Introduction

An introduction to the protocol.

A Layer 1 with no foundation, no admin keys, and no upgrade authority after genesis.

PRE-LAUNCH · SPECIFICATION · NO TOKEN Continue

§01 / CORE PROPERTIES

Four propertiesthat constitute the protocol.

Existing chains trade privacy, throughput, and governance neutrality against one another. The protocol is constructed on the premise that the trade-off is not fundamental — that integration of standard, peer-reviewed primitives delivers all three.

PROPERTY 01 WP §1.1.7 · §11

No party can alter the protocol.

Most chains are governed by a foundation, multisig, or token-holder vote — entities with the technical capability to alter consensus rules, gas costs, or issuance schedules. Adamant adopts the Bitcoin posture: no on-chain governance, no admin key, no upgrade authority. Change requires a published spec, a public reference implementation, and a 2/3+1-by-stake supermajority of Node Runners (validators in the spec) each independently choosing to run new software.

PROPERTY 02 WP §2.2 · §7

Privacy is the default.

On transparent chains, every transaction is publicly observable forever. When privacy is opt-in, using it becomes a signal. Adamant inverts this: sender, recipient, amount, and contract execution are encrypted by default, with selective disclosure available through view keys — a counterparty, a tax authority, an auditor — without exposing unrelated activity.

PROPERTY 03 WP §2.4 · §8 · §10.4

Sub-second finality. Sub-cent fees.

Approximately 500 ms finality for owned-object transactions and a per-transaction fee floor on the order of $0.0001 USD-equivalent at design throughput. Shielded transfers cost roughly one to two orders of magnitude more — still well inside consumer payment-network territory.

PROPERTY 04 WP §2.3 · §8.5

Verifiable by anyone with a phone.

A Halo 2 recursive proof at every epoch boundary attests to the validity of all transactions and state transitions from genesis to the present. The proof is a constant-size artifact (≈5–10 KB) verifiable in 50–200 ms on a smartphone — anyone running the verifier becomes a Node Watcher (a light verifier in the spec). Verification is cryptographic, not statistical; no node, no RPC, no trust.

§02 / DOWNSTREAM

A permissionless market forlight-client infrastructure.

Not a constitutional core property; a downstream consequence of the architecture. A chain that is permissionless at the participation layer, with standardised lightweight verification, naturally supports a market for the infrastructure that serves its lightweight clients.

SERVICE NODES WP §9.10

Permissionless light-client infrastructure

A standardised query protocol opens a market for service nodes that wallets and applications query for state. No registry. No allocation. Anyone can run one. Wallets choose; payment channels settle. The chain remains correct without it — but its day-to-day usability stops depending on a few centralised RPC providers.

VALIDATOR-FUNDED WP §10.5.5

Validators compete on service quality

Node Runners may, at their discretion, fund infrastructure providers from their commission revenue. The protocol does not allocate. It does not pick winners. Issuance still goes only to Node Runners. But Node Runners competing for delegators may choose to share revenue with the infrastructure that makes their delegators' wallets fast.

§03 / FRAMINGS

The protocolin familiar terms.

The protocol's relevance differs depending on the system it is compared to. The framings below describe what Adamant is in terms of infrastructure already familiar to particular audiences.

Compared to retail banking

A settlement layer with sub-second confirmation, sub-cent fees, default confidentiality, and no institution that can freeze accounts or alter the rules.

Compared to international remittance

Half-second cross-border settlement at fraction-of-a-cent fees, twenty-four hours a day. No correspondent-bank intermediation. No holding period.

Compared to Bitcoin

Bitcoin's design philosophy — credibly neutral, capture-resistant, settlement-grade — extended with programmable smart contracts, default privacy, and sub-second finality.

Compared to typical crypto

No company. No investors. No allocation. No marketing fund. The protocol cannot pivot, run out of funding, or be acquired.

Compared to transparent chains

On transparent chains, every transaction you have ever made is publicly observable forever. Adamant treats this as a structural defect, not a feature.

From a settlement perspective

A settlement layer with cryptographic finality, sub-second confirmation, default confidentiality, and no counterparty risk on the issuer side. The issuer is mathematics.

§04 / INTENDED USERS

The users for whomexisting chains are insufficient.

If none of the following describes a meaningful concern, existing chains are likely adequate. Adamant is designed for users whose threat model includes their own bank, their own protocol foundation, or their own jurisdiction — and for applications whose correctness must outlive the institutions that hosted them at deployment.

01 · Privacy

Operating under restrictive financial controls

Privacy by default with selective disclosure permits compliance with legitimate legal obligations without surrendering one's complete financial history to all observers in perpetuity.

