Privacy by default.Verifiable by anyone.Governed by no one.
§ 01 SEVEN PROPERTIES NO EXISTING CHAIN DELIVERS ALL SEVEN

Each property in isolation exists. Their conjunction does not.

The thesis is not a single feature. It is the simultaneous delivery of seven properties whose joint absence elsewhere is the entire reason Adamant exists.

Property
Mechanism
BTC
ETH
XMR
ZEC
MINA
ADM
Privacy
Privacy by default
○
○
●
●
●
●
Post-quantum
PQ secure
○
○
○
○
○
●
Throughput
≥50 000 TPS floor
○
○
○
○
○
●
Finality
Sub-second
○
○
○
○
●
●
Mempool integrity
Encrypted by default
○
○
○
○
○
●
Verifiability
Phone-verifiable
○
○
○
○
●
●
Decentralisation
Residential-fibre
○
○
○
○
○
●

● delivered by protocol  ·  ○ not delivered  ·  sources: project documentation, WP §01 motivation

§ 02 FIVE MECHANISMS WP §3–§10

How the protocol actually works.

Five mechanisms, each specified to component level in the whitepaper. No novel cryptography. The contribution is the synthesis.

§ 01
Consensus
DAG-BFT, Mysticeti-shaped. Active set floor 7, ceiling 75.
Throughput ≥ 50 000 TPS · sub-second finality
§ 02
Mempool
Threshold encryption + time-lock VDF. Two-regime fallback.
Encrypted by default · MEV-resistant
§ 03
Verification
Recursive proofs. Phone-verifiable. Light clients without trust.
Halo 2 · ML-KEM-768
§ 04
Governance
None. No foundation, no admin keys, no governance contracts.
Hard-fork-only protocol changes
§ 05
Infrastructure
Residential-fibre runnable. Four participation tiers, two permissionless.
Stake floors 1 000 / 100 ADM
— FOUR ROLES · TWO PERMISSIONLESS —

Who runs the chain.
A residential-fibre desktop is enough.

Validator hardware stays on commodity desktops because GPU-class proof generation lives in its own permissionless tier. A phone is sufficient to witness the chain. No tier alone controls it.

T.01
BONDED
Node Runner
Consensus participant
STAKE1 000 ADM
HW16 GB RAM · 2 TB NVMe · 100 Mbit symmetric
COUNT7–75
T.02
BONDED
Node Watcher
Attestation, DA sampling, fraud detection
✓
STAKE100 ADM
HW8 GB RAM · 500 GB SSD · 25 Mbit
COUNTuncapped
T.03
OPEN
Prover
Recursive proof generation
π = halo2.prove(circuit)π = halo2.verify(π, vk)π = recursive.fold(π)
STAKE—
HWGPU recommended (proof-rate competitive)
COUNTpermissionless
T.04
OPEN
Service Node
Light-client infrastructure
adamant_getBlock→Block #4,829,117
STAKE—
HWReliable connectivity; modest compute
COUNTpermissionless
§ 03 GENESIS ECONOMICS WP §10 · §11

The first ADM is acquired by burners.

100,000,000 ADM at genesis. Partitioned 70 / 30 between burn-to-mint and validator block rewards. No premine, no founder allocation, no investor allocation, no foundation treasury. The launch phase ends in five years or pool exhaustion, whichever comes first.

Fig. 02 — 100M pool drain

Pool — pre-launch · undrained 100,000,000 ADM
Burn-to-mint pool
70,000,000
Validator pool
30,000,000
Genesis total
100,000,000

Unclaimed pool at the 5-year cap is destroyed. Post-genesis emission follows the fixed schedule in WP §11.3.

Fig. 03 — Burn-to-mint rate (20 ADM / USD-eq)

Burn (source)
USD Coin · 1 : 20 fixed
Receive (destination)
2,000
ADM · native

Burn-to-mint is the only launch-phase issuance. USDT / USDC are pegged 1 : 20. BTC / ETH calibrated at protocol design time and held constant through launch — not a live oracle. Per-address claim cap ramps 1 % → 2 % → 4 % → 8 % → uncapped across months 0–12.
— WHAT YOU CAN BUILD —

Six categories of consequence.

