We are in the eye of a very peculiar storm. Legacy gambling associations in the United States (a.k.a. the casinos) have recently begun lobbying and conducting propaganda campaigns against prediction markets. Or, at least, propaganda is one way of calling it. The claim is simple: that these markets constitute unlicensed gambling, and ought to be regulated as such. Native American tribal leaders have filed complaints with the federal government on claims that these markets violate the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. And a Massachusetts judge has already ruled that Kalshi cannot operate sports prediction markets in the state, pending appeal.

At the same time, large crypto players and prediction market providers have formed their own trade group: Predict Action. They call it a ‘Coalition.’ Their purpose is identical: to lobby, to shape definitions, to contest the claim that prediction markets are gambling. DraftKings and FanDuel, two huge sports betting platforms, recently dropped out of the American Gambling association and began repositioning themselves in an attempt to get into the prediction market space.

So the question presents itself: are prediction markets gambling, and does it matter? The answer is not straightforward, because the definition of gambling isn’t always completely clear. If it were, there would be no need for competing coalitions rushing to define it. As usual with legal terms, they require interpretation.

The distinction, however, is simpler than it appears. In comparing prediction markets with casinos or betting services, we must first state the fact that, in the latter, you always bet against the house. It is exceedingly rare that, when gambling, you play against another player on equal terms. In fact, even when such a game occurs, an operator (the house) is always present at the table, always participating in the game. And as we all know, gamble for long enough, and you find that the house always wins. This operator sets the terms, runs the books, and retains the power to intervene. As much as prediction market CEOs may insist that there is some unique guarantee that means prediction markets aren’t gambling, this is not set in stone. There is nothing inherent that prevents them from acting as bookkeepers, taking the other side of trades, or shaping outcomes through design. They can be run just like any other betting platform. In such cases, they are gambling. And we are inclined to believe such versions of these markets should require a license.

Unlike with casinos or online sports betting platforms, prediction markets do not have to be gambling, and herein lies the importance of the interpretation we mentioned before. And thus the entire question turns.

A feature of Dex.Do is the ‘Shake’: Send a link to someone online, someone you disagree with, and make a bet to resolve the matter. The ease of use resembles Zoom. And the settlement is automatically enforced on-chain at the resolution of the event, rather than being enforced by reputation. This is indistinguishable from a bet between friends. The participants coordinate directly with each other, and not through an intermediary. The structure removes the very element that defines gambling.

It is very common for two individuals to make a friendly bet on the outcome of any number of things, global as well as personal, and no-one would ever really equate that to a casino. And rightly so. You don’t need a license to place a bet against a friend. It is, in fact, a time-honoured tradition that acts as an important social indicator or trust and camaraderie between two individuals of differing opinions. When an argument goes on and on without an end in sight, two people can decide to forgo the prickly unpleasantness to which many such quarrels fall victim. The incessant tautologies, the going around in circles, the verbal jousts with no good cause can be discarded. And the point settled with a bet.

One of the attractions of such bets is that, not only do they not need external coordination, but they also benefit from not having any. This absence of coordination is the defining feature. These bets do not require an operator. They benefit from not having one. There is no book, no override, no authority standing above the participants. The entire principle is that they are self-resolving. Involving an arbitrator is almost a faux-pas, and if a party defaults, they risk damaging the friendship or their reputation, which makes honouring the bet all the more symbolic of those very things.

Dex.Do does not create truth, but disciplines beliefs through consequences. The broader problem is not disagreement, but polarization without constraint. The internet did not cause this; its structure allowed it. Monopolized platforms optimized for engagement stripped away the conditions for convergence. Openness remained in name, not in function.

Bring this back to prediction markets, and the distinction becomes precise. This quality of non-coordination is what separates a bet that is called gambling, and one that is not. A bet on a decentralized prediction market is virtually no different to a bet between friends. When people deploy smart contracts within the market, they coordinate between themselves, not thanks to an external party. By definition, it is impossible to have a decentralized house. A decentralized operator of anything is a contradiction in terms. An operator is singular and privileged. Whereas a decentralized system by definition includes all participants and doesn’t prescribe an artificial hierarchy between them. Its rules are fixed. Its execution is automatic. And it is characterized by the impossibility of any human interference: i.e. the immutability of its Code as its Law.

Agreement on what happened precedes any argument about what it means. Dex.Do offers a system that can produce shared reference points, even minimal ones, and hopefully restore the basis for discourse.

We believe that the internet today could do well with just such a market. A place where, rather than endless arguments on social media where people can’t even agree on established facts, let alone their interpretations, users can instead wager with each other to settle the matter. No house, no middle-man, just send a link and place a bet. In this way, a prediction market can be a good tool to make the internet a less toxic place. Rather than trying to build consensus in some artificial way, a system that is concerned with social cohesion should take into account that human behaviour and opinion is always and necessarily going to be fraught with biases. And that one of the most surefire ways that individuals combat their biases is by losing something. Not losing something big, just losing something which their bias ought to have confirmed as theirs forever. Every bet has a winner and a loser, and nobody who places many bets ever wins or loses all of them, thus the regression to the mean can allow us all to interpret events in a more sober, considered way. Instead of a predatory algorithm that is designed to amplify the echo chamber and make citizens angry and distrustful of each other (all to maximize ad revenue), we can instead build a platform where people consider their opinions and put their money where their mouth is.

A stated aim in building Dex.Do: That it may provide the conditions for a less toxic internet.

We go off of the opinion that one of the main threats to the fabric of society is this vitriolic polarization we all know and hate so much (how ironic). Go online today and you won’t spend long finding people with opposing points of view who can’t even agree on the facts, let alone on how to interpret them. We could, and much to our dismay, say that the internet has become the main culprit in the polarization-dynamic. But saying that would be attributing personal agency to a technology, whereas the real issue lies in the dynamics that allowed the internet to become monopolized. And as happens in all monopolies, this ended up gutting the spirit of openness, plurality, and innovation that once characterized it.

It need not be so. We state that the Web can once again be a vehicle for bringing people closer together, albeit not in a sentimental Kumbaya, We Are The World sort of way. All we claim is that if there is a general consensus regarding what did or did not happen, that is the basis for civil discourse. If there is civil discourse, then there is less fertile ground for propaganda and coercion, and isn’t that what it all comes down to? And maybe that is the true definition of the so long hoped for and ephemeral Web3, fixing the toxicity of this mad experiment called ‘The Internet.’

Examination #1

Can all opinions be financial markets?

Prediction markets today say: “We provide a lot of information (a.k.a. the news) about what’s happening in and around, out and about. Whatever you put your money on, we will allow you to make an ‘informed decision’ about what your next move should be.” Critics say: “Sports betting platforms do exactly the same! They give you updates on a game so you can make a ‘better bet.’” So what’s the difference? We doubtless call the news essential. Whereas football injury reports are fodder for escapism. So which one is it?

Whatever the claims, all a prediction market does is aggregate sentiment on the news; that is to say, it aggregates people’s beliefs that events will turn out one way or another, expressed in odds. Many people who hype-up prediction markets have come to term this as a source of truth, which we believe can be the case, but it has to be designed around that intention. Despite most prediction markets insisting that their status as a ‘source of truth’ is paramount, the fact is that today, as a recent Financial Times article points out, prediction markets make most of their money on ordinary sports betting, and then we get back to the prior question: are you just betting against a house?

You have no doubt heard the phrase so often tied to prediction markets: “In the future, we will financialize any difference in opinion.” This is, in a sense, a shibboleth of the proverbial ‘space.’ Taken literally, believing ‘everything will be financialized’ is naïve. So far, most of this ‘financialization’ has been confined to a narrow class of events. I.e. speculating on sports: events in one narrow sector which has little bearing on the world at large. But this shibboleth is actually far more than that, and something far more ominous—the statement is not wrong, but misunderstood.

Dex.Do does not discover truth; it compresses conviction into price, forcing belief to persist under risk rather than perform under applause. As we’ve said before: a derivative is a claim on an outcome. Once outcomes can be specified and settled, they can be traded. Dex.Do extends this logic. It does not introduce a new structure, but applies an existing one to a wider class of events. The underlying mechanism is identical. Once liquidity and programmability are sufficient, every tradable event becomes a position, and every position demands a price.

Financialization is not an ambition. It is, in fact, a reflection of what happens to all financial markets when they cross an event horizon of sufficient liquidity, programmability, and institutional indifference to meaning. The phrase “financialize any difference in opinion” sounds like crypto-utopian bravado, but fundamentally, it describes a well-documented transition that occurs when markets reach this threshold. Once that boundary is crossed in prediction markets, disagreements cease being empty positions taken for the sake of argument and become positions like positions in a market.

This outcome is purely structural and not dependent on moral appeals or politics. It arises when a market has sufficient liquidity to make entry and exit inexpensive and enough standardization to formally represent claims. In the case of prediction markets, the absence of an authority in place to pre-adjudicate truth, so that participants are free to be wrong at their own expense, means claims are admitted to the market solely on the basis of specification of form and settlement conditions, rather than epistemic validity.

Disagreement is thus expressed as priced exposure rather than argumentative consensus. And as we know, any claim that can be broken down into discrete units becomes tradable. When disagreement is no longer primarily rhetorical (“I think X will happen”) but operational (“I am willing to stake capital on X”), and discourse transmogrifies into market, asking why you believe something becomes less important than how much you are willing to pay to be right.

Dex.Do does not “financialize opinion” as an ambition. It is not an ideology. It is a threshold condition. The moment a claim is legible to settlement, disagreement ceases to be argued and holding an opinion ceases to be a rhetorical matter. When you can price, trade, and resolve your beliefs, opinion stops being something you say and becomes something you have to stand behind.

People’s true convictions are a prickly pear. Some believe a thing without substantial experience or knowledge of a matter, while others can’t accept a truth that stares them in the face. What’s more, the internet is full of people who are looking for exposure without an underlying belief of any kind, significantly stunting the coherence of online discourse. But this question of beliefs, and the seemingly-universal search for exposure to express them doesn’t need to be mediated by attention, outrage, or performative consensus. Instead, prediction markets allow belief to be expressed through risk-bearing commitment rather than speech alone, leading to information being expressed as a financial action.

This is not because markets absorb all ideologies, but because price is simply a way to summarize disagreement. It combines different opinions into a single number without needing to resolve the underlying intellectual conflicts. In this sense, prediction markets don’t turn opinions into financial assets; they simply reveal that an opinion was already a hidden preference for risk.

But the ‘financialize every difference in opinion’ slogan overreaches in one crucial way. Not all differences in opinion are event-resolvable. Markets require a terminal condition, an unambiguous settlement rule, and bounded time horizons. Many opinions (moral, aesthetic, metaphysical ones) do not resolve cleanly into events. They persist, metamorphose, reconstruct themselves unreliably, or refuse closure. So yes, you can bet on an election outcome; but no, you cannot coherently settle the meaning of justice, at least not without smuggling in some third-party or authority or just a good deal of subjectivity. So really it would be more correct to say that the future is not one where all differences are financialized, but one where all differences that can be made legible to settlement pressure will be. And once this happens, the markets will stop caring whether they are being used as markets, and become infrastructure for adjudicating uncertainty, regardless of domain. That is powerful. And it is also dangerous. Because markets are excellent at pricing belief under risk but terrible at distinguishing truth from incentive alignment, a fully financialized disagreement space risks replacing epistemic humility with capitalized confidence, and being right and being well-funded could begin to blur.

So should we reject the ‘financialize everything’ narrative? Or should we seek a solution? Well, prediction markets aren’t going anywhere. That much should be clear. And it should also be clear that ‘the news’ is one of the main appeals of prediction markets. And we have a nagging suspicion that the solution is found in that dynamic, thus begging the question:

Examination #2

Do you have to trust the news?

DexPress is the who, what, where, when, and how of decentralized editorial news, opinion, and analysis.

(We’re not really proposing a correction to financialized disagreement. We aim to establish a counter-institution that metabolizes it.)

The creation of DexPress stems from the need to make sure this non-house, decentralized, interface-less, dark platform—one that aspires to being a source of truth—can provide the information that befits a paper of record. Is there some ephemeral, but hopefully rigorous, editorial standard which any such paper requires? Building a decentralized news outlet, we claim, is only possible on prediction markets. And we believe it’s essential that decentralized prediction markets have decentralized news.

Traditional media and social networks are set up like this: anyone can loudly say anything, risking nothing except reputation (and often not even that). This leads to lots of noise and little responsibility, ‘opinions’ that are worth almost nothing. And so, ultimately, it is hard to tell who really believes what they write. A prediction market is arranged the opposite way: if you’re truly confident, you can put money on an outcome. This immediately creates ‘skin in the game’ and words start to have a price.

DexPress is media built on top of Dex.Do markets so that only materials by people who actually have a stake in the topic make it into the feed, and so that this can be proven without revealing a wallet, thanks to ZKPs.

Our principle is: “Put your money where your mouth is.” If you want attention, show that you are willing to make a real point, and back it up with something you can lose if you’re wrong. This is where the whole point about fixing polarization comes in. If this sounds like another ‘financializing everything’ narrative, think again. This is not a stated aim in and of itself when thinking about the future of these markets. Rather it is just one possible outcome of a system which can define, in terms of Price is a Probability, people’s beliefs in what will, and will not, be the outcome of quantifiable events. As well as their quantifiable quotients across a vast spread of sectors.

It is obvious that it takes time for such a network to develop. As well as buy-in en masse. And for the proper mechanisms to be put in place to incentivize growth, hopefully in an ethical way. It is obvious, too, that this is true of any network. But we believe that Dex.Do is particularly well poised to develop into the ultimate decentralized prediction market, offering an alternative to the social media platforms that profit from arguably the pressing issue facing the digital world in our time: the feeling that nobody can agree on anything anymore. Especially online, where opinions are warped and weaponized. All with nothing to back them up. TikTok conspiracy slop. Rage-baiting podcast clips. National politicians that claim their word is gospel and that anything else is fake.

The solution goes something like this: you want to make a statement? Then put something on the line. It’s not just ‘put your money where your mouth is’, it’s also ‘don’t put your mouth where your money is not.’

Anyone can write a piece for DexPress. They just have to indicate if you are ‘for’ or ‘against,’ and then they need to place a bet on that belief. We believe that is the core of journalism: Looking at the world, or a part of it; evaluating everything there is to find out about it; and then coming to a reasoned conclusion about a possible outcome, and arguing the point correctly. To ensure that this core holds, journalists have always had to prove their credentials: in a digital space where everyone is constantly vying for attention and clicks, where the media landscape is so fragmented that even the most well-established papers don’t get nearly the same reach, and where journalism is fast becoming a more and more precarious profession, being willing to publicly wager on your point and risk losing money for it, is, we believe, one of the boldest statements a journalist can make to prove their credentials.

