Proxima - a DAG-based cooperative distributed ledger

[lunfardo314]

Proxima has started its journey to decentralization. The pre-launch network is
open, and anyone can join.

It took years to get here. Proxima is a new L1 with a radical innovation at
its core: cooperative consensus, reached on a DAG of transactions by token
holders cooperating rather than competing. No blocks, no block proposers, no
committee, no proof of work behind the consensus. Just token holders. It is
Nakamoto-style decentralization on a proof-of-stake footing.

It is fair-launched. Nearly all of the supply is mined by whoever wants to,
with proof of work that distributes tokens and does nothing else. There is
nothing to buy and nothing for sale.

And the ledger itself is what we always wanted a UTXO ledger to be: fully
programmable covenants and native tokens, from day one.

We are doing it in takes. The network starts centralized, in a pre-launch
phase that can be stopped and reset at any time, and it will take a few takes
to get it right. Each take goes a bit further than the last, until one of them
decentralizes and just keeps going on its own. This is take 0. If that sounds
like your kind of thing, come mine, run a node, break it, and share with the
community what you found.


Docs and how to join: https://lunfardo314.github.io
Why a fair launch, and how it works: https://lunfardo314.github.io/#/overview/fair_launch

Ledger description: Proxima ledger take 0
Genesis time (slot 0): 2026-09-10 06:35:05 UTC (Unix 1789022105)
Ledger definitions hash: aee726b6bb2e29bf37277ed0cf14f04e239b2d2050e19be9f0b8a6bae824cccf
Genesis controller public key: 872c48cbadfa6bc86d7046bf74e6c38be243fb30cebc4a9cbeaa33fc34e3bdd2
Genesis file (slot 0 snapshot): https://lunfardo314.github.io/static/genesis/s0-0-030000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000.snapshot
SHA-256 of the file: 367cfdf637bf7491779496f20f2a2b2262f386d4cf4316297b93c6995293a163

[lunfardo314]

We are stopping the take 0 network

This is the planned end of take 0, not an emergency. Stopping and resetting the
network is the normal course of the centralized pre-launch phase, announced from
the first day. The take 0 ledger will be erased and every token on it ceases to
exist, as the notice on every page said it would.

Take 0 was a success. In four weeks:

• The network ran without interruption through several important bug fixes and
    many improvements. For more than ten days at a stretch the bootstrap nodes
    were not touched at all.
• Up to 25 nodes, 15 of them run by the community; up to 15 sequencers, 10 of
    them community-run.
• Between 5 and 15 miners competing at any time, with the proof-of-work
    difficulty reaching 34 bits.
• Optimized private miners, on CPUs and on GPUs, were built and run against the
    reference one, and they competed on equal terms, as designed.
• 24.5 million PROX were mined in about 49,000 transits, 2.6% of the whole
    mintable supply, and the share of the bootstrap capital in the supply fell to
    70%.

One thing to improve.
Throughout take 0 half or more of the mined capital sat idle, outside consensus,
while the consensus health indicator dropped to about 80%. That is not a healthy operating point.
We attribute it to three things specific to take 0:

• no real economic stakes, so no rational response from token holders;
• the early versions of the mining software, whose automatic delegation was
    still rough;
• the "mine and hold" habit brought over from other blockchains. In Proxima,
    holding means putting the tokens to work; tokens left idle are diluted by a
    significant inflation.

All three are matters of learning what is new in Proxima, and take 1 is built
to make that easier.

What happens next.
Preparing and starting take 1 will take up to a week,
hopefully less; the changes need testing first. If the centralized phase of
take 1 goes well and the reset rules are not triggered by events outside our
control, take 1 is the network that reaches the decentralized stage. There is
no guarantee and no promise of that: the centralized phase is not trustless,
and that uncertainty cannot be removed. For the thinking behind the fair launch
and its details, see https://lunfardo314.github.io/#/overview/fair_launch.

Stay tuned.