I'm one of the developers of SOV Network, so read this as a project post, not a neutral review.
SOV Network is an open-source network where each real person holds exactly one account, and with it can hold and send money, message privately and vote on the rules. It is not a blockchain: no mining, no chain to download.
One human, one account: you enrol with a palm scan on your own phone plus a live face check. No photo is ever stored or sent. The phone sends a feature vector, not a picture, over an encrypted link; the node turns it into a protected (cancelable) template and stores only that. The same palm always matches, so nodes can tell a person is already enrolled without ever holding a picture of them.
Payments without a chain: every payment is signed on the payer's device, every voting node checks the signature and the balance, and a payment needs a majority of them before it counts, so two payments trying to spend the same money cannot both succeed. Every node checks continuously that wallets plus the remaining pools equal exactly 50,000,000 SOV.
Messages are end-to-end encrypted and nodes keep no message content. Joining needs no phone number or email. Nothing to buy: early citizens receive a grant from a fixed pool; node operators are paid from a separate pool.
Every node publishes the fingerprint of the exact source it runs, so anyone can rebuild and compare. There is no token sale and no pre-sale; the whitepaper lists who holds which pool and how operators are paid. Distributed directly (site, GitHub, IPFS, BitTorrent), not through the app stores. Android, Windows, macOS, Linux.
Whitepaper:
https://sov-network.github.io/whitepaper.htmlSource (Apache-2.0):
https://github.com/sov-network-dev/sov-build-sourceRun a node:
https://sov-network.github.io/academy/run-a-node.htmlNot a coin launch: there is no sale, no pre-mine for sale and nothing to buy. Posting here because this board is where peer-to-peer money was first argued through in public, and this design makes different trade-offs (identity instead of proof-of-work) that deserve the same scrutiny.
What it does not do yet is stated in section 10 of the whitepaper: liveness is checked in the app rather than by nodes, every full node holds the secret that protects the templates, and there is a fixed list of servers until independent operators join. I'll answer questions here.