The news (as in: providing news) has always been an entirely economic question. The effects these markets can have on this dynamic could end up an avenue for the de-monopolization of the news, because by design no gatekeepers and no Rupert Murdochs are allowed, and diversity of opinion is encouraged. DexPress is a place for journalists (right as well as left) and traders (day as well as institutional) to predict and offer reasoning on their predictions and insight on the events of the world, free of bullshit and politicos’ spin and newsroom politics. Ultimately, quality journalists really should be making money from placing these bets and writing these columns, because journalists should be able to correctly predict a fair number of events a fair amount of the time, otherwise what are they doing in the profession?

Unlike on websites where people discuss stocks, but where they can only indicate their portfolio, but never prove it (meaning they can write about which stocks they own, but they could also lie about which stocks they own), on the DexPress, because everything is on-chain, the bets an author makes can be proven and indicated with the article. This is because the DexPress’ content is on the blockchain, and one can only deploy this smart contract if one places the bet. Because Dex.Do is a dark order book, it means the details of positions should not leak just because you did something publicly. Therefore publication works through the author attaching a ZKP (zero-knowledge proof) that proves the fact that they have a stake in this market but does not reveal whose wallet it is, the size of the position, or any other private mechanics they want to keep hidden.

Authors will write only when a market is a place where people have a position and an interest. Content is an extension of the position: explain your thesis and present arguments and facts and links; influence attention and discussion and attract liquidity and debate (in a good sense). It’s worth noting that this media does not hide conflicts of interest. It is built out of them. This is not “neutral journalism”; it is a media of positions.

“But!” You may now exclaim. “How does this differ from ordinary social networks?”

Answer:

You can’t post without skin in the game: publication requires a stake. And privacy is preserved, as the proof of the trade is provided without revealing the wallet/position. (Privacy? Remember that? You have that on Dex.Do—And, we can almost guarantee, you have that pretty much nowhere else).

It’s important to understand in advance that this media is not about ‘objectivity.’ It’s about arguments backed by a stake. It’s normal here that people will promote their cases, argue, write counter-theses, and ‘play’ with rhetoric. But this will always be under the condition of ‘money in the game.’

The DexPress doesn’t try to re-introduce epistemic purity or neutral authority; instead, it forces the market to externalize its own psychology. By making publication inseparable from exposure, and making exposure provable without being extractable, it prevents the most corrosive failure mode we identified: capitalized confidence masquerading as truth. Here, confidence must persist to matter. Time-weighted stake turns voice into a function of endurance, not bravado. At the same time, the DexPress’s design reintroduces epistemic humility. And not by moral appeal, but by mechanism. Because DexPress is openly a media of positions, conflicts of interest stop being scandals and become the raw material of sense-making. Readers are not asked to trust authors; they are asked to observe incentives. The ZKP layer preserves privacy while still anchoring speech in consequence. In that sense, the DexPress doesn’t fight financialization by rolling it back; it fights it by making it legible, time-bound, and self-disclosing.

If the danger of post-horizon markets is that being right and being funded blur together, DexPress’ wager is that forcing funding to speak continuously, publicly, and under decay is the only way to keep that blur visible, and therefore contestable.

Finale

Those more inclined to paranoia…

…might question our integrity when we assert that Dex.Do is not gambling.

In the unregulated space of prediction markets, a clear regulatory avoidance strategy exists: maintain resistance to any accusation of gambling until the market achieves a scale where regulators are compelled to negotiate on the market’s own terms. And you’d be right to suspect this. It’s precisely why you should maintain a healthy skepticism and never trust us blindly. Always consider the possibility that any prediction market platform you use could in theory be called gambling, rather than accepting claims to the contrary at face value. The burden of proof is on whoever operates the damn thing and… oh, wait. Herein lies the one crucial distinction between Dex.Do and ‘The Others’ whom you so justifiably, nay, wisely distrust: Even if you completely reject our arguments and believe Dex.Do is gambling, the core facts remain that it is decentralized, meaning it is not operated by anyone, there is no central interface, and nothing that could constitute a ‘house.’

Consequently, everyone who is or ever will be involved, be they the Acki Nacki core development team, financial institutions, journalists, traders and speculators of every ilk, are always and necessarily participants on equal footing. We are entirely unable to manipulate the odds, refuse payouts, or implement the clandestine schemes we anticipate will surface in centralized prediction markets. It is precisely because it eliminates the need for trust that decentralization matters so.

There are already legitimate arguments to be made that Polymarket and Kalshi’s use of in-house trading teams (which they say are designed to boost liquidity) is comparable to a sports book. And in fact that’s just what it is: if a platform hires traders to bet against users, that’s really no different to what a bookie does. A good definition of a ‘decentralization test’ is quite simply: is it or is it not impossible for a platform to have a centralized-majority that can favour the odds by-design? If it is, then you pass.

Don’t trust us? Good! Don’t trust anyone. Be paranoid—board up your windows and stock up on your neuroleptics. But remember this: always conduct thorough research, examine the data sources, and, whenever feasible, read the underlying source code. While the statements we make about Dex.Do are biased, undeniably… the arguments are not. To support our claims, we welcome scrutiny of our decentralization according to this test. We welcome it from far and wide, including from you, dear reader.

What can be said to be the main cause of the growth of American financial markets? 

Whencefrom doth the unparalleled historical creation of wealth in the modern United States stem?

Derivative markets, you say? Piff! I’ve a mind to agree, God forsake me!

(...)

A Derivative

A tradable claim on the future. It is a financial contract whose value is derived from an asset, a price, a rate, or an event. The catch is that you do not need to own the asset itself.

Derivative markets did not begin in the United States. But that is where they were first built at industrial scale. Futures trading existed much earlier. Japan had rice futures markets. Europe had commodity exchanges. But these markets were narrower and more closely tied to specific goods. In the United States, derivatives expanded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through institutions like the Chicago Board of Trade and later the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The American innovation was not the contract itself. Those already existed. The innovation was the market: standardized contracts, exchange trading, and clearinghouses that guaranteed trades. Contracts could now be traded more easily. Risk could be traded on its own, separate from the asset beneath it. Traders no longer needed to own the underlying asset in order to speculate on it. That shift broadened the role of derivatives. They were no longer only hedging tools for producers. They also became instruments for price discovery and risk transfer across much wider parts of the economy.

Why did this system flourish in the United States rather than in Europe or Asia? American markets developed under conditions of scale and uncertainty. The country was vast, commodity supply was volatile, and industry expanded quickly. Hedging became indispensable. Just as important was culture. The United States proved unusually tolerant of speculation, treating it as a legitimate economic activity rather than a moral danger. Exchanges gradually evolved into a kind of public infrastructure for managing uncertainty.

Europe took a different path. Finance remained centered on banks, and governments exercised stronger oversight. Speculation was widely viewed with suspicion. In many cases the slower development of derivatives markets was a conscious political choice after repeated financial crises. Yet this did not prevent economic success. In the mid-twentieth century countries like Germany and Japan financed industrial growth very effectively through bank-centered systems. Factories were built, infrastructure expanded, and prosperity increased without deep derivatives markets.

Across much of Asia a similar pattern held. Governments imposed capital controls and strict financial regulation, keeping derivatives markets relatively small. But when those limits were later relaxed—especially in places like Hong Kong and Singapore—sophisticated derivatives markets appeared quickly. The capacity had always existed. The United States simply allowed these markets to develop earlier and more freely. By the postwar era, derivatives trading had already become normal. American capital markets were large and liquid, able to absorb new financial instruments and trading strategies as they emerged. The dollar’s rise as the world’s reserve currency, along with the postwar flow of global capital into American markets, strengthened this position further.

The deeper reason was structural. The United States already had enormous markets for stocks, commodities, and bonds. That depth allowed derivatives trading to expand rapidly. Each new layer of activity attracted more capital, which in turn created demand for new instruments. Markets became deeper, more liquid, and more flexible. Over time this changed the nature of finance itself. Risk no longer had to be traded only through ownership of assets. It could be separated, priced, and exchanged on its own. Investors could hedge uncertainty or express views about the future without holding the underlying asset. Markets became systems for organizing disagreement about what would happen next.

Europe’s caution toward speculation was not irrational. Bank-centered systems financed growth quite effectively, and many European societies achieved high living standards. But over the long run the American decision to let capital markets expand earlier produced something different: the deepest arena in the world for pricing risk. Combined with the dollar’s central role, this gradually concentrated the architecture of global finance in the United States. Europe did not fall behind in prosperity. It fell behind in financial gravity—where global capital gathers, where liquidity concentrates, and where the rules of the market are set.

Derivatives alone did not create American power. But they were one of the mechanisms that determined the American economy’s lasting global influence. Whether being “late to adopt” them determined Europe’s getting “left behind” is a discussion for another day. The point is simpler: welcoming speculation into open markets, and allowing capital to move freely through them, produced an enormous gravitational center for global finance.

We see no reason why a similar dynamic cannot, broadly speaking, appear again in online prediction markets. Decentralized markets could become new sites where capital, information, and liquidity accumulate—independent of the whims of oligarchs, the pivots of national governments, or the censorship of centralized exchanges. All the while, being prediction markets, they would also allow traders to speculate directly on the events shaping those very forces—a small and perfect irony of markets reflecting the world that produces them.

Today, most prediction markets function like simple wagers: one event, one bet, one resolution. But markets do not have to stop there. When positions can be traded, recombined, and layered on top of each other, they begin to look less like betting and more like financial systems. Digital markets make this possible at far lower cost. Contracts can be created instantly. Positions can be traded continuously. Entire structures of risk can be built on top of a single underlying event.

Decentralized markets remove the final constraint. Without gatekeepers deciding who may participate or which risks may be expressed, traders can build new instruments directly on-chain. If enough liquidity gathers around those instruments, prediction markets could evolve into something far larger: a digital marketplace where uncertainty itself becomes the raw material for a new layer of global finance.

Smart contracts allow market structure itself to evolve programmatically rather than institutionally. This accelerates financial innovation. Taken together, these features make decentralized prediction markets well suited to develop derivative depth—at a speed and scale comparable to traditional financial systems, but without the privileges and rigid institutions that shaped them.

American financial dominance grew from the industrial-scale abstraction and recombination of risk. Decentralized derivative markets represent the same historical force appearing in a new medium. The United States became the center of global finance by turning uncertainty into tradable structure. In the same way, decentralized prediction markets suggest a future where financial gravity gathers not around jurisdictions, but around protocols that can sustain continuous, high-volume disagreement without central control. In this sense, derivative markets on Do.Dex are not simply another venue for speculation. They mark the early formation of a new financial core—one defined by privacy and fairness.

Derivatives markets fuel financial booms because they let investors take large, liquid positions with relatively little upfront capital, multiplying both buying power and speculative momentum. In other words, they reduce how much capital you need to gain a given exposure. Take Apple Inc. as an example. If you want to bet on its price today, you normally buy the stock itself. Your prediction takes the form of ownership. Without derivatives, the only way to gain exposure is to buy the asset and hold it. Prediction markets like Polymarket are already derivatives markets, but they operate within a more constrained speculative architecture. Positions are fully collateralized. To take a view, you buy a Yes or No share whose price reflects the market’s estimate of the event, and you can sell that share at any time as the probability moves. The exposure is tradable—but it still scales directly with the capital you put in. With the money that once bought a single stock, you can now gain exposure to many different assets.

So how does it work in practice? Say Apple trades at $260. Paul owns the stock. Mary expects the price to rise within two weeks. Instead of buying shares, she buys a call option from Paul for $20. The option gives her the right to buy Apple at $280. If Apple stays below $280, the option expires worthless. Mary loses $20. Paul keeps the premium. If Apple rises to $300, Mary exercises. She buys at $280, effectively paying $300 once the premium is included. She profits above that level. Paul earns $20 in exchange for giving up the upside beyond $280.

The arithmetic is not the point. The structure is. With $20 instead of $260, Mary gained leveraged exposure to Apple’s upside. Paul monetized his willingness to sell that upside. The asset remains the same, but the exposure has been separated, priced, and traded on its own. That is what derivatives markets do. Now translate this into the language of prediction markets. The price condition becomes an event: Apple trades above $280 within two weeks. The $20 premium becomes the market price of that probability. Mary buys “Yes.” Paul effectively sells it. If the event fails, Paul keeps the premium. If it occurs, Mary’s position pays out. Strip away the ticker and clearinghouse and the structure is identical: two parties take opposite views on a future outcome and agree today on the price of that uncertainty. A derivative is simply a priced probability with defined settlement rules.

Now Do.Dex enters: it allows derivatives to be built on top of other derivatives. So say Mary creates a market: Will Apple reach $300 in the next two weeks? She stakes $20 on Yes. Paul stakes $20 on No. The payoff is binary, but the logic is unchanged. Neither party owns Apple. At settlement, one receives the other’s stake. Then Matthew arrives. He believes Apple will reach $300, but doubts it will reach $310. Instead of holding a simple Yes position, he sells a conditional contract paying $20 if Apple reaches $300 but not $310. He sells that exposure for $10. Matthew has sliced the probability distribution. He is long the move to $300 and short the more extreme move above $310. In options markets this would be called a spread. What began as a simple Yes/No bet has become layered structure. There is $20 for Yes, $20 for No, and $10 for Yes-but-not-higher. In total, $50 of capital now expresses different views about the same event. None of it comes from owning Apple stock. It comes from information — beliefs about the future price of Apple. And once markets can trade structured beliefs like this, the logic scales indefinitely.

In 2025, global GDP was about $117.2 trillion. The notional value of outstanding over-the-counter derivatives reached $846 trillion in June. That figure is more than seven times global GDP. These markets are built on predictions. They are bets on the movement of prices. They create layers of exposure that do not require ownership of the underlying asset. Yet this system became a central engine of modern finance. It helped make the United States the world’s financial center. The same mechanism may now reappear in a new form. Just as derivatives once pulled global capital toward U.S. exchanges, prediction-based derivatives could draw liquidity toward decentralized markets. If that happens, financial gravity may shift again—away from nations and toward protocols.

In that world, platforms like Do.Dex would not simply host speculation. They would form the early core of a post-national financial system built on prediction itself.

How it works

The market unfolds in two phases. A market begins when an event is created. Creation is done by oracles, the information suppliers. Anyone can become an oracle. DoDex uses an Open Oracle Protocol in which multiple oracle providers stream signed, verifiable real-time updates directly into markets, allowing the universe of tradable events to expand as new oracle feeds appear. An oracle cannot create multiple markets for the same event. Each market opens with a Pari-Mutuel Pool (PMP). The pool bootstraps liquidity and enables early price discovery. It is tradable immediately, even before professional liquidity providers arrive. It forms probabilities intuitively and allows participation without a visible order book. Pari-Mutuel contracts can be deployed permissionlessly with an oracle attached. Once deployed, anyone can bet into the pool. Users stake any amount and receive a proportional allocation of “Yes” or “No” tokens. When the event resolves, the total losing stake is redistributed to the winning side in proportion to each participant’s share. This mechanism is a totalizator-style pari-mutuel system designed for early participation and stable market formation. Pari-Mutuel contracts behave like accumulator contracts. A participant stakes money on one outcome—either “Yes” or “No”—and receives one token per dollar staked. A single bet cannot be split between outcomes.

