive in parallel and are ordered rather than orphaned, so the chain runs at one block a second at launch with scheduled steps to four and ten. A transaction is included in about one second, against twelve on Ethereum, and locked in about two minutes against roughly thirteen. Emission is paid per unit of difficulty-adjusted work, never per block, so a faster chain never means more coins.
Finality
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 the active mining weight arrive. Once a checkpoint is locked it overrides the heaviest chain, so no amount of fresh hashrate can reorganise past it. In the chain's first month the weights behind those locks are thin, because nobody has a long history yet, and the chain leans on proof of work and the one-hour depth limit the way every new proof-of-work chain does.
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 who brought the whole network's hashrate would need ten days of mining in public to hold a third of the weight, and twenty days to hold two thirds. At 51% of the network they never reach two thirds at all 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.
Two further rules close the gaps. Only miners who are present count: a key that stops signing drops out of the denominator within two hours, so a silent minority cannot freeze finality and a lock never waits for miners who have left. And Kaspa's one-hour merge-depth bound limits any reorganisation beneath the latest lock. Signing two different checkpoints at the same height is equivocation, provable by anyone, and it strips the key of its vote for 30 days.
What is not here
No stake. 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.
Building on Igneum
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.
Three things run on Igneum that run nowhere else.
- Proving as a native primitive. 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. No other EVM chain has a prover network in its base layer.
- Trustless light clients. Because every block is proven, a phone or a browser verifies Igneum's state by checking one proof and the latest locked checkpoint. Bridges built on that need no multisig, the piece that has failed in the biggest bridge hacks.
- Rollups that settle here. A rollup posting to Igneum gets its proofs from the same miners that secure it, in the same flow. Settlement and proving in one place costs less than paying a proving network and a settlement layer separately.
The first apps, a DEX, a lending market and an Ethereum bridge, ship at genesis so there is somewhere to use the coin from day one.
What a builder gets for being early
- Apps earn the gas they generate. 20% of every transaction's priority fee goes to the contracts whose code ran, by gas consumed inside each, paid every block to the developer address registered at deployment. Canto and Blast proved builders come for this. On Igneum it comes out of fees, never out of miner emission.
- Stablecoins at genesis. USDC and USDT bridged through the proof bridge, canonical versions on Igneum, the way Arbitrum and Base launched. Native USDC is requested from Circle during public testnet. Igneum issues no stablecoin of its own.
- Liquidity from the people who are there. The DEX is seeded by the founders' own mined coins and by miners, and every miner is a funded wallet from day one.
- Launch grants. Paid from the founders' own mined coins, never from emission, to the first apps that bring users.
- A minute of proof lag costs you nothing. Execution is immediate, the block is locked by miners in about two minutes, and the proof is a guarantee on top. A bridge withdrawal waits for the lock, about two minutes, against seven days on an optimistic rollup.
Economics
The coin is IGN. It is gas, it is the proving currency, and it is what every outside customer pays in. Part of every payment is burned.
Supply
Fair launch. No premine, no pre-sale, no allocation to anyone. Hard cap of 4 billion IGN, approached and never reached, because emission starts at 1 billion a year and halves every two years for ever. Nearly a quarter of all supply is mined in the first year and half in the first two, so the people who show up early get the most. Emission ramps from 10% to 100% over the first 30 days so that nobody takes the first month before the rest of the world hears about it.
Where every coin of emission goes
| Share | Goes to | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 80% | The miner who wins the block | Pays the hashrate that secures the chain |
| 20% | The proving pool: shard provers and aggregators | Pays a standing prover population that does not have to hash |
| 0% | Treasury, foundation, team or stake | There is no coin-holder class in consensus and no tax on emission |
Where the price comes from
The base fee of every transaction is burned in full, Ethereum's rule, so a miner cannot fill blocks with its own transactions for free. The priority fee splits two ways: 80% to the miner and provers of that block, 20% to the apps whose code ran, by gas consumed inside each. External proving fees pay 90% to the provers who delivered and burn 10%. The hard cap fixes supply. Demand comes from use of the chain and from outsiders buying proofs, and both reduce supply as they happen. Emission is untouched by any of this: every coin minted still goes to miners and provers.
No fund, no foundation, no fee to the team
There is no development fund. A switch that routes money to an address somebody controls is the first thing a critic points at, so Igneum has none. The protocol carries no fee to any team, foundation or fund. The team earns in the open: it runs provers in the job market and collects the app share on the contracts it deploys, like anyone else. If the community ever wants a grant mechanism, miners can add one by signalling.
For miners
Igneum is built for the GPU fleet that has had no home since 2022. Here is what it offers and what it asks.
Three income streams, one balance
| Stream | Paid by | Moves with the IGN price? |
|---|---|---|
| Block reward | Emission, 80% to the winner | Yes |
| In-chain proving | The 20% proving pool plus the proving share of every block's gas | Yes, mostly |
| External proving jobs | Rollups and apps on other chains, priced in their money | No, but the market is small today and is upside, not a promise |
The honest bear-market case rests on cost. A miner's card is already running and the power is often domestic, so Igneum miners have the lowest marginal cost in the proving market and are the last provers to switch off.