02 · Settlement

Cross-border value transfer at consumer scale

Half-second settlement, fraction-of-a-cent fees, continuous availability, no correspondent-bank intermediation, no holiday or weekend gaps.

03 · Permanence

Long-lived contractual arrangements

Wills, trusts, escrows, and inheritance instruments designed to outlive their creators by decades cannot rely on a foundation existing in 2070.

04 · Custody

Self-custody outside the banking system

Banks fail; bank deposits depend on a government's solvency; bank accounts may be frozen. Self-custody on a chain that cannot be captured is a structurally distinct security model.

05 · Apps

Building applications that hold value

Applications deployed on Adamant inherit its properties: default privacy, sub-cent fees, no platform owner with the capacity to ban a contract.

06 · Sovereign

Public-record systems where the rules must hold

Voting registries, identity systems, public archives — applications for which "the rules cannot change without all participants agreeing" is the central security property.

§05 / WHAT IT IS NOT

Notable absences,by design.

Most chain launches involve at least some of these. Adamant deliberately involves none. The absence is constitutive, not incidental.

A speculative investment vehicle

The protocol is not marketed as a path to financial returns.

An ICO, airdrop, or token sale

No private round. No discount tier. No retroactive airdrop.

Operated by a company or foundation

No legal entity owns or directs the protocol’s development.

Funded by venture capital

No investors hold ADM. No allocation has ever been issued.

A general-purpose-chain replacement

For users existing chains do not adequately serve.

Subject to deposit insurance

Self-custody on a chain that cannot be captured.

A finished implementation

A draft specification. Substantial work remains.

A marketing programme

Public infrastructure. Treated as one.

§06 / GLOSSARY

The protocol'svocabulary, defined.

Concise definitions of the terms used across this site, the whitepaper, and the reference implementation. The marketing site uses friendly aliases (Node Runners, Node Watchers); the whitepaper uses the formal terms (validators, light verifiers).

Node Runner: A participant in the active set running consensus. 200 of them at any time, each publishing one vertex per 250 ms round in the DAG, each referencing 2/3+1 of the prior round. Earns block rewards from the genesis pool, then post-launch issuance. Anyone can become one by acquiring stake.
Node Watcher: Anyone with a smartphone or consumer device. Downloads a 5–10 KB recursive zero-knowledge proof and verifies the entire chain history in 50–200 ms — no full node, no RPC trust, no light-client trust assumption. Verification is cryptographic, not statistical.
Service Node: Permissionless light-client infrastructure provider. Wallets and applications query service nodes for state via a standardised query format. No registry; anyone can run one. Optionally funded by Node Runners from commission revenue (WP §10.5.5).
ADM: The protocol's native token. Native to the protocol layer (not contract-defined). 100M genesis pool drained over a five-year launch phase via burn-to-mint and Node Runner block rewards. Post-launch issuance: 4% → 1% per year, in perpetuity, paid only to Node Runners and their delegators. Base fees burned via EIP-1559-style mechanism.
Genesis pool: A fixed 100,000,000 ADM that exists at the protocol layer, partitioned 70/30 between burn-to-mint claims and Node Runner block rewards. The pool is not held by any party; it is a counter that decrements only through public acquisition paths. Unclaimed tokens at year five are destroyed.
Burn-to-mint: A genesis acquisition path. Anyone burns BTC or ETH at a verifiably unspendable address on the source chain; the protocol observes the burn via light-client verification of source-chain headers and mints the corresponding ADM at the protocol-defined rate. Per-address claim caps prevent early concentration.
Recursive ZK proof: A Halo 2 proof that attests to the validity of all transactions and state transitions from genesis to the present. Each new proof π_n verifies the prior proof π_{n−1} plus the current epoch's transactions, collapsing the entire chain history into a constant-size 5–10 KB artifact.
DAG consensus: A directed-acyclic-graph consensus mechanism (Mysticeti-based). All Node Runners produce vertices in parallel each round; ordering emerges from the structure rather than from a single leader. Commit waves finalise blocks every four rounds.
Threshold-encrypted mempool: A mempool design that conceals transaction contents until ordering is committed. Users encrypt to the upcoming epoch's BLS threshold key. At the epoch boundary, 2/3+1 Node Runners publish decryption shares; transactions execute in the next epoch. Eliminates front-running and validator-level censorship at the cryptographic layer.
Credible neutrality: The property that no party — including the original implementers — possesses the unilateral capability to alter the protocol's operation. No on-chain governance, no admin keys, no upgrade authority, no premine. Enforced not by promises but by the structural absence of any mechanism to modify the protocol.

For the fullprotocol specification.

Thirteen sections. Draft v0.1. Public for review.

Read the whitepaper Genesis mechanism Home