Example: you bet $100 on Yes and I bet $100 on No. You receive 100 Yes tokens. I receive 100 No tokens. This rule applies to all participants and stake sizes. When the event resolves, tokens for the losing outcome are burned. The total losing stake is redistributed to the winners in proportion to their holdings. In this example, the No tokens are burned and the full $200 pool is assigned to the Yes holders. Your 100 Yes tokens now represent a claim on the entire $200. The fee for placing a pari-mutuel bet is zero. This pari-mutuel phase is the first stage of the market. It usually lasts about 10% of the time between market opening and event resolution. If an election occurs in one month, the pari-mutuel phase might last three days. The exact duration may vary. This stage establishes the risk structure of the market. Traders do not yet know the final distribution of tokens. They therefore act on long- and mid-term convictions. They trade because they believe their predictions—or because they want to open an event for later speculation. When the pari-mutuel phase closes, participants can no longer mint only one side of the market. The initial distribution of Yes and No tokens becomes fixed.

However, participants may still mint both tokens simultaneously, in the exact ratio set at the end of phase one. Example: if the first phase ends with 80% Yes tokens and 20% No tokens, then depositing $1 mints 0.8 Yes tokens and 0.2 No tokens. After phase one, anyone may still add capital by minting this full token set in the fixed ratio. The process is reversible. If you return the full token set in the same proportions—0.8 Yes and 0.2 No in this example—the contract burns them and redeems $1. In other words, you can recover your dollar as long as you return a complete token set in the exact distribution.

Phase Two: the secondary market

In the second phase, anyone can open an order book using a secondary-market contract. Any token minted during the pari-mutuel stage—either “Yes” or “No”, for any event on the platform—can now be listed and traded at whatever price a buyer is willing to pay. This creates a derivatives market, and it enables two things. First, participants who minted tokens in phase one can now sell them on a dark, decentralized order book at market prices. This is where speculators who do not want the early-stage risk—or who have no strong belief about the outcome—can enter. The trade-off is simple. By avoiding the risk of phase one, these traders often receive less favorable prices, because the market has already begun to move. But they gain certainty and flexibility. Second, anyone can mint a full token set by adding capital to the market and use those tokens to act as a market maker. A full set always mints both sides of the market. Market makers therefore enter with two legs—“Yes” and “No”—rather than a directional bet. For providing liquidity, market makers receive a 0.015% rebate on every token they sell. Traders who buy tokens from the book (takers) pay a 0.045% fee. All fees flow directly to NACKL holders, supporting the token’s price. Importantly, fees exist only in the secondary market. The original pari-mutuel bets remain completely free.

The order book can also combine partial positions. For example, one participant might sell 0.8 “Yes” tokens, while another sells 0.2 “No” tokens. The order book can combine these into a complete token set and redeem it for one dollar. This means liquidity providers do not need to wait for counterparties to exit their positions. It also gives traders flexibility. Someone holding only one side—say 80 “Yes” tokens—can either sell them on the order book or acquire the remaining 20 “No” tokens and redeem the full set directly. When we say “dollar,” we mean the native currency of the bet. Do.Dex supports any on-chain asset that can serve as collateral. Fiat users can also participate by connecting a credit card. The funds are automatically converted—minus a commission—into the currency used in the chosen market.

Why Do.Dex uses this structure

To answer why Do.Dex allows this level of flexibility and complexity we have to look at the history of U.S. financial markets. Their expansion was driven by decentralization of risk and by giving traders many tools to express, manage, and transfer exposure. Do.Dex follows the same logic. If traders can express risk freely, markets do not need centralized intermediaries to hold that risk. Exposure can instead be distributed through open price discovery. This principle guides the design of Do.Dex. The goal is to bring freedom to financial markets, in the same way that Bitcoin brought freedom to assets. Removing institutions and gatekeepers changes how markets function. Risk is no longer warehoused by centralized actors. Price formation moves to open markets that are censorship-resistant and self-correcting in real time.

Multi-outcome markets (“Bands”)

One final feature of the Do.Dex derivatives system is that pari-mutuel bets are not limited to binary outcomes. Two tokens—Yes and No—are the minimum. But markets can also support Bands, which divide the outcome into ranges.

For example, traders could bet on the year-end price of Apple Inc.:

• Token A: 0–200

• Token B: 200.1–250

• Token C: 250.1–270

• Token D: 270.1–280

This structure adds granularity to the market.

It mirrors the architecture of traditional derivatives markets and improves informational efficiency by allowing traders to express more precise views about future outcomes.

Secondary market and price discovery

The secondary market on Do.Dex allows price discovery to continue while preserving a key advantage prediction markets have over sports betting: dynamic odds and the ability to enter or exit positions at any time.

After the pari-mutuel phase, the distribution of tokens—Yes/No or A/B/C/etc.—is fixed. But the odds are not. They keep evolving until the event resolves. Price discovery simply moves to the secondary market. What phase one fixes is only the ratio in which derivatives are minted. From that point forward, probability is expressed through trading, not through new issuance. Probability no longer sits inside the original bets. It emerges through the buying and selling of derivative tokens—the Yes and No tokens created in phase one. This is structurally similar to how options trade in traditional derivative markets.

At this point, a clarification about Polymarket is necessary. Its contracts are also options. They are also derivatives. Prediction markets are “gambling” only in the same sense that derivatives markets are gambling. This is not blackjack. It is structurally identical to buying an option on the price of Apple Inc.—a wager in which capital is committed based on a prediction about a future outcome.

Redemption and token mechanics

As on Polymarket, withdrawing funds requires a full token set. It is technically impossible to redeem tokens in any distribution other than the one in which they were originally minted. The contract enforces this automatically. Any tokens redeemed must appear in the exact ratio established at the end of phase one. Without a full set, you cannot withdraw from the contract. What you can do instead is sell your tokens on the secondary market, ideally at a profit.

The value of derivative tokens follows a simple principle: price is probability.

Three factors shape that price:

1. The initial proportion of Yes and No tokens minted in phase one

2. The capital added after phase one when users mint full token sets at the fixed ratio

3. The dynamics of the order book, where traders buy and sell tokens

The order book is where traders speculate on the event’s likelihood and hedge their positions. When the event resolves, the mechanics are simple. Tokens representing the losing outcome are burned. For example, if you hold 80 Yes tokens and 20 No tokens, and the event resolves Yes, the 20 No tokens disappear. You lose that portion of your position—unless you rebalanced earlier through the order book and adjusted your exposure by trading with other participants.

Just as with Apple stock, a prediction market trades a contingent claim on a future outcome. The claim is priced continuously, remains liquid before resolution, and settles mechanically at expiry. The difference is only the level of abstraction. A stock price is itself an event — the event that an asset reaches a certain level. Prediction markets simply expand the range of events that can be traded. Capital is committed under uncertainty, positions can be entered or exited before maturity, and risk can be hedged or amplified through secondary trading. Settlement remains binary and rule-based.

Calling one finance and the other gambling is therefore cultural, not structural. Prediction markets are already derivatives on events. The next step is derivatives built on top of those derivatives. This layering allows risk to be hedged, recombined, and carried forward instead of disappearing at settlement. The economic force lies not in the prediction itself, but in the structure that grows around it. Historically, financial booms followed the expansion of derivative markets, not the creation of new underlying assets. The argument of this article is therefore simple: if derivative trading on prediction markets develops without intermediaries and at sufficient scale, it could form the basis of a decentralized financial system with the same wealth-generating dynamics that once made traditional financial centers dominant.

Prediction markets differ only in their foundation. Their contracts settle on real-world events rather than the price of another financial asset. Because those outcomes are observable, they naturally support additional derivative layers. Each event gathers conflicting beliefs into a single market price. That price becomes a new instrument — one trader can hedge, leverage, and recombine into further positions. The result is not merely a bet on an outcome, but the beginnings of a much deeper financial system built on prediction itself.

M A R C H , 2 0 2 6

Oakley is in. Patagonia is out.
Love is in. Situationships are out.
Palm Beach is in. Dubai is out.
Lattes and UFC are out.

Reading, food trucks, and Ethiopian Jazz are in.
Being subordinate is out. Being ethereal is in.
Believing politicos is out. Fighting the man is in.

Shorting crypto is out. Store of value is in.
Hype and social media trading advice is out.
Intelligent investing is in.

Sports betting is out. Prediction markets are in.
Financial derivatives are in.
Financial derivatives on top of prediction markets are in.

Do.Dex is in.
And bullshit it out.

We’ve heard a fair bit about prediction markets lately. They have been touted as a revolution and equally derided as a portent of all societies’ ills. In news, exploiting anxieties about a lacking paper of record, they have been declared as a source of truth, sometimes even the last such source. In finance they have been spoken about as a tool to potentially ‘financialize any difference in opinion’. Some say prediction markets are primed to kill the casino business, which cheats people out of money, and let people instead make money on merit, and lose money, too, only never to a house, because there is no house. There’s only you and the person you’re betting against. Prediction markets were one of the fastest growing financial sectors in 2025. As disagreement has outgrown institutions and trust in traditional information sources is collapsing, a new digital infrastructure now allows uncertainty itself to be priced, traded, and settled at scale. And so prediction markets seem to have suddenly become unavoidable. We will all be hearing this, that, and more about them in the near-future. So what do we make of the noise? And what does Acki Nacki have to do with it?

In our last post, we introduced readers to Do.Dex, the Dark Order Decentralized Exchange. In this upcoming series of posts we will be providing an in-depth look at what Do.Dex is and what it offers traders as a prediction market. A series of discourses on the criticisms levied against prediction markets and an outline for our own vision for how such a market should look. Decentralization is central to the design of Do.Dex, which lets users bet against each other with no intermediary. But is it really that simple? Is Do.Dex going to be just a place for people who know each other to place simple yes/no bets against each other? You know already that Do.Dex is much more than just that. It is worth noting here, too, that Do.Dex is far from the first attempt at building a decentralized prediction market. What gives Do.Dex an edge in the space are quite a number of hitherto unseen features on both centralized and decentralized crypto markets. If Bitcoin was built for the liberation of financial assets, Acki Nacki was built for liberation of financial markets: markets that are real-time and on-chain, capable of sustaining immense volume, natively algorithmic, and yet fully decentralized. Do.Dex is the expression of that logic at the level of market structure.

But first, a primer:

Prediction markets combine the wisdom of crowds with the price discovery mechanisms of betting. At their core, they translate shared uncertainty about future events into prices by letting participants put money behind their beliefs. Prices are not set by authority or credentials, but by how much risk people are willing to take on opposing outcomes. By allowing participants to take opposing positions on clearly defined events, markets continuously adjust prices as capital flows in. Over time, these prices reflect the market’s best estimate of the likelihood of each outcome, based on the collective risk people are willing to bear.

There are myriads of versions of prediction markets that are deeply institutionalized. Insurance is one of the clearest examples. When you buy insurance, you are essentially making a wager on a negative event, such as a car accident, and the insurer takes the opposing bet. If you crash your car, you ‘win’ by receiving a payout. If you remain accident-free, the insurance company profits. Premiums function like odds: they reflect estimated risk, are pooled across participants, and fund payouts plus the insurer’s margin. This basic structure underpins all insurance.

It is also not so different from what a bookmaker does. The core concept revolves around money in a pot, and the entry cost is determined by the likelihood of a specific outcome. These are the odds, established by the flow of money towards one outcome versus another.

In the lead up to the 2024 US elections, there was a huge surge in betting volumes on online prediction markets, with odds strongly favoring a Donald Trump victory. This is not the first time this has happened. Prediction markets in the US were fully legal in the past as well, and in the period between 1884 and 1940 they accurately predicted the winner of the US election every time bar one. They were widely regarded as the most reliable predictors of election outcomes, surpassing the accuracy of polls. However, because of US officials’ stated fears that prediction markets could unjustly influence election results by swaying public opinion and altering voting patterns, after 1940 these markets were subjected to gambling regulations. In reality, this policy change in 1940 was likely driven by the concerns of Wall Street and vested interests, who worried that election betting would harm their reputation. The legalization of horse racing in New York had led to betters spending money at the tracks, and Wall Street was keen to avoid being seen as just another gambling ring. Outside of the US, legislative sentiment towards prediction markets is oftentimes even more negative. In Taiwan today, betting on election results is a criminal offense.

Claims that prediction markets meaningfully alter voter behaviour are unconvincing: ideological and social motivations vastly outweigh marginal financial incentives, voters can hedge without changing their ballot, and markets are accurate not because people follow forecasts but because traders price evolving probabilities. If anything, strong partisans are more likely to defy a forecast than obey it. This defiance carries both promise and risk: it turns disagreement into something measurable, drawing money toward the strongest convictions and forcing beliefs to prove themselves through financial exposure rather than mere rhetoric. In other words, people have to back up what they believe with cash, not just words. The financial inflow, and the resulting odds, often proves to be as accurate as, or even more accurate than, almost all expert analysis in predicting event outcomes. This leads to a central question: why does a diverse crowd, with mixed incentives and information, often outperform expert consensus?

To fully understand this unique nature of prediction markets, we must first recognize the core principle of ‘The Price is a Probability.’ Unlike stock prices, which can rise without bound, prediction market prices are constrained between 0 and 1, directly expressing probability. As the price moves closer to the extremes of 0 or 1, the potential payoff decreases, and the price encounters natural resistance. This built-in limit dampens excess volatility and produces a more stable mechanism for estimating likelihoods, making prediction markets unusually effective at quantifying uncertainty.

Insurance relies on a similar principle. And yet, a decentralized insurance market is all but impossible, because any real-world events like car crashes, deaths by drowning, and home invasions cannot be verified, or even logged, on-chain. So they exist squarely in the remit of human judgment and, to paraphrase Tennyson, when we cast to earth a seed, and up comes a flower, the people say ‘a weed.’ In other words, without objective verification you invite fraud and moral hazard. The real divide, then, is not regulated versus unregulated, but events that can be settled by objective data versus those that require investigation and interpretation. Prediction markets work only when outcomes are observable and mechanically resolvable. Where platforms rely on internal market-makers (a concerning trend) or profit directly from user losses, they start to resemble bookmakers, and that is precisely where regulation becomes necessary.

A truly decentralized system has no operator to license, subpoena, or hold liable. There is no balance sheet, no discretion, no one who can step in and tilt the game. It is not “unregulated” so much as structurally beyond regulation. An algorithm does not hold licenses, make promises, or respond to subpoenas. This is the distinction we treat as a Howey-style test for prediction markets: if a system can access user keys, hire traders, privilege liquidity, match orders internally, or intervene in outcomes, it is centralized and should be regulated. But not all actions are even regulatable, and that is by design. Where outcomes are objectively verifiable, decentralized markets can do something regulators cannot: remove the need for judgment and let disagreement express itself directly as risk. With Do.Dex’s dark execution to limit copy-trading, objectively defined events for automatic settlement, and structures that spread information across positions rather than concentrate it, the oversight regulation normally provides is replaced by design. (Much as, thanks to blockchain, we can make transfers that no longer require a human to validate them.)