Hardware
The dataset starts at 2 GB and grows by half a gigabyte a year, so a 4 GB card mines for about four years and an 8 GB card for more than a decade, approximate. 12 GB or more proves full shards. 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. There is no CPU mining lane, on purpose, because CPU mining is what botnets farm. Nodes, wallets and exchanges need no GPU at all.
What a miner's hour looks like
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. The official client is open source and charges a 1% dev fee, like every miner you already run, and any other client is welcome.
One click, for everyone else
Farm operators get HiveOS support on day one. Everyone else gets the Igneum app: install it on Windows, macOS or Linux, press one button, and the card is mining and proving to a wallet the app made for you, with earnings shown in IGN and in your currency, and mining paused while you game. It is the same client with a face on it. 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.
Fair launch, announced
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.
Governance
Igneum is governed by the people who power it, and by nobody else.
- Nothing needs a scheduled upgrade. 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.
- Miners set what genesis leaves open. A parameter that the genesis rules leave to miners is set by signalling: a proposal passes or fails on 60% of hashrate over two weeks. There is no fund to vote on and no fee to any team, foundation or fund.
- Pools cannot censor. Igneum uses Stratum v2 from day one, so each miner chooses its own transactions even inside a pool.
- There are no admin keys. 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 chain runs without its founders. Blocks, proofs and finality need no one. A second independent node client is the first priority after launch, and anyone can build it.
Roadmap
Thirteen months from specification to a fair launch, with four public gates. Each gate is a measurement published whether it passes or fails. Miss it and the phase repeats or the project stops.
| Phase | When | What | Gate to pass |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Specification | Oct to Nov 2026 | Mining generator, shard proving, finality rules, written for external review | |
| 2. Prove the proving | Nov 2026 to Jan 2027 | Mining program prototype on GPU and CPU, shard proving benchmark on consumer cards | A mid-range GPU proves a shard in under 20 s and a CPU verifies a hash in 10 ms |
| 3. Devnet | Feb to Mar 2027 | BlockDAG node with the new mining program and EVM execution, 20 nodes | 1 block a second held with proofs under 60 s behind the tip |
| 4. Finality and job market | Apr to Jul 2027 | Sustained-mining finality, external proving jobs, miner client with auto-switching | Finality design passes external review and one rollup signs for testnet |
| 5. Public testnet | Aug to Oct 2027 | One-click miner app on Windows, macOS and Linux, HiveOS, pools, the first rollup as a proving customer, no coin yet | 1,000 independent miners run 30 days and rollup proofs are delivered on time |
| 6. Mainnet fair launch | Nov 2027 | Genesis with no premine, 30-day ramp, exchange listings after |
Phase two decides everything. If consumer GPUs cannot prove shards fast enough, Igneum says so and does not launch on promises.
Questions miners ask
Kaspa was GPU-mined too, and IceRiver shipped a chip within two years.
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. In January 2027 the benchmark tool is public, so you run it on your own card and post the number to a leaderboard by card model. A standing bounty pays anyone who can show a chip design that beats a GPU by more than 2x. And if a chip ever appears, miners are the ones who signal the response.
Finality weighted by mining history is new. New gets attacked.
Correct, and it is the first thing the external review is paid to break. The specification is public, the review is gate 3 with named reviewers and a bounty, and the chain runs on plain GHOSTDAG without it, so the rule can be fixed without stopping the chain.
Who are you?
The founders mine from genesis with disclosed addresses and the same software as everyone else, and hold no coins before block one. The team page is published at public testnet, with the people, the mining addresses and the code history.
Where is the miner?
Benchmark in January 2027. Miner client with the devnet in spring. One-click app on Windows, macOS and Linux at public testnet in August 2027. All of it before any coin exists. Nothing is asked of a miner before they can run something.
Will my card still pay in a bear market?
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 have the lowest cost in that market, because the card is already running on domestic power, so they are the last to switch off. That is an edge and nothing more.
Questions builders ask
Proof of work, in 2027?
Igneum's miners are paid for proving, not only for hashing, so the energy buys a proof of every block as well as the ordering of it. Proof of work also gives what stake cannot: no stake to capture, no builder cartel between you and the block, no foundation that can change the rules, and a chain whose state is proven at the base layer, which Ethereum does not have today.
What does a one-minute proof mean for my app?
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. Bridge withdrawals wait for the lock, about two minutes.
Which stablecoin, and is there liquidity?
USDC and USDT, bridged through the proof bridge at genesis as the canonical versions on Igneum. Native USDC is requested from Circle during testnet. The DEX is seeded at launch by the founders' own mined coins and by miners, and every miner is a funded wallet.
What do I get for being early?
20% of the priority fee on every transaction that runs your code, paid to you every block. Launch grants from the founders' mined coins. A place in the wallet's Apps tab and the explorer from day one. And the only user base a new chain has ever had that did not have to be paid to arrive.
How do I deploy?
Point Hardhat or Foundry at an Igneum node with the chain id and deploy the same bytecode. Verify the source in the explorer. Register a developer address for the gas share. The afternoon is the hard part.
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 is pointless, because the target moves before it ships. The honest efficiency ceiling for a fixed chip on a memory-bound program is under 2x, approximate, and Igneum's generator changes under it every hour.
- A guaranteed income floor. No. External proving is a small market today. Igneum's miners have the lowest cost in it, which is an edge and nothing more.
- 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 to one hour. Reaching a third takes at least ten days of the whole network's hashrate, in public. 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.
- 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.