Network
A small settlement layer, wrapped around a very large one.The substrate that holds the model.
This is not a chain in the conventional sense. It is a compute and data network with just enough on-chain state to enforce its own rules — specified at the level of components and their interfaces, and nothing further.
Three layers, stacked by latency budget.Each one is as small as it can afford to be.
Settlement
Single-second finality
On-chain state: validator registry, checkpoint registry, job ledger, treasury.
Touched on every economic action; never touched during inference. The smallest layer, and the slowest.
Coordination
Sub-second propagation
Off-chain signed messages: job announcements, heartbeats, routing tables, attestation streams.
Touched on every job dispatch. It absorbs the latency gap by allowing signed off-chain messages with an on-chain backstop.
Execution
Milliseconds to weeks
Validator-local: forward passes, training steps, dataset ingestion.
The bulk of the network's work happens here. The largest layer, and the fastest.
One query, seven steps.It touches settlement once, at the end.
Steps 1, 4 and 7 touch the settlement or coordination layers, and step 3 is the routing decision. Every other step is local to a validator and to the gateway.
Inference runs at validator speed. Settlement is touched once, at the end, to record what happened and pay for it.
Ten components.Everything else is local.
The architecture specifies only what must be globally agreed for the network to function.
| Component | Layer | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Token mint | Settlement | Holds supply, enforces transfer policy |
| Validator registry | Settlement | Mapping of validator IDs to stake, hardware tier, surfaces served |
| Checkpoint registry | Settlement | Active checkpoint per surface, by content hash |
| Job ledger | Settlement | Posted jobs, bids, selections, attestations |
| Treasury | Settlement | Holds fee proceeds, executes disbursements under timelock |
| Routing service | Coordination | Maps user queries to validators |
| Attestation stream | Coordination | Validator-signed execution logs, batched to chain on cadence |
| Challenge service | Coordination | Receives fraud proofs, computes payouts |
| Validator daemon | Execution | Runs surfaces locally, signs outputs |
| Dataset shards | Execution | Content-addressed data slices held by validators |
Three observations select for the split.None of them are preferences.
Throughput
A general intelligence cannot run on a chain. The throughput inference needs at any meaningful user count is many orders of magnitude above what any current chain offers, so the execution layer cannot live on chain.
Verifiability
A network with no on-chain state cannot enforce its own invariants. The settlement layer is what makes this a network rather than a federation of independent services.
Latency
On-chain finality is too slow for anything a user is waiting on. The coordination layer carries the gap in signed messages, with the chain behind it as the backstop.
The settlement chain
Portable in principle.Solana in practice.
The codex assumes a high-throughput chain with sub-second finality. The architecture would carry to any chain with comparable primitives, but the live deployment is Solana-specific and the rest of the codex should be read that way.
- Chain
- solana · mainnet-beta
- Token
- spl-token, 9 decimals
- Liquidity
- raydium-cpmm
- Commitment
- finalized
What it does not specify
Three things are left open.Deliberately, and by name.
The wire format between gateways and validators
Operational, and revisable without a protocol change.
The gateway operator set
Anyone can operate a gateway.
The user-facing API
A product concern, not a protocol concern.