Do.Dex does not seek to govern all uncertainty. It seeks to eliminate the need for a central counterparty in the formation, pricing, and settlement of risk, just like Bitcoin removed the need for trusted intermediaries in value transfer.

Now, consider these 3 recent headlines:

• Trump Media enters prediction market business

• Don Jr. Becomes Senior Polymarket Advisor

  Note: He is also an advisor for Kalshi

• Truth Social offers a Prediction Market called Truth Predict, in partnership with Crypto.com Derivatives of North America.

Now the question:

Isn’t this exactly what, in his time, Satoshi tried to fight with Bitcoin? All these headlines do is highlight the importance of decentralization and emphasize why we need systems that are incorruptible. Advisors and secret interests? We don’t have that problem. We work according to Code Is Law.

Do.Dex is not the first swing at decentralized prediction markets, and it doesn’t claim to be. Centralized platforms have already proved something impressive: when money is on the line, crowds can price uncertainty with surprising accuracy. Where we differ is structural. A centralized venue, however well run, still has a house, and a house has limits: balance sheets, risk committees, regulatory ceilings, and the awkward habit of tightening precisely when volatility spikes and everyone wants to trade. Removing the operator isn’t ideological purity, and the argument for Do.Dex, like any exchange, is economics, not philosophy. When execution and settlement follow fixed rules instead of human discretion, market capacity is set by transparent collateral and open competition, not by hidden limits, internal risk tolerances, or the ability to change the rules mid-game.

Bitcoin solved this in the asset world by removing the middleman whose balance sheet defined the system’s limits. Before it, moving digital money meant banks and processors. Credit caps, settlement delays, frozen accounts, and rules that tightened just when pressure rose. The bottleneck wasn’t technology but institutional risk tolerance. Bitcoin’s real breakthrough was rule-based settlement without a balance sheet; issuance and finality enforced by protocol, and the absence of intermediaries who can panic, overextend, or pull the plug. Capacity is set by transparent network rules, not by someone’s capital constraints or regulatory anxiety.

Decentralization was essential because it eliminated the point at which discretion re-enters the system. A centralized operator, even running identical rules, can still pause, reorder, or intervene under pressure. Bitcoin didn’t create infinite throughput but it created credible neutrality and that’s what allowed value transfer to scale without leaning on any institution. Do.Dex applies that logic to markets. In centralized venues, trading capacity ultimately depends on the operator’s capital and risk tolerance, which shrink when volatility spikes. In a house-less market, depth comes from participants, and participants alone. No one is trading against users or rationing liquidity; risk is distributed across the market, settlement is automatic, and capacity expands or contracts transparently with participation — not with an operator’s stress.

The driver of the most massive financial expansion in history was not new assets, but the growth of derivatives and higher-order derivatives that allow risk to be sliced, priced, and recombined at scale. By placing those instruments on a decentralized, high-performance prediction market, we aim to champion the economic, rather than just ideological, benefits of decentralization. The claim is simple: decentralization should make markets deeper and more resilient under stress. No hidden spreads, no house conflicts, no balance-sheet ceilings. Just participation and transparent code setting the limits, with the same rules for everyone, even when volatility hits.

When people cry out in favour of ‘betting on everything and pricing the future’, or, indeed, when people cry out criticism that this is a ‘gambling epidemic’ and ‘they want to sucker you out of your money’, what people on both sides don’t realise is that, on an essential level, there is no actual difference between basic prediction markets like Polymarket, advanced prediction markets like Do.Dex, and the stock market as it has worked for as long as any of us has been alive. The only non-cosmetic difference is that stock markets are primary markets for trading assets plus secondary markets for events and derivatives (where you can bet on prices), whereas prediction markets are only secondary markets where you can bet on a broader scope of events. What newness Do.Dex really adds is dark trades, and derivatives trading on top of events. The scope of what you can trade on stock markets is now going to be tradable on prediction markets. All of it fully decentralized (so there is no house to bet against), privacy preserving (and thereby preserving fairness), while remaining just as fast (so the trading experience remains efficient).

Of course, privacy is not a magic solvent for one of the main concerns typically levied against prediction markets: information asymmetry. Sadly, nothing is, not on prediction markets, nor on a market like NASDAQ, where the matter is also a major concern. But what privacy does is allow for the removal of a more prosaic unfairness that pervades market microstructure: the ability of intermediaries, brokers, venues, and privileged flow to identify and then tax the weaker side through routing games, selective spreads, front-running, and de facto discrimination by account type, geography, or balance-sheet status. A privacy-preserving venue cannot equalise what people know; it can, however, narrow what the venue itself (and its gatekeepers) can exploit about who is trading, and thereby make the playing field less dependent on access to the right counterparties, pipes, and permissions.

There are innumerable great platforms, ranging from fully decentralized to institutional as it gets, for trading securities. Derivatives, however, have so far been mostly handled on stock markets. Where people used to only be able to bet (remember: ‘play’ the stock market is sometimes referred to as ‘gamble’ on the stock market) on underlyings on large, centralized, institutional exchanges, now people can do so in a decentralized setting. Yes, it is regulated. It is regulated by the Code, which is its Law, which is open source, and accessible for all to view, just like a government-imposed law. And it behooves the people who assume the latter is somehow more ‘legit’ to make that case without overlooking the corruption (and more importantly: the corruptability) inherent to public policy as has been made evermore clear in world events over the recent years. Now, “regulated by code” should be read precisely: code cannot replace courts, fraud statutes, disclosure regimes, or dispute adjudication. And we do not oppose any of that; we welcome the prosecution of fraud and manipulation wherever humans are involved. The claim is narrower and, in a sense, stronger: the parts that can be made on-chain—matching, margin logic, settlement conditions, fee schedules, priority rules—become by definition unmanipulatable, immutable, secure, while everything off-chain ceases to be about the market and becomes about individual citizens who use the market. There will always be people who try to game things, the point is that the same certainty you have on NASDAQ you can have about Do.Dex, or indeed any system really governed by Code as a Law. The market’s plumbing is not clean because you trust the operator, but because you can verify the mechanism. It is the same kind of certainty traders demand from an exchange’s integrity, only here it is obtained not by institutional reputation, but by cryptographic finality and open code. All you need to do is read it.

To be clear, the similarity between cash-flow assets and event contracts isn’t metaphysical but structural. Corporate equities are claims on productive cash flows, and equity derivatives ultimately reference assets that, in the long run, are anchored—however noisily—by the balance sheet. Event contracts, by contrast, reference outcomes: they settle to a fact, not a stream of cash flows. But that distinction does not rescue the stock market from “gambling,” nor does it exile prediction markets from finance. In much of today’s secondary markets, trading activity is less about funding production and more about taking exposure to changing probabilities.

Options markets already price earnings announcements, regulatory decisions, and macro releases, events in all but name, through volatility and contingent payoffs. Prediction markets simply make the underlying uncertainty explicit. The continuity, then, is not that a corporation and an election are the same, but that both can be intermediated through the same financial grammar where what is being exchanged is exposure to risk.

The boundary people draw between stock-market derivatives and event contracts is often more rhetorical than real: both are instruments for buying and selling exposure to uncertainty, and what matters is whether that uncertainty is priced by a neutral rulebook or by a discretionary house. If someone decries prediction markets as gambling, it behooves them to decry stock markets in the same breath. And whether gambling and by extension stock markets are good or evil, ethical or dubious, manipulative or freeing, could theoretically be argued, upheld, refuted, reassessed, and subjected to all the acrobatics of intelligent debate; the relationship, ontological as well as physical, between J.P. Morgan, Caesar’s Palace, The US Government, and Polymarket, could be analysed, compared, contrasted, nitpicked. But what this debate will necessarily come down to is the following question: Who takes your money and what do they offer in return? And (surprise, surprise) we return to the point where it behooves us to remind you that, until Bitcoin, financial assets, being debt based and issued by an entity into whose remit these assets fell, were by definition never really owned by the person holding them. Trustless money changed that. And that is the crux of what Acki Nacki aims to achieve, only with financial markets rather than assets. In casinos you gamble against a house. On stock markets you bet alongside brokerage firms. But a market which is decentralized (even in its interface), dark and privacy preserving, but which all the while offers the trading tools, scope, and tech found on stock markets preserves those markets’ financial ontology, eliminates those markets’ in-built unfairness, and lets traders be sure that they are the ones who collectively: set the price, bear the risk, and reap the reward, without an upper-handed entity sitting on the other side of the trade or dictating the rules according to the whims of its own balance sheet, political exposure, or preferred clientele.

We return to the outset:

If Bitcoin was built for the liberation of financial assets, Acki Nacki was built for liberation of financial markets: markets that are real-time and on-chain, capable of sustaining immense volume, natively algorithmic, and yet fully decentralized. Do.Dex is the expression of that logic at the level of market structure.

We will be publishing the next article in the series in the coming days. If you enjoyed this text and don’t want to miss out:

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It is our belief that no Dex can compete with centralized exchanges unless they hide information. Unless they go dark.

Exposing all order flow has failed cryptocurrencies because transparency produces extraction, front-running, and unequal access. In other words, lit markets distort execution.

Do stands for Dark Order. Dex stands for Decentralized Exchange. Dark Order Dex is the first of its kind—the first dark, decentralized limit-order-book exchange—the only way to do TradeFi on a decentralized blockchain.

Hiding trades is a mechanism long used in traditional markets. This strong precedent has been set in legacy spaces for the simple blunt fact that without controlling information exposure, markets cannot function. If information is fully exposed, trading collapses into extraction, not exchange. In other words, centralized exchanges hide information because without it trading comes down to manipulation.

And yet look at crypto today. All (yes, all) current exchanges are either:

• Very slow and transparent

  or,

• fast(er), centralized, …and transparent.

As such they are vulnerable to unfair trading practices, and a host of attack surfaces, such as those associated with transparent mempools and slow settlement.

Traditional finance solved this by hiding information from traders. Off-board venues and dark pools emerged to prevent information leakage and market impact. Opacity became a requirement for fair execution. On the New York Stock Exchange, trader identity, account balances, and individual order details are hidden, and only aggregated visible size at each price is shown. Traders can further conceal information using hidden or iceberg orders, dark pools, and algorithmic execution to mask true order size and intent. After execution, only trade price, size, and time are legally disclosed—never the trader’s identity or total original order size.

No decentralized exchange has ever brought this mechanism into a trustless environment, into a domain where no operator exists. This is the missing component in DeFi. Today’s decentralized exchanges, by replicating only transparency with AMMs and visible order books, made manipulation structural. No decentralized system offers pre-trade opacity. Meaning TradeFi-grade execution was impossible on-chain… until now.

Dark Order Dex creates a new kind of on-chain marketplace: a hidden venue with no size reveal, and optional price reveal, but strictly after the execution. It extends decentralized systems into areas that once required centralized control. On Dark Order Dex, no-one sees open positions, no-one can predict where the market is going by analyzing them, because the book is never revealed—it remains opaque at all times, revealing only the total size of the buy/sell after a trade is done, and never revealing the price. As a result, Dark Order Dex effectively eliminates front-running, sandwiching, and all forms of order-flow surveillance. It offers no data for prediction. It provides no surface for extraction. Traders act on conviction and past history, not reaction. Outcomes arise from executed decisions, not inferred behavior. All anyone can rely on is what they want to do, based on what the market is doing right now. Identity and balance are hidden, wallets interacting with Dark Order Dex do not disclose state.

Blockchains removed the trusted issuer; exchanges reintroduced a trusted intermediary. In every existing exchange, the operator remains the point of trust, control, and failure. Dark Order Dex has no owner, no authority for custodial trust, and no interface requirement. Anyone can run a client. Anyone can interact with the contract. Listings are permissionless. Pairs are arbitrary. Control is absent by design. It merges dark-pool logic with decentralized architecture. Finality precedes disclosure. Information is removed at the moment of trade. Dark execution becomes trustless, institutional-scale trading without intermediaries is possible, enforcement by oversight is replaced with enforcement by code.

Dark Order Dex defines a market in which seeing is no longer the basis of power.

The trouble with dark exchanges built by centralized entities is simple: If a system has a single point of control, it isn’t actually dark—in any system built by states and large institutions, your privacy is at their discretion. Ultimately, any entity seeking to govern, classify, and control, relies on visibility.

Removing that visibility in a way that is structural is not a cosmetic choice; it changes who is in charge. A market that cannot be seen cannot be steered.

Dark Order Dex applies to execution what Bitcoin applied to issuance. Bitcoin removed the mint; Dark Order Dex removes the exchange. Bitcoin replaced trust in an authority with trust in computation; Dark Order Dex replaces trust in a venue with trust in finality. It takes the core insight of the first decentralized system—that freedom requires removing intermediaries—and applies it to the most sensitive part of trading: information available before the moment of action.

Dark Order Dex runs entirely on-chain on Acki Nacki—The Fastest Blockchain Possible. This means Dark Order Dex provides sub-second finality, no gas payments, and an execution path suitable for high-frequency strategies. Only Acki Nacki can operate a dark market without exposing intent and without relying on discretion. High-speed consensus is not a performance feature; it is the only way to make secrecy objective rather than negotiated. On Dark Order Dex, the volume is never revealed, and the price of the trade is revealed voluntarily and always strictly only after it occurs, and by the time a trade becomes public, it is irreversible. This whole sequence is governed by ‘Code is Law’—the core of Acki Nacki.

On Dark Order Dex:

Intent = not broadcast.

Orders = do not signal.

Size = does not leak.

Spot, perpetuals, options, and derivatives share the same constraint: zero pre-trade information. Algorithms cannot map the flow. Liquidity cannot be profiled. Large orders cross without moving against themselves. Smaller participants do not supply free signals to larger ones. Every trade emerges from decision, not reaction. The conditions facilitated on traditional markets by custodians, brokers, and dark rooms now exist without them. Hidden execution becomes a public good. Privacy becomes a protocol rule rather than a privilege. Fairness becomes structural because no one has anything to exploit.

Traders will have the benefit of parameters they can set in the interface, which also provides an array of trading tools. In fact, Dark Order Dex provides all—from the simplest to the most sophisticated—trading tools found on other exchanges. So not only is this market pure (as in buyers come, sellers come), but it also offers state-of-the-art infrastructure for market makers and for perpetual futures (albeit with cryptographic matters being paramount, perpetual futures have a time limit). Options and derivatives instruments? Provided. And because Dark Order Dex offers privacy of settlement, this severely limits long-term statistical analyses. This is not an evolutionary branch of existing DEXs. It is a break. AMMs exposed everything. Order books revealed everything. Both created predictable paths for extraction. Dark Order Dex eliminates the information they rely on. A market without asymmetry does not need protection, arbitration, or hierarchy. It only needs finality.

