VERSION 1.0 — 2026-05-12

Sophis Whitepaper

A Fair-Launch, Post-Quantum Layer-1 BlockDAG. Technical and economic foundation of the Sophis network, authored by Marcelo Delgado. 27 pages, 17 sections.

Download PDF ↓ Read source on GitHub ↗

Table of contents

1. Introduction
2. System overview
3. Cryptography
4. Proof-of-Work
5. Monetary policy
6. Consensus (GHOSTDAG)
7. Native tokens
8. sVM — smart contracts
9. ZK-Rollup L2
10. Out-of-scope by design
11. Operational boundaries
12. Network parameters
13. Reference implementation
14. Roadmap
15. Threat model & limitations
16. Acknowledgements & references
17. Disclaimer

What the whitepaper covers

Cryptography

Why CRYSTALS-Dilithium ML-DSA-44 (NIST FIPS 204) is the only signature scheme, why secp256k1 and Schnorr were excluded, and how the implementation (libcrux-ml-dsa, constant-time Rust) is integrated.

Monetary policy

The 210,000,000 SPHS hard cap, smooth ~0.94% monthly subsidy decay, ~159-year long-tail emission curve, the elimination of any on-chain devfund, and the founder's voluntary 5% lifetime mining cap.

Consensus and PoW

GHOSTDAG with k=124, 10 blocks per second, RandomX as the memory-hard PoW choice, anti-long-range-attack measures (min_chain_work + max_chain_work_seen), and finality semantics.

Smart contracts and L2

The sVM (Wasmtime-backed, fuel-metered, capability-gated WASM runtime), the eleven capability slots, native L1 token primitives, and the Risc0 ZK-Rollup that provides optional L2 throughput.

Operational boundaries

What the core team will and will not operate (faucet, explorer, DNS seeders yes; mining pool, bridge, custody no), and the rationale anchored in the 2026-05-04 regulatory pivot.

SIP track

The seventeen Sophis Improvement Proposals (SIP-0 through SIP-16): six are consensus-impacting and baked into genesis; the rest are spec-only or ecosystem extensions gated on demand.

Version & integrity

Version
1.0
Date
2026-05-12
Status
Pre-testnet

The canonical Markdown source is committed to the reference repository at github.com/sophis-network/Sophis/blob/main/Whitepaper.md. The PDF hosted here is built from that Markdown by the build_pdf.py script. When the launch checklist is fully green, the SHA-256 of the canonical PDF will be published in the T-72h mainnet announcement to anchor a single verifiable version at a fixed point in time.