Adamant is a base-layer settlement chain. These are the use-cases its property set makes possible — and, in their conjunction, makes possible nowhere else.

C.01
Private payments at consumer scale
Send and receive value without exposing your transaction history to every observer in perpetuity. Sub-second confirmation, sub-cent fees, selective disclosure when you need it.
Payments, payroll, remittance, donations, allowances.
C.02
Applications that hold money
Smart contracts that inherit the chain’s properties. Default-private state. Sub-cent execution. No platform owner with the power to ban your contract or freeze your users.
DEXes, lending markets, derivatives, escrow, payment channels, on-chain games with private state.
C.03
Long-lived contractual arrangements
Wills, trusts, escrows, and inheritance instruments designed to outlive their creators by decades. The chain commits structurally that the rules cannot change without all participants agreeing.
Digital inheritance, multi-decade trusts, dead-man’s-switch contracts, intergenerational financial planning.
C.04
Self-custody outside the banking system
Hold value on a chain that cannot be captured. No bank that can fail. No deposit insurance contingent on a government’s solvency. No account that can be frozen at someone else’s discretion.
Personal sovereignty over capital, jurisdictional independence, intergenerational wealth preservation.
C.05
Validators and witnesses run by individuals
A residential-fibre operator with a desktop and a 1 Gbps home connection can be a validator. A phone can be a witness. Hardware floors that don’t drift toward datacentres over time.
Real participation in chain security by individuals — not just infrastructure operators.
C.06
Privacy that doesn’t leak
Default-shielded means your use of the chain doesn’t itself become a signal. Selective disclosure means you remain compliant where you must be, without exposing everything else.
Compliance without surveillance. Audit trails on demand without permanent broadcast.
§ 06 PLAIN FRAMINGS FOR READERS WHO HAVE SEEN THE LANDSCAPE

Where Adamant sits, in plain language.

vs. retail banking

You hold the keys. No bank can freeze, debit, or close your account.

The ledger is public, but your activity is not. Selective disclosure is yours, not the bank's.

vs. Bitcoin

Same scarcity discipline (no premine, no foundation). 100M genesis pool plus a fixed-schedule issuance regime.

Adds privacy by default and post-quantum security. Same monetary posture; updated cryptography.

vs. Ethereum

Adamant is a settlement chain, not a smart-contract platform — focused, narrow.

No on-chain governance, no upgrades, no admin keys. Hard-fork is the only protocol-change mechanism.

vs. Monero / Zcash

Privacy by default like Monero. Selective disclosure like Zcash. Halo 2 proofs, no trusted setup.

Adds post-quantum signatures and DAG-BFT throughput. Same privacy primitive class; modernised.

§ 07 WHAT ADAMANT IS NOT

Six things it is not.

NOT
A token launch  there is no premine, no foundation allocation, no investor round.
NOT
A general-purpose world computer  Move contracts pay gas; shielded functions carry proofs. The VM is narrow on purpose.
NOT
A governance system  there is no on-chain governance and no admin key.
NOT
A scaling layer  Adamant is a base layer, not a rollup or sidechain.
NOT
A privacy add-on  privacy is structural, not an opt-in module.
NOT
A novel-cryptography research project  primitives are standard, peer-reviewed, audited.
§ 08 PROJECT JOURNAL LIVE FROM COMMIT LOG

Decisions, in order.

2026-05-01
Spec
Whitepaper v0.1 published
Full specification, including the two-regime mempool design and the genesis cohort mechanics, is now public on GitHub.
2026-04-18
Impl
Reference client repository opened
Rust reference implementation is public. Networking and consensus modules stubbed; cryptography in progress.
2026-04-02
Spec
Cryptographic primitives selected
Ed25519 + ML-DSA (FIPS 204) hybrid signatures; ML-KEM-768 (FIPS 203) for key agreement; Wesolowski VDF for the time-lock mempool.
2026-03-20
Spec
Throughput floor revised to 50 000 TPS
Earlier 200K figure was projected against ideal Mysticeti throughput; 50K is the conservative residential-fibre floor with 7–75 active set.
2026-03-01
Ops
Project journal opened
Material design and operational changes will be logged here. Decisions before this date are reconstructed in the appendix.