The market that forms around Dark Order Dex is one in which power cannot accumulate through visibility. Hence it is fair.

Dark Order Dex does everything NASDAQ does—it is just as fast, and completely fast—while all the while being fully decentralized. Dark Order Dex has a Decentralized User Interface (DUI), it allows for permissionless trading pairs, allows for microsecond execution and full privacy, while remaining compliant.

This decentralization is facilitated with no gimmicks, just with 257 validator nodes on 3 continents and growing running on Acki Nacki Dedicated Decentralized Multicast protocol infrastructure. RPC Nodes are part of the consensus, meaning no censorship and no MEV by design. Its order book = no liquidity pools, no slippage. Fully permissionless liquidity = anyone can deploy AMM or MM.

Dark Order Dex allows for fully permissionless listing, fully permissionless Oracles, spot and derivatives trading, x1000 margin, and no gas fees on single Order Book, with trading fees remaining super low.

How does it achieve microsecond execution? Each trading pair matching engine runs in its own WASM engine in parallel scalable to thousands of Nodes. Like in Nasdaq or ICE clusters. The trading execution is microseconds — the Matching Engine written in RUST runs at native speeds inside WASM. It runs on the fastest blockchain possible — Acki Nacki. The settlement is less than 1 second — average block finality on Acki Nacki blockchain is 750 ms. Block time — 330 ms

All user balances are shielded at funding = full privacy

All Prices in the On Chain Order Book are shielded = full privacy

All individual orders are hidden = full privacy

Prices may be revealed after the execution by the trader discretion = full privacy

Order Sizes stay hidden = full privacy

No order‑flow inference. No adversarial routing. No toxic flow selection.

Dark Order Dex is compliant. It is not created for transfer privacy, there are other protocols for that. The Privacy feature of Dark Order is to prevent market manipulations. And since there is no intention to support any kind of KYC, AML, black lists etc., when exiting Dark Order all users’ previous trades will be automatically revealed.

Taking an unusual step in the DeFi space, the Dark Order invention is patented. Dark Order Dex is an Acki Nacki Open Source project and anyone can use it under its License terms, but young networks (as well as users who believe in it from established incumbents in the space) need to be protected. Therefore if someone wants to launch a Dark Order-like exchange on some other network, they will have to make their own inventions (after all, everyone in crypto had plenty of time to do just that in all those years). It’s only fair.

We believe that decentralized exchanges will always lose if they are not more efficient than traditional ones. Financial Freedom is incomplete without decentralized assets trading, but for them to thrive, they have to improve upon what is already a very long established set of tools and conditions traders have access to. Efficiency has to not only equal, but be greater than everything traders have today. We believe it is common sense. After all, financial markets are already extremely efficient—to create a novel financial market you need to be more efficient, not less.

This is why we see Dark Order Dex not as a transition, but as a baseline. A permanent structure for trading without intermediaries, surveillance, or informational advantage, all the while not compromising a touch on decentralization, speed, censorship-resistance, or familiarity of trading tools. This is a market configuration that quite simply never existed—

& now it does. Dark Order Dex is Dark, decentralized—

—& Free.

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[SOFIA, BULGARIA] February 27, 2025 — GOSH, the core developer behind Acki Nacki, today announced the successful completion of its pre-launch Node Sale, securing backing from validators including Kingsway Capital, Blockchain.com, Hack VC, K5 Global, and Original Capital. As a result of the network’s recently launched decentralized starter protocol, Gossip Ignite, the Acki Nacki mainnet will go live once a critical mass of node operators are active.

Acki Nacki is an asynchronous blockchain protocol that reaches probabilistic consensus in two communication steps. At the heart of GOSH’s vision in supporting Acki Nacki is solving blockchain’s most fundamental technical challenge: transaction speed, scalability and time to finality.

“The network’s Node Owners all share the Acki Nacki vision from beginning to end,” said Mitja Goroshevsky, GOSH founder and Acki Nacki architect, leading the team who spent the 4 years prior building the technology stack for TON blockchain. “The values behind the tokenomics, how we see decentralization, as well as technology, adoption, and how we go to market, are supported thoroughly by all network participants. This level of collaboration defines the future of the decentralized world.”

With a community of over 5 million users in testnet, Acki Nacki is primed to support use cases that include payments, gaming economies, IoT networks, and AI applications. The early ecosystem already includes Popits, an on-chain content-sharing platform, and Die Last, a Web3 real-time strategy game running entirely on-chain.

A diverse group of aligned validators and Acki Nacki’s approach ensures the network emerges organically — owned and secured by its decentralized community from the first block. There is no pre-mine, airdrop, token generation event, investor or team allocation. Beyond its technical advancements, Acki Nacki introduces a radically decentralized economic model. Node Licenses allow owners to validate transactions and mine $NACKL tokens which guarantees decentralization regardless of network state. All $NACKL are distributed as block rewards through a 60-year mining schedule following a deflationary curve.

Validator Quotes

Alexander Pack, Managing Partner at Hack VC commented “Acki Nacki with its innovative consensus aims to have sub-second finality for transactions. This allows new applications to move on-chain and open up the design space.”

Peter Smith, CEO and Cofounder of Blockchain.com commented “We were impressed to see that Acki Nacki has generated a loyal community of developers, followers, infrastructure providers and now investors. We’re excited to play a part in this journey”.

Ramnik Arora, partner at Original Capital said “One of the constraints to more things moving on-chain is the lack of general purpose block space with high throughput and low finality. We’re happy to back Mitja and the Acki Nacki team - early pioneers in asynchronous blockchain design space and aiming to be the fastest blockchain possible.”

“The network's ‘Bitcoin for Proof of Stake’ design and a 60-years mining schedule means that we view Acki Nacki to be a permanent fixture in global coordination and property rights, similar to Bitcoin and Ethereum.” says Kingsway Capital.

About Acki Nacki

Acki Nacki is the fastest blockchain possible. Based on a breakthrough consensus protocol, the Acki Nacki network reaches consensus in 2 communication steps, the lowest number possible in any interactive network, meaning that by design Acki Nacki finalizes transactions faster than any other blockchain that can be built.

Acki Nacki has a community of over 5 million users in its mini-app that allows anyone to verify blocks by playing a simple interactive game on their mobile phones. This means players contribute to network security and mine Acki Nacki network coins as block rewards. Acki Nacki is a decentralized blockchain. There is no token pre-mine, airdrop, token generation event, investor or team allocation.

Media contact:

M Group Strategic Communications (for GOSH)

GOSH@mgroupsc.com

Introductions, Dots, & a TL;DR Section

Have you ever hoped that you could be there right at the beginning? Felt as if you’ve missed the chance? Thought that it’s too late? Now is the time to change that.

Today Acki Nacki announces that she is live! And Acki Nacki allows everyone, no matter the level of experience, to join, validate, and get rewards.

Step into Acki Nacki’s world. She says:

I am friendly. I am not. I am universal. I am personal. But beware, I don’t like liars. I’m the B*tch that keeps you honest.

Acki Nacki is the first blockchain of its kind.

We have already presented some of the reasons backing up this claim:

• Not only is it the fastest blockchain in production, but Acki Nacki is faster than any other blockchain that can ever be built, the fastest possible

• Likewise, Acki Nacki achieves higher levels of security than Bitcoin, coming as close as is theoretically possible to offering maximum levels of security

• Add to that scalability going as high as the total computing power available allows, free transactions, and a perfect set of teeth and suddenly you find before you a blockchain you can really do something with. Like go hiking together, or maybe paint a nice mural

But there may be a few firsts in Acki Nacki’s repertoire that even loyal readers such as yourselves have yet to encounter. And today seems as good a day as any to announce them. These include a game (Another one!? Well, it’s a bit more than that); a token and relevant economic model; a few announcements and reflections; and information on how to join Acki Nacki (in a variety of possible capacities).

Let us begin at the beginning…

A Clicker Game With Real Meaning

Do you want to make something meaningful? But really meaningful… Like The Bible, or maybe Star Wars? We get you, and we do too. Problem is, making something meaningful usually comes with a catch; typically it takes some effort. Until now.

Introducing the Acki Nacki clicker game. Players smash that screen and say farewell to your troubles. Ok, maybe there’s more to it than that. In fact, this mini-app game that operates in part through Telegram takes the entropy created by the user’s interaction with the screen and uses that as a sort of cryptographic primitive to run sub-trees of transaction verifications on the Acki Nacki blockchain. This essentially turns millions of Acki Nacki Telegram mini-app game players into real verifiers of the Acki Nacki network, in turn contributing to network security.

For this they get real Acki Nacki Tokens as block rewards as do Validators of the network. The Acki Nacki Token goes by $NACKL, and we will discuss it a little bit later in more detail

Play Acki Nacki Now:

https://t.me/ackinacki_bot/ackinacki_app

By performing simple tasks in the mini-app game, now, before the network even starts, players gain Boosts that determine their place in the verifiers list. This list works as thus: the higher a player is, the more chances they have to verify and get block rewards. Those lower on the list will still get rewards — everyone will be rewarded — it’s just the rewards are greater for those at the top. Boosts are the first phase that any user can participate in right away. It is a competition, the higher up the list you go, the more you earn.

Phase Two is what? A game? A game and so much more. Through interactive gameplay users will mine Acki Nacki tokens right from their phone and Verify Blocks, meaning that they really contribute to network security. Finally, any user can become a whale and vote for decisions affecting the network.

Try The Acki Nacki Bot Now:

https://t.me/ackinacki_bot/

The Acki Nacki game will start the same instant as the network. There will be zero delay.

The Acki Nacki Node Sale

Then of course there are Validators. In return for running the servers of the Acki Nacki network they get the other part of block rewards. This, however, poses a problem, a zero-state problem to be precise. And the best solution we found in between fiddling with Cat’s Cradles and intense games of chess was to facilitate validation using a Node Sale mechanism, allowing Acki Nacki to be completely decentralized from block zero.

A Node Sale mechanism is exactly as advertised: a multi-stage sale of the validator nodes. We call them Slots. This allows people to buy licenses to run Slots on the network, ensuring full decentralization of the network from the get-go. Acki Nacki has no pre-mining, zero investor allocation, in fact Acki Nacki leaves no tokens that can be allocated to anyone who hasn’t earned them. And anyone wishing to earn them has to mine them: By producing the blocks and getting the block rewards.

Block Rewards will be distributed among Validators with a license as well as the aforementioned Acki Nacki game players who verify and provide additional security guarantees.

From block zero, Acki Nacki is completely decentralized. And this is before the network has even launched.

Why Decentralization Is Vital: A Reminder

Nobody questions security. Nobody questions profitability. But decentralization, though still a trendy go-to, conceptually speaking, doesn’t get the love and attention it both requires and deserves. In other words, many use it as a tag-line, throw the word around, but not every network makes the effort to embed a truly decentralized architecture when designing how it’ll be governed and distributed. There is a reason for this: Decentralization is naturally subversive. It is not that security is essential to facilitate decentralization. It’s that anything at all that facilitates decentralization is essential because decentralization is the only way to fight off societies of control, mass surveillance, and state policing. The narrative should be shifted: decentralization is not art, it doesn’t exist for its own sake, it is a state of being in which any network—be it computational, societal, or financial—must exist in order to call itself truly free.

In many ways we agree with the assessment and definition of decentralization presented by the SEC when using the Howey Test. And it is around answering precisely that criteria that we designed…

$NACKL, The Acki Nacki Token: A Bitcoin Model For Proof-of-Stake Networks

The Acki Nacki network Tokenomics is optimized for maximum decentralization from the start of the network, security and fairness.

In Acki Nacki there are two tokens: a network token and a computation token. The separation allows us to have two distinctive properties of Acki Nacki that is not possible under a one common token design. In Proof-of-Stake systems the security of the network and the participation incentives are largely attributed to the network token price increase over time. But when there is only one token which is used for both security guarantees and network transaction fees its utility will be hampered by its increasing price, which happens with every blockchain we know. To tackle this problem Bitcoin is promoting the Lightning network, Ethereum is trying to balance the gas price, and Solana is processing large amounts of transactions with very low fees. We don’t believe any of these approaches work over time and we see problems with all of them. We take a different approach. We introduce two interconnected tokens separately created to optimally perform each of the functions: network usage and network security.

1. Computation token, called SHELL — is designed to pay for network usage and Guarantor, in such a way its price will never increase, it can only decrease, but will eventually correct itself

2. $NACKL coin — designed to guarantee network security, used for Staking and to provide a claim for a share of Shell revenues but will always accumulate value over time. 

Let’s begin with the $NACKL coin.

Acki Nacki has no predetermined staking rewards; Validators are compensated for their participation in network activities like block production, verification, and transaction processing. Rewards are distributed proportionally among all Validators during a common epoch. Validators not adhering to network rules can be penalized by slashing, or removed.

Each Validator receives proportional reward regardless of if they produced blocks or not. The reward depends solely on their honest participation in the network. Thus the network participants are not rewarded specifically for producing the block but for participating in all stages of block livecycle from the creation and up to the finality.

To prevent staking delegation, Acki Nacki restricts the Validator Epoch contract to only accept messages from Validator private keys, eliminating staking pools. While off-chain staking is possible, it’s not encouraged by the network in any way.

Instead of staking pools, regular participants can engage with the protocol through mobile verifiers, who provide essential security verifications without needing special equipment or becoming Validators.

Fairness in Acki Nacki is achieved by rewarding Validators based on participation rather than block production. The asynchronous transaction model minimizes opportunities for Miner Extractable Value exploitation, making fair block rewards feasible.

Acki Nacki's scalability is managed through a multithreaded execution environment. As network demand grows, additional Validators are required to handle the load, but block rewards do not increase to prevent spam attacks. Instead, the minimum stake required for new Validators is lowered, making it easier to join the network. Over time, a Validator's reputation becomes crucial for earning rewards, promoting honest and efficient participation.

SHELL is a token used to compensate Validators on Acki Nacki for their computing resources and storage. Since Validators incur costs in fiat currency for electricity, network traffic, and server expenses, the SHELL price reflects these costs.

SHELL tokens are sold through a System Pool, where Validators provide liquidity and set a minting rate for various currency pairs. This rate reflects their collective view on the current conversion price. SHELL holders can sell their tokens in the pool, lowering the price until the supply is exhausted. Thus, SHELL tokens can be sold at the set pool price or less.

Payments for SHELL tokens are locked in an Accumulator Contract. $NACKL token holders can burn their tokens to claim a proportional share of this contract. However, this is rare, as NACKL's market price often exceeds its intrinsic value due to expectations of future revenues and a decreasing supply.

The intrinsic value of $NACKL, derived from SHELL revenues, forms a floor value that rises as $NACKL supply decreases. This ensures a continually increasing intrinsic value for $NACKL over time.

The Science Behind It

Acki Nacki is the fastest blockchain theoretically possible. Now you can read the scientific paper it is based upon: “Acki Nacki: A Probabilistic Proof-of-Stake Consensus Protocol with Fast Finality and Parallelisation”. 

