In plain terms: validators are the operators who run the machines that keep the network honest, and earn staking rewards for it. The role we describe commercially as a miner is technically a validator: you run consensus and validate deterministic state transitions — without ever touching a passport, a biometric or a KYC file. That work belongs to issuers, not to you.
consensus
Validation here is cryptographic and deterministic. There is no identity for you to inspect and no discretionary judgement to make about a person — only protocol rules to enforce.
Consensus is permissionless proof-of-stake with a bounded active validator set — 60 operators at genesis, growing to 100 only by governance decision. Operators stake, accept delegation, and are subject to slashing, with predictable upgrades governing the protocol over time.
Validators run consensus servers on CometBFT and validate deterministic protocol state transitions. Blocks reach deterministic finality, so a verified state is final rather than probabilistic.
You never inspect passports, biometrics, names, addresses or KYC files. KYC is performed entirely by issuers; validators only validate cryptographic evidence and deterministic state.
Supply has a hard cap — 108,000,000 — and 60% of it, the argued point inside a ratified ≥60% band, is reserved for the validator emission pool: a strictly declining issuance schedule with no re-mint whose curve sums exactly to the pool. Protocol burns from registry leases, issuance and renewal fees and penalties reduce supply — with no promise of perpetual deflation.
On-chain rewards are consensus rewards only. Any optional off-chain proof or status services you choose to run are paid directly, separate from the consensus reward path. And the published launch budget provisions fiat-denominated validator service agreements — professional operators join as contractable counterparties, not patrons.
No mainnet ships before independent application, cryptography, infrastructure and economic audits, testnet attack exercises, a bug bounty, and a documented incident-response plan. The security gate is measurable by construction — bonded share of supply, independent-operator count, a Nakamoto-coefficient floor, a published price-independent attack-cost methodology — and insider genesis accounts count toward none of it.
Bands are ratified and frozen; the points shown are our argued working points inside those bands, and the independent economic simulation validates every one of them before genesis.
These are protocol constants — the same for every validator. You validate state against them; you do not decide them.
Staking, delegation and slashing follow standard proof-of-stake mechanics, governed by a native-token bond reserve and a separate small BTC remediation reserve under a threshold-vote council and independent custodian. Talk to us about joining the set, or read the consensus and monetary-policy specification.