The paper has been published by Springer Nature in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS, volume 14586) and you can buy your copy in either electronic or soft cover editions here.

If you care for autographs — it can be arranged, just ping us in the chat, and we will coordinate the delivery.

Of course the implementation of Acki Nacki protocol, currently running in the testnet, is based upon many more discoveries and groundbreaking thinking in computer science and economics. There will be many more papers released. But meantime we would like to thank Andrew Kurochkin, Andrew Lyashin, Alexander Silkov and all the team for the amazing contribution.

Acki Nacki network is going into production in the coming weeks. This will be one of the most decentralized launches in history. Everyone can participate. Go to ackinacki.com website or try the App now. 

For more news and updates about Acki Nacki:

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An Introduction In Numbers

50%. According to the World Economic Forum, 50% of the world’s GDP is in some way dependent on biodiversity. What do we mean by biodiversity? Let’s consult an encyclopedia:

“Biodiversity refers to the variety of living species on Earth, including plants, animals, bacteria, and fungi. While Earth’s biodiversity is so rich that many species have yet to be discovered, many species are being threatened with extinction due to human activities, putting the Earth’s magnificent biodiversity at risk.”

That’s 50%, Half, of the world’s money, in some way dependent on something at risk.

But, of course, money isn’t the main concern…

100%. According to common sense, 100% of homosapiens on Earth have their future survival threatened by the destruction of the planet; “Let's be clear,” these words are taken from the novel Jurassic Park, “The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. (...) But we might have the power to save ourselves.”

We agree we can save ourselves, but we make the point that the central way we must do so is through saving the world we live in. And yes, it is at risk, and yes this is a power we do have…

6. According to a study published in December 2022: “The planet has entered the sixth mass extinction” — otherwise known as the Holocene extinction. “Every day, up to 150 species are lost. Every year, between 18,000 and 55,000 species become extinct,” reads a paper by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. And the paper states very clearly that: “The cause: human activities.”

Whichever way you turn it, it is evident that humans must, simply must, find a way to mitigate the effect our modern existence has on the world’s biodiversity.

Let’s get back to the World Economic Forum…

$711 Billion. The WEF estimates this “is the global biodiversity financing gap annually to reverse biodiversity decline by 2030.” And as the astute observer will surely note: that’s an awful lot of money. According to every economic logic, an awful lot of money needs one of two things: either a universal, intergovernmental agreement on how to spend it without getting bogged down in bureaucracy, or, financial instruments that incentivize private actors to, in the words of a Roman playwright, “spend money to make money.” We have no control over the former. As much as climate activists try, Minister X and President Y have proven themselves lugubriously unresponsive. This leaves us with the latter as, we believe, the best we can do to arrive at a solution to fixing the aforementioned financing gap. We must offer financial incentives for nature positive practices.

But how? What shape do these financial instruments take and how do we ensure they are impactful?

1. We believe Biodiversity credits are one of the most vital financial instruments that backs up meaningful ecological action that is underutilized and under-promoted.

We offer the WEF’s description as a primer: “Biodiversity credits are a verifiable, quantifiable and tradable financial instrument that rewards positive nature and biodiversity outcomes (e.g. species, ecosystems and natural habitats) through the creation and sale of either land or ocean-based biodiversity units over a fixed period.” And we’ll add to that the addendum that biodiversity credits are issued upon a guarantee of biodiversity preservation, restoration, or reclamation. In this regard biodiversity credits share a similar premise in common with another financial instrument used in ecology, namely, carbon credits.

Carbon credits often have “add-on” credit standards, and biodiversity credits are one of these most commonly cited. Called “co-benefits,” they often bear no relation to a credit’s quality. But that’s not how we feel it ought to be. We feel this is all in reverse, that it is in fact carbon that ought to be an add-on to biodiversity, after all carbon deduction is often present in biodiversity issuance due to the prevalence and importance of trees and other flora. Don’t get it twisted, we don’t mean to discount the good done by carbon offsets, but we would be remiss to not also point out that they are often used by buyers as excuses to increase their emissions. They are ‘offsets’ not solutions. In addition, practical questions of efficacy persist—the question of carbon credits’ collective value is one fraught with doubt as to their traceability and transparency and a lack of due diligence. Due to genuine and 'permanent' carbon removal not existing as a prerequisite to carbon credit issuance, those who purchase carbon credits as offsets to their emissions often make little impact in the long term, contributing to the ever increasing emissions despite ever increasing carbon credit sales. We don’t believe the solution is to keep inflating markets around ecology while doing nothing to address the root emissions themselves. The danger with any financial instrument is that it requires growth in perpetuity, so carbon credits, if given an animus, require pollution to increase to be worth more and more. While this could be said of biodiversity, there is a key distinction.

Biodiversity protection through regenerative finance eventually reaches a line of balance. Biodiversity credits are not all permanent, that may be true, but when an actor retires them, it is because they stymie biodiversity somewhere else, meaning they cannot use them again. This acts as an anti-double-spend mechanism. Once retired, these credits become permanent, because some part of them was destroyed somewhere else. There is, however, another opinion: an actor could buy and hold credits, limiting how many of them can be retired, thereby shrinking the amount of biodiversity that can be destroyed. In a cruel twist of fate, Biodiversity credits are what we should really be HODLing (as in, not retiring). The limited supply is literally defined as the mass of the world’s ecosystems. This is why we believe carbon credits that are add-ons to biodiversity have more impact than carbon credits alone, which do not have a physical delineation which makes them permanent.

The earlier we begin the more we protect

Education is a crucial topic in biodiversity proliferation — one of the most groundbreaking subjects in ecology. When anchored around principles of high-integrity, equity and inclusion, and transparency, biodiversity credits can generate benefits for the Indigenous People and local communities - the ultimate custodians and stewards of nature which have safeguarded it for generations. Simultaneously, biodiversity credits can create positive value for business by reducing exposure to physical nature risks, keeping pace with regulatory changes, supporting positive nature outcomes aligned with consumer preferences, and securing access to competitive finance.

We believe that biodiversity credits carry in weight just as much, if not greater, significance as carbon credits do. A vast majority of ecosystems have already been heavily damaged if not destroyed because of human activity. Biodiversity credits exist to preserve ecosystems, and even restore as many of them as possible, and not destroy more. It’s about more than just global warming. What’s the point of going completely carbon neutral if the marine life, flora, fauna, and greenery of the earth is destroyed and covered with skyscrapers and eight lane highways? And how can it be, at all?

The News

We write about all this to preface the announcement of a new partnership between Integrity Certificates and rePLANET to build an end-to-end decentralized pipeline for biodiversity credits, all of which is powered exclusively by GOSH. It offers financial instruments for rePLANET’s nature based credits issuance assuring widely established scientific methodology and decentralization to address the biodiversity crisis

Meet The Players

Integrity Certificates is a nature value chain certification partner which drives market success for nature-positive value chains through fast, reliable validation and certification, tailored to real-world business models and applications. rePLANET is a for purpose company driving large scale ecological restoration and protection through private sector funding through developing high quality carbon projects for investors where the biodiversity benefit is quantified; Biodiversity Led Projects that partially or completely rely on the issuance of Biodiversity Credits; Insetting, which quantifies the impact in terms of carbon emission reduction units and biodiversity gain units for investments for Insetting Projects; and Nature-based Consultancy.

Beginning from funding and going on to peer review, this end-to-end decentralized pipeline for nature based credits, built on GOSH, incorporates widely-established scientific methodologies of peer review of biodiversity projects with GOSH’s transparent, immutable, decentralized version control platform that offers tools for peer review, document management, form construction, git repositories, and more, all running entirely on-chain, available freely. Credits are issued on-chain and logged in a decentralized registry, whose architecture and stakeholder management is ensured by Integrity Certificates. Credits can then be traded on a primary marketplace and secondary market decentralized limit order book exchange for commodities. Finally funds are redistributed from every project to local communities, to facilitate benefit sharing, which, too, is done in a decentralized way.    

Buyers don’t need promises, they need guarantees. By eliminating the need to trust an entity, both those working on biodiversity development, and those who provide the vital private sector financing are assured that the results of any project are seen through until the end, and the interests of every actor across the value chain are aligned.

Addressing urgent planetary challenges, the climate emergency and biodiversity crisis, requires a significant increase in scale, and the main, much maligned, obstacle to scale is lack of trust in private and public institutions. The partnership allows rePLANET to leverage decentralization to ensure the integrity of large-scale biodiversity projects across the whole value chain, with scientific peer review verification, and certification at scale, unlocking necessary regenerative financing. As part of the agreement, Integrity Certificates assures the verification, issuance and registry services for rePLANET biodiversity credits. Coverage of rePLANET, in particular its Transylvania Grasslands Project, by the Dow Jones first weekly Biodiversity Market Report, which states that 11,683,980 credits are listed in rePLANET’s entire portfolio of projects, together priced at an estimated total value of $95,015,300 if generated at posted price levels, is evidence of the maturation of the nature capital market. Both in terms of project proliferation, credit issuance, and recognition by established financial institutions.

Only with end-to-end decentralization can we be certain that every step we take to saving the planet’s biodiversity is guaranteed to be reflected in the credits people buy. GOSH offers an immutable attestation that every essential prerequisite to ensuring that the whole pipeline is decentralized, from peer review to issuance and registry, to the market, and finally to the local communities. The solution developed by Integrity Certificates in partnership with GOSH and rePLANET ensures verified biodiversity gains on the blockchain, bringing full integrity and trust to Biodiversity credits, aligned with the market needs for trust and integrity. 

Commodity Marketplace

Most current efforts around biodiversity and carbon are project-based, where people associate credits with a particular project, the reason for this being that there is no ubiquitous standard for these credits. Thus, it is not a commodity, thereby preventing wider participation and distribution of this vital resource.

Why is it a vital resource? Well, because ecological action cannot be limited to token gestures or to the goodwill of governments. The human task of protecting the planet should be seen as something akin to a supply chain, ranging from international environmental policy at one end, and local action on the other, and while activity on both of those ends has been covered and encouraged, in between them are a wide range of actors: corporations, small businesses, city planners, telecom service providers, construction products, real estate developers, farmers, and individual consumers, to name a few. How do you provide a comprehensive framework for all of these actors the world over to significantly reduce their environmental impact? Moreover, how do you do that without resorting to calls for an end to the entire human cycle of production and consumption? After all, this cycle has undeniably allowed for increased living conditions for billions of people… The answers to these queries are manyfold and in constant discovery and review. But one of them, we strongly believe, is not only to involve the trade of carbon and biodiversity credits, but to facilitate strict and universal standards for their review, realization, and traceability. That’s exactly what GOSH in partnership with Integrity Certificates and rePLANET is doing.

Peer review of biodiversity credits necessitates specialized expertise, to weigh and assess each project. The natural problem this process faces, then, is very obvious: Specialized expertise doesn’t scale. (This is one of the reasons for the aforementioned failures in biodiversity certification.) And all the while we simply cannot afford for it not to scale, otherwise the planet will continue inching ever closer to the destruction of its environment. Therefore it is imperative, urgent, of paramount importance, that we turn biodiversity credits into commodities that anyone can buy, and participate in efforts to rid the economy of incentives for planetary destruction as much as we possibly can. The prerequisites to this end are:

• Universal standards for biodiversity credit peer review; as well as open, transparent, and decentralized scientific peer review tools

• Issuance of commodity certification, in this case an on-chain tokenization of biodiversity credits

• A global platform for issuance and trade of biodiversity credits as commodities

• And financial instruments that would enable markets to be plugged in

  ---

Enter GEX, The World’s First Decentralized Commodity Marketplace

What do we mean by secondary marketplace? When we issue credits, they can be issued to anyone, a fund, say, that sponsored development of the area denoted by a credit, but they are not the final destination, rather the final destination are enterprises like gsk who can buy credits on the open market as a commodity, and can use these credits to retire them, or they can resell them. Someone can speculate that the price of these credits can go up, and we build financial instruments on top of that on GEX. What are the financial tools offered and how are they unique? They are not unique to the commodity market, but we have futures and options, and all the other features on the chicago mercantile exchange. Why is it so important that it’s decentralized? How is that better than what we have today? Because of the huge problem with credibility with carbon certifications, which were not decentralized, leading to fraud. We want to eliminate all the points where credits can be tampered with or issued with the wrong methodology. Everything is transparent and immutable. Decentralization is the in-built mechanism that prevents fraud, exactly for the reason blockchain always prevents fraud: you have a well established scientific methodology and issuance process, now what we need is to ensure that this methodology is followed and everyone can check on that, and all the artifacts are available and immutable — so anything we say about any supply chain we can say here — also all the financial instruments should tightly follow the same principle, so we know when, where, and how the money has been distributed, so everything is transparent, because we also want to ensure that the money is really always going to the developer, to the local area, and is distributed in the correct way.

So that any corporation, small business, city planner, telecom service provider, construction product market, real estate developer, farmer, any entity or individual, can use GEX to buy and trade biodiversity credits that they can trust as they would any other commodity, without them needing to be experts or verifying the entire chain of what it is they are buying. In this way, it is no different to buying, for example, aluminium, or nickel, on a commodity market; there, like here, buyers don’t feel the need to verify the entire supply chain of that aluminium or nickel, they take it for granted that a commodity is verified. When we say ‘take for granted’ we don’t imply ignorance, but rather that certain assumptions are always made when trading — wheat, for instance, is always wheat; market actors can buy features on this wheat, on the implicit assumption that whatever the grade of quality of this wheat, it nevertheless conforms to a set of standards around wheat production. And now, biodiversity credits can say the same.

The underlying technology is provided by GOSH, running on the Acki Nacki blockchain; this technology includes decentralized peer review, based on its bespoke and most secure, formally verified implementation of git on-chain; GEX, the marketplace and secondary market exchange; and an issuance platform developed as an App on GOSH.

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Die Last is a lovingly crafted MMORTS game on the Acki Nacki blockchain. It is focused on regeneration, which involves imbuing a decaying landscape with new life. Players regenerate the ecosystem of a rotten world through teamwork, deception, cunning, and strategy.

Die Last is conducting a novel in-game token airdrop, during which players must dig and craft Lost Objects, the shards of the forgotten civilization. They need to find a Spy Radio to craft an NFT, which is key to participating in the upcoming token airdrop. This NFT allows players to buy Die Last tokens. Players can use this possibility themselves or resell their NFT. Die Last tokens are needed to participate in the airdrop. The number of required tokens ranges from 0 to 100 and depends on the NFTs, each with unique characteristics. The luckiest players will be able to find NFTs that require 0 tokens to participate in the airdrop, meaning they won't have to buy any.

Didn't find an NFT with a 100% discount? No problem, keep digging. In addition, each NFT you find will increase the number of tokens you get with the airdrop. For example, if you have 100 tokens in your wallet and crafted 6 NFTs, you'll get 80 tokens during the airdrop. The more NFTs you have, the more tokens you will get during airdrop.

Have fun and participate in the first-ever Web3D playtest. The game has no servers and runs entirely on the GOSH blockchain using the Acki Nacki protocol. In future steps, anyone can build their game essence, which will also be stored on the blockchain.

Step-by-Step Guide

• Visit the Die Last Airdrop Page

• Click "Join Playtest"

• Create a new or log in with an existing Steam account

• Add the game to your wishlist

• Find the "Join the Die Last Playtest" caption and click on the "Request Access" button in the Steam page

• You'll receive Steam's email notification once we approve your request

• Stage 1️ - Objects Farming: install the game and travel through the game's world; your task is to dig various Lost Objects scattered throughout the area and collect as many as possible. You are looking for "English Spy Radio" items necessary to craft an airdrop message, but you will also need other objects for crafting

• Stage 2️ - Message Crafting: once you collect at least four items, you can craft a message. Each Lost Object you use to craft the message changes the parameters of the future NFT. Then, send the message to Da Vinci's Parachute Factory, which you can find in the Message Recipients list in the game world. Ensure that at least one of the crafted Objects is a Spy Radio, or the message will be destroyed!

• Stage 3️ - NFT Minting: Da Vinci's Parachute Factory will generate an in-game NFT with unique airdrop parameters once a message is sent. To claim it, you must visit the Die Last website

• Once NFT is claimed, please stay tuned for an announcement with upcoming airdrop details on our socials

• The number of tokens is limited, so the airdrop follows the first-come-first-served (FCFS) principle; take your time with what you can do today!

Moreover, we've launched a quest campaign with BitGet Wallet and DeGame. Complete quests to earn rewards totaling $3000+ USDT. Join now and happy digging!

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The LAST AirDrop is live. To participate you need to register in Die Last DAO here and request access on the Die Last Steam page here.

It has been precisely 67 days since the announcement of Die Last, the all-new, first-of-its-kind massively multiplayer online real-time strategy game that’s run entirely on-chain. We announced previously that it is developed by GOSH, but today we write about Die Last’s decentralization; its token that all players can now earn through the first-ever in-game token airdrop, and that allows for Die Last to be governed entirely by players.

As of today, anyone can enter the world of Die Last—even if in a limited capacity— a game where all players together regenerate the ecosystem of a decaying world through teamwork, subterfuge, cunning, and strategy. While it’s fair to say that so far not all of the development of the gameplay and Die Last’s unusual world is yet to be completed, those who want to see how you can play a game on the blockchain — with properties of the blockchain, and with properties of the classic video games we’re all familiar with as well; and those that may be curious about the Die Last Token, can earn it now through in-game NFT crafting: The first feature of Die Last available to the public. To play the full game when it is released you can add it to your Steam wishlist now.

Die Last & Its Game Token Airdrop

Die Last is a new type of game. It’s played entirely on-chain but the game client doesn’t contain a single blockchain element. A game where you revive a post-industrial world after it has finally been destroyed by our civilization, because yes, the bad guys won. A game that creates a crypto asset with every move you make, but only makes them available on 3rd party websites. Now it’s time to plant trees to earn Karma, build pipes, join Guilds, and participate in league tournaments to stay alive. Find lost objects to craft secret messages. Go rogue, wander with your dog, steal other players’ Karma and grow stronger with every battle.

Die Last is completely open source and available for contributions from anyone. Its source code will be stored and managed on-chain via the Die Last repository and DAO on GOSH, governed entirely by the players. The initial code has been developed and maintained by a small distributed and decentralized group of developers, and all are welcome to contribute and join at any time. This means You govern Die Last. All decisions regarding the game are taken via Die Last DAO on GOSH blockchain. Players earn Karma while playing and can use this Karma to participate in decisions regarding the game development and governance. 

Introducing: LAST, The Die Last Token

LAST is a tradable commodity token that can be exchanged with all revenues generated by the game, proportionally. You can get it via In-Game Airdrop or buy it from someone later on. Karma is the in-game credits that you earn and spend while playing. The amount of LAST a player has determines how much Karma they can use for DAO Voting, which cannot exceed the number of Tokens a player owns.

LAST Is Now Launched Through The Die Last In-Game Airdrop

The LAST AirDrop is live. To participate you need to register in Die Last DAO here and request access on the Die Last Steam page here.

How The LAST AirDrop Works

After registering on Steam and getting access to the game when the AirDrop starts, players need to dig for Lost Objects. Once you find a Spy Radio they need to craft a message which includes the Radio object and send it to the Parachute Factory. In return they will be send an NFT which you can claim at

http://dielast.io

using their in-game seed phrase. 

The amount of Tokens that will be created will be determined by the LAST In-Game AirDrop, but they will number no less than 100 mln. All tokens will be distributed via AirDrop, but pay attention, not every AirDropped token is for free. There is a discount rate from 100% (means Free Token) to 1% (which means you will get one free token on every 100 tokens in your Wallet). So for every free token 1 token for sale will be created. The supply of tokens is regulated by the initial demand during the AirDrop. That means the LAST Token is determined by how much people are ready to invest into a new product, introducing users to a trading paradigm, as they see the token price and they can decide whether they want to convert this NFT into a Token using money. In this regard it operated like an option. The Die Last AirDrop can be thoughts of as less about tokens, and more an AirDrop of call options — that is: a right but not the obligation to buy — a Token at a certain discount to the future price

What is LAST Token distribution

It is very simple and transparent:

All Tokens will be AirDropped and sold by DAO in proportion decided by LAST AirDrop as described above, all proceedings of LAST Token Sale will be going automatically to DAO Treasury, meaning back to you, increasing the Price of all other Tokens. 

All Tokens that have not been claimed are placed back into DAO treasury and distributed by decisions of DAO to support development and marketing of the Game. Tokens will be sold on Launchpads or Decentralized Exchanges by the decision of the DAO. And the DAO can decide to list Tokens wherever it wants.

Die Last is distributed via http://dielast.io, as well as Steam, https://store.steampowered.com/app/2872100/DIE_LAST/, and other gaming marketplaces. Anyone is more than welcome to create distributions for other platforms. It is fully decentralized, after all.

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The authors of the Acki Nacki Protocol Paper are going to Vegas!

Ok, maybe not, but they are going to a conference in Abu Dhabi, where Mathematician and Researcher at GOSH, Nikita Sattarov, will be delving deeper into Acki Nacki, and its implications in radically rethinking what a blockchain can do.

The Lowdown

The Acki Nacki Protocol Paper has been accepted to The 6th International Workshop on Application Intelligence and Blockchain Security (AIBlock) in conjunction with the Applied Cryptography and Network Security Conference (ACNS 2024), held in Abu Dhabi in March of this year — a testament to the research that has met the rigorous standards of the conference, known for its focus on contemporary challenges and advancements in cryptography. In addition, the conference is sponsored by the Springer Nature Computer Science Book Series, which offers The Acki Nacki Protocol Paper greater potential to reach readers interested in radical innovation in computer science and cryptography.

Recognizing the opportunities for collaboration and further development that these publications will bring (but mostly because they will now be allowed to go outside and see some natural light), the authors of Acki Nacki will be presenting their work at AIBlock at ACNS 2024 in-person. More precisely, the representative will be the aforementioned Nikita Sattarov. For anyone interested in attending the event and engaging with Nikita, we offer a glimpse at the event schedule.

Read more about Acki Nacki

With the unveiling of Acki Nacki on December 2nd, 2023, GOSH has outlined its vision for a groundbreaking consensus protocol which, we believe, can solve for the existing problems of scalability and security within blockchain technology. Now, this vision has become reality. The Acki Nacki TestNet is live. With the protocol in production, developers have the opportunity to try Acki Nacki hands on via this link.

This is facilitated in part through a collaboration with TVM Labs to give access to crucial cloud infrastructure tailored for Acki Nacki. TVM Labs also extends an invitation to developers on other networks to join this enhanced cloud platform, with all code openly available in this repository for community use and contribution, now with GraphQL access extending to all TVM networks. This feature is supported and maintained alongside the popular TVM SDK development framework.

You can try out the Playground instantly, find essential resources, and start building here: https://www.tvmlabs.io/

Yes, Acki Nacki Going Live Is That Important.

The development of Acki Nacki was guided by a singular idea: to facilitate a highly scalable, multi-threaded, multi-core execution environment capable of sustaining myriads of operations in parallel. By realizing this, Acki Nacki achieves finality in under 1 second. All while ensuring that the probability that Acki Nacki will be compromised is lower than that of Bitcoin… In fact, so secure is the guarantee offered by Acki Nacki that the chance of a security breach is lower than the likelihood of a comet hitting Earth and causing a catastrophic meteorological event.

Acki Nacki's architecture is the state-of-the-art blockchain. Proof of this technology’s capacity to transcend current limitations.

By delivering three blocks per second on a single thread and enabling any number of parallel threads (constrained only by hardware resources), the concept of near-infinite scalability now has the potential to be functionally realized. As we mentioned in a previous post, the throughput of transactions on Acki Nacki is limited only by the total computing power available. 

As part of the announcement of Acki Nacki, GOSH is holding a Hackathon & Grant Program called the Underworld Computer.

We saw that there is enormous potential for development on Acki Nacki, and immediately organized a Hackathon, as part of GOSH Hacks & Grants. Now, the Underworld Computer Hackathon is ending soon.

The Hackathon’s objective is to develop wallet applications; traffic visualization and indexing tools; Validator and CI/CD features; Security tooling for advanced cryptography used in Acki Nacki; Pre-Compile TVM instructions; ZKP for proving TIP-3 tokens; and much, much more. Any tool developers think might be beneficial to the Acki Nacki community is welcome. The Hackathon ends in just over a week. So make sure to participate.

Thought Of The Day

Acki Nacki arrives at a crucial time for blockchain technology. Despite the hype, mass adoption remains elusive. And there is a clamor of financiers, regulators, and developers all in a rush to go faster, leaner, cheaper. With near-instant block finalization, no limit to how much it can scale, and being free to use — all while offering universal security guarantees — Acki Nacki is the first blockchain technology that is truly accessible, truly applicable to a wide range of applications beyond just decentralized finance. The journey of Acki Nacki, from its conceptualization to its acceptance to AIBlock at ACNS 2024, mirrors the evolution of blockchain technology itself—from a niche area of interest to a cornerstone of future digital infrastructure. As we look ahead, the contributions of Acki Nacki are poised to shape the landscape of blockchain technology, heralding a future where the digital and decentralized world is not just a vision but a practical reality.

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TL;DR

• As part of the launch of GOSH L2 we have partnered with Q

• The Q Protocol provides a universal layer for Governance Security in the decentralized world

• One of the features is an integrated dispute resolution process, which enables DAOs on GOSH to settle disputes in a fair and transparent way

• DAOs on GOSH will be able to write up a constitution of their own, laying down the community’s rules. If decisions are suspected to be unconstitutional, they can be challenged via Q’s dispute resolution framework. This ensures that conflicts are resolved and the DAO community’s values are upheld

• Because GOSH L2 offers easy ecosystem integration for any project, Q’s dispute resolution system extends to any DAO on different networks seamlessly

• Q goes beyond the principle of ‘Code is Law’ to offer dispute resolutions on questions that cannot be answered by smart contract binary yes-no, and if-this-then-that programming

• Q has integrated the Rules of Arbitration of The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) as a dispute resolution mechanism in order to provide procedural certainty of independent international arbitration to all participants in Q, and to ensure high standards will be met in the arbitration proceedings.

• Any DAO’s Constitution will be set up as a private contractual agreement that will be able to expressly select private arbitration as its dispute resolution mechanism and exclude state courts where possible. Arbitral awards from such disputes may be enforced in any court of competent jurisdiction. This allows DAOs and their members to operate upon the basis of a private contractual agreement and achieve an unprecedented degree of legal certainty.

• If you code an agreement between two parties as a smart contract, instead of printing that out onto paper and saying “this is a legal signature,” you will be able to quickly initiate the dispute resolution process on the blockchain and connect off-chain private arbitration back on-chain. This is an essential step to helping GOSH be set as a standard for decentralized governance in private and public sectors where building consensus is essential to security and operations.

But what do we mean by ‘Code is Law,’ and why can’t we just rely on it alone?

Part I: A Breath of Fresh Air

When Bitcoin first established the idea of Code is Law, it was in order to govern the first ever trustless monetary network in a way that assured decentralization. If it can be coded somehow, the thinking goes, it can become law, regardless of conflict; provided enough people accept the code.

According to our friends over at the SEC, this is precisely what makes Bitcoin the only non-security network. Because there is no formal decision-making mechanism, decisions made on Bitcoin essentially come down to: should the code in the node be changed, and therefore changed in the network itself. These decisions are made as all participants, individually, of their own accord, decide to run this or that code.

The outcome is that some blocks on the network have this new functionality (which should always be backward-compatible), and miners can either attest to, and build on top of them… or not. If they do, the network upgrades. If a block is not accepted, the block creator loses money, and either way decisions often follow a rigorous debate, leading to multiple blocks with different node-code running on the network simultaneously. The Bitcoin Cash fork actually came about because of disagreements in this process. The process of accepting new blocks, however, is essential to fixing bugs and upgrading the software.

So what does this mean? Well, one can take the view that Bitcoin’s Code is Law principle is not a collective decision-making process. Everything is done individually, and no formal vote is held. The SEC, in concurrence, believes that simply running software on a user machine does not constitute formal decision-making.

But what if we were to call any consensus building among humans in a decentralized framework a process of organization? In that case Bitcoin, too, would be a type of DAO network, with the obvious implication that Bitcoin is the most decentralized DAO network in existence, and in history. 

DAOs are nothing more than a higher level of abstraction of Code is Law. DAO members still run code on their local machine, but have to send it to the network which needs first to accept the correctness of a vote, and then smart contracts need to be processed to calculate the results of the voting. It is a smart contract which executes the decision, but at the beginning the decision is still made by a human being. And as a rule, that human’s decision, in any DAO, is still subject to consensus.

In the event of a conflict between miners within Bitcoin, or between members of a DAO, it nevertheless stems, and finally depends upon, human beings making decisions. In this sense, there is no difference between Bitcoin’s voting process and a DAO’s voting process. The distinction is made only on the assumption of actors’ roles.

But what happens when a DAO doesn’t reach consensus? When humans cannot reach a decision collectively of their own accord, or when one collection of individuals makes a decision which another group believes to be contrary to the best interests of the whole, Q steps in to provide access to independent arbitration through the well-established practices of international arbitration. The interests of the whole are defined by a constitution (the purpose of which is always, at the outset, to codify the values of the organization in law).

Web3 has struggled to offer users answers to questions that don’t follow a clear binary. Simple code structures and algorithms struggle to convey many ambiguities and motives behind their very existence. If they could, AI would be conscious, Alexa would also be your legal consultant, and we wouldn’t be writing this blog post. This is why, despite Code is Law by and large being an excellent governing principle for blockchains, it cannot answer for when no consensus can be reached for uniquely human reasons or when it is dependent on some off-chain actions.

This is where Q offers DAOs on GOSH a solution.

The claim goes: Because there are humans in the process of accepting a proposal in the first place, at no matter what level, there should be other humans who are able to correct mistakes. This is based on the correct assumption that there are some rules which cannot be strictly coded. If a constitution states “only those who are over 18 can hold DAO tokens,” there is no easy and straightforward way of verifying this through code. Indeed the very point of a constitution is to make rules that cannot be resolved through Code is Law. That cannot be coded.

More importantly, Q offers DAOs on GOSH minority protection. In any DAO, like in any government, a majority of members can make a decision — just because it’s in their best interest — without following the rules… the law. Even if this law is code. In making these illegal decisions they can heinously impact minorities; as happens, comically, when members of a blockchain mint more tokens for themselves year in, year out… And happened tragically when the US government flouted its own laws to steal Indian land in the 19th century. Both of these events represent the power of a majority, and which can, and should be fought against with binding legal recourse. This is where a DAOs constitution kicks in. A constitution, let’s remind ourselves, is a way for an individual to have protections against the absolute power of the state, in this instance against a DAO, and centralizing forces within it, in the event that a majority makes a discriminatory decision.

Part II: How It Works

Q has integrated the Rules of Arbitration of The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) into its governance framework for dispute resolution in Web3. Now, on-chain disagreements can be resolved off-chain by a private arbitration court.

The DAO Constitution will be set up as a private contractual agreement that will be able to expressly select private arbitration as its dispute resolution mechanism and exclude state courts where possible. Arbitral awards from such disputes may be enforced in any court of competent jurisdiction. This allows DAOs and their members to operate upon the basis of a private contractual agreement and achieve an unprecedented degree of legal certainty.

The enforcement of decisions rests on the public identities of root nodes, maintaining accountability and acting as a check against the pseudo-anonymous protocol validators in charge of transaction-processing. Web3 requires a system that has both technical reliability as well as nuance and accountability. This means a framework that embodies ethical governance and recognizes the intentions behind actions.

With Q, there’s an evolution beyond Code is Law, allowing age-old judicial principles to further decentralization, and ensure transparency, discretionary decisions, and due process in DAO governance structures and a binding connection to the world off-chain.

Part III: DAO Constitutions — Alternatives To Regulatory Bodies

An algorithm regulates itself. What regulatory bodies do is direct what bearing algorithms are able to have, on that which is beyond what is coded. In other words, what regulatory bodies do is less about regulating the algorithm itself and more about regulating how an algorithm impacts users in the real world. That interaction is key.

If you code an agreement between two parties as a smart contract, instead of printing that out onto paper and saying “this is a legal signature,” you will be able to quickly initiate the dispute resolution process on the blockchain and connect off-chain private arbitration back on-chain. This is an essential step to helping GOSH be set as a standard for decentralized governance in private and public sectors where building consensus is essential to security and operations.

This partnership between GOSH and Q ensures that DAOs on GOSH have access to a sophisticated system that provides the certainty of technically binding transactions while simultaneously offering discretion, nuance, and accountability. Q enables discretionary decisions, democratizes access to international private law, and ensures a path for resolution of disputes on GOSH, and the decentralized world more broadly, according to the highest of standards to achieve legal certainty between all parties involved. Q’s decentralized governance system for the Web3 world allows DAOs on GOSH to work through legal frameworks and even binding contracts based on international private law. Ensuring decentralized protocols are a viable alternative to old-world legal systems, courts, and institutions.

On December 2nd, GOSH held a special event at the Madlenianum Opera & Theatre in Belgrade, Serbia and announced Acki Nacki, a new and groundbreaking decentralized network architecture which just rewrote the rules of what a blockchain can do. In this post we have embedded the event video so you can rewatch it on YouTube now, and we then go into more detail as to the reasoning behind Acki Nacki and how it works.

TL;DR

• Acki Nacki is a multi-core, multi-threaded execution environment where anyone can deploy a contract and execute many operations in parallel with under 1 second finality

• By delivering 3 blocks per second on one thread, with an unlimited number of possible threads, Acki Nacki can sustain an infinite number of transactions per second — directly proportional to the amount of computing power that exists in the world — making it the only true solution for scalability on the blockchain

• For this reason, Acki Nacki is the only blockchain technology today capable of processing the amount of data needed to run a decentralized world computer, which is exactly what GOSH is building; a decentralized backend that can power any cloud service, providing access to databases, and empowering high usage applications, stored entirely on the blockchain. Now, on GOSH, any feature can be executed by any user, immediately

• Acki Nacki also offers higher security guarantees than Bitcoin — Not just that, but the probability of a comet hitting the planet Earth and destroying life as we know it, is higher than the probability that Acki Nacki will be broken in the same time period

• Acki Nacki allows GOSH to be the first blockchain with a Freemium business model, and the powerful tools GOSH offers — everything from scientific research to finance to software security — now have much fewer friction points to mass adoption than any decentralized solution running today

Introduction

Abstract

The use cases enabled by GOSH demand so great an amount of data to be processed, that no blockchain technology today can actually cope with handling it entirely on-chain (which, of course, is GOSH’s raison d’etre). We always take as a benchmark the example of the Linux repository; the Linux repository has 50 million objects, ergo 50 million smart contracts. If a user wants to push it onto the blockchain, even if you take at face value what some of the fastest blockchains tell you that they can do (despite the fact that none of it has ever been put into production) it will take 5 hours for the Linux repository to be uploaded. And that is just one user uploading one simple repo. By comparison, they can do this in a few minutes, on a regular basis, with GitHub.

GOSH applications require enabling millions of documents to be processed, and aim to set new standards for work on collaborative projects around a single document, etc. etc. Every aspect of our work requires a tremendous amount of data to be processed on-chain, such that quite simply no blockchain today can do. Ergo we need a new blockchain architecture that will enable us to do what cloud computing can do.

For cloud services, which provide access to databases, and empower high usage applications like GitHub, Microsoft Office, Google Docs, etc. etc. to be stored on the blockchain, there needs to be a decentralized backend that powers these services. We spoke about this for years. We knew that it's coming… And we weren’t ready. Acki Nacki is about solving this problem; a problem of real scalability and finality, in the sense that every user click on the same button on a document, doesn’t require them to wait for minutes…

…Or even for seconds. Research shows that what users actually consider a working state for software is when they wait less than a second for each action. Can we do anything about that? That’s why we created Acki Nacki.

Definitions

Faster is just a marketing term

What is faster? Faster is really the amount of data you can process in a particular time frame. So what are you optimized for? The amount of data or the time? Faster is the relation between these two metrics, how many objects are there and how fast each of them is processed. If you're talking about a small object, like deploying a smart contract on a blockchain takes X seconds, is it fast? And if you want a million smart contracts to be deployed, is that considered to be fast? How long should you wait?

So there is no real definition of faster. What we need to talk about is the finality and throughput. That is: the time the object is deployed, how long it takes for the object or its associated task to be performed, and how many tasks we can perform simultaneously. These two metrics actually intersect. For example, the TON blockchain, theoretically, has a lot of throughput — although still not enough for GOSH — and you can process many objects at once, yes, but the finality of the TON blockchain is still only about 13 seconds. Or you can have very quick finality in Solana, but the throughput will be limited to only a few thousand transactions simultaneously. That’s the tradeoff: Which would you be willing to sacrifice, finality or throughput?

What Difference Does It Make?

The Problem

Blockchains have different architectures. Of course we're not going to review them all, but we are going to compare them on a given example. There are two major groups of consensus algorithms: Nakamoto consensus and Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus. Nakamoto consensus is probabilistic. The idea is that the longer you build on top of one chain, the more security guarantees you have, with time, and that ultimately your transaction is secure. That's why in Bitcoin, we wait usually between six to 10 blocks to build on top of the chain in which our transaction is included to be sure that any attack on this consensus would have no economic incentive following a certain number of blocks. The amount of electric power you would need in order to mine all of these blocks, include transactions, and withhold them, would be so great that, economically, it's just not possible to assume that someone would be prepared to pay such cost, while actually corrupting the chain would not bring any value in comparison to the price of electricity. That is the main security guarantee of Nakamoto consensus.

BFT consensus, on the other hand, outlines certain assumptions — namely, that if 66% of the validators in the network are honest, and we can guarantee that a transaction is signed by 66% of network participants, it need not afterwards be reviewed or rejected. If you have more than 33% of the network, you can stop the BFT consensus from working entirely, but you will still need 66% to include a malicious transaction. There are some other esoteric algorithms like Algorand (which is marginal and not without its difficulties) and Solana. But Solana also employs BFT on a certain level. And therefore to achieve finality in Solana, with a very low probability of being corrupted, you need to wait 13 blocks. Still four or five seconds. Not fit for purpose.

There are optimizations for BFT, because BFT, like Nakamoto, is a good algorithm; but it's a one chain algorithm, meaning you cannot do sharding, and it still takes a lot of communication. Aptos say they optimize BFT to be about one second. But the problem with that is that even if you can have a finality within a second, it's still one chain. You will not be able to scale this in parallel execution because you will need a lot of these BFTs to work together. And once you have several BFTs working together, then you need a consensus between them, which is what TON attempts to do. The architecture being: A lot of BFT consensuses being regulated by one BFT, which is the master chain, a consensus of consensuses. Which adds another layer of communication and delays finality.

So bottom line, we don't have a single algorithm today that can really guarantee finality under one second, and also support parallel operations. When GOSH talks about consensus algorithms, we use the analogy of it being a processor. For us, the blockchain is really a processor where we run our smart contracts, which are our programs. It's a distributed kind of a processor, all of which today operate like single threaded processors — the Intel 8086 — and blockchains try to make them as rapid as they can. Single thread processors, but really, really fast… The problem with that process is it has the fundamental limitation of still having only one thread, meaning it cannot (really) execute many operations in parallel. Solana says: “Ok, we have a way around this (kind of). Like a collator, our block producers will put the blocks inside a huge machine that has many, many physical processors that will execute in parallel.” The first problem with this is you need to put all transaction results into one block, leading to blocks that are simply too large, an issue Vitalik Buterin brought up when announcing Ethereum, stating that Bitcoin blocks are too limited in capacity to sustain a world computer. If you try to perform many operations on a single processor the communication bus has to be really fat. The second problem is that if you have a single threaded machine, you tend actually to create single threaded applications; those with one smart contract like an ERC-20 token, used by millions of people. Imagine, this contract has 20 million users and they try to transfer these tokens between them. It cannot be executed in parallel on time. You'll need to shard this contract somehow to be able to execute it, even in this single thread environment with these many cores in the block producer’s machine. There’s still a bottleneck. Naturally, certain operations will be split into chunks, because if you want fast finality, you need a block to be released very quickly. And so in order to release blocks very fast, you need to chop off the amount of operations you can perform inside the block, and then get it to another block. So they have a block size of 250 milliseconds. It then moves on to other validators, but you still wait for 5, 6, 7 seconds for finality. The architecture is OK but it's not really what we're looking for when we talk about the ultimate processor. 

The Search For The Holy Scale

How Acki Nacki Works

When we talk about a multi-processor, we mean a multi-core, multi-threaded execution environment where you just deploy the contract and it executes across many cores. Of course, you need to write the program in a way that will be executed on this multi-core machine, but before you write the program, you need to actually create this process. So what did TON do, and this is TON’s contribution to blockchain science, is that it created this virtual machine which allows for parallel execution; a multi-threaded asynchronous virtual machine, where every execution can be terminated with messages and sent to another virtual machine, which would then execute it's operations. And if we want to build this distributed parallel processor, we need to have an asynchronous core, like those on a physical processor, talking to each other and trying to execute operations really fast in parallel. And that's how this process should look. There is no such architecture in production today. The TON protocol concerns multiple BFTs that can achieve high throughput only theoretically. But as yet there has been no solution for functionality. Here are the requirements that we have set in front of us for Acki Nacki.

The basic mechanism of Acki Nacki; how it works in the most optimistic scenario where no one attacks the network:

• You need a block producer, and then you need to apply that block as fast as possible to the state machines of other nodes. A block producer is somebody who takes the transactions received from users, executes them inside the virtual machine, creates the block, and sends it out to the network. Now, if the block becomes too big and there are too many people who want to execute, then the block producer splits the block into another block and another block and delegates the work to another block producer. So now, instead of one big block, we'll have two smaller blocks, which will both be executed, in parallel, by two different block producers. If you have a lot of load, theoretically, you'll have a network full of block producers. Each of them will propose smaller chunks of this block.

• Now when they collate the block and they propose it to the network, it is sent to everyone in the network, and everyone happily applies, making the network pretty damn fast. How fast? Well, the whole network would operate off the time it takes to collate the block, according to the limited amount of transactions supplied to the block, and the broadcast time it takes to deliver this block to the block keepers and the other participants in the network. We unpack the block end-to-end and update the current local state with all transactions. So far, so good. This is the fastest theoretical way to update the state of the network. That's what Acki Nacki is. We could stop right here. The Acki Nacki block producer takes the transactions, applies it to the block, and sends this block to everyone, every 330 milliseconds. And in roughly another 200 milliseconds on top of that, all block keepers will get the block, apply it to the state, and send an attestation, which takes another 100, 120 milliseconds, and in under 500 milliseconds a created block was propagated to the network. The randomly selected verification of blocks, and the propagation of the result (which is what Acki Nacki is, as we will describe in the section below), takes at most 500 milliseconds, but because everything is executed in parallel, neither block producers nor block keepers need to wait. 

• All in all, from block creation to transaction result in the whole network takes less than a second. We have a happy network of all nodes in sync…

But what if someone is not honest?

Ack/Nack/You’re ‘It’

What Acki Nacki Means.

We need consensus, lest all involved propose whatever the hell they want. 

Enter block keepers.

In Bitcoin the prerequisite to running the network is just to prove that you mined the hash. Once that’s satisfied you can happily produce the block, and everyone applies it. And if someone sees a mistake, they then simply accept another block by someone else. That's how it goes. And that's why it's slow.

In our case we say: “Wait a second. We need to validate this block somehow. So instead of proposing and waiting until another (correct) block will come out, let’s recognize that this is just one block producer. It wasn’t everyone who created the block. If we don’t recognize this, then yes, it will take 13 minutes for all the blocks that could possibly pop up to be processed, and for the block to be accepted.” The solution we find, and one that is backed by the numbers, is as follows:

• What we're doing is amazingly simple. Let's imagine that we have a random number that is known to the network after the block was created by a proposer, that all agree upon, but that is not related to block validity — just a random number — and each block keeper will have their private key only known to them. Now let’s divide this random number by this private key and with Modulo division. If the Modulo ends with, for example, zero (0), then they know for themselves that they need to validate the book. A process entirely random and unpredictable

• Now we don't know how many block keepers there will be, we don't know who they are, and the block producer doesn't know who they are, meaning no collusion is possible. These random nodes will just validate this block. If they see that the block is not correct, they will send a negative acknowledgement/not acknowledged message (NACK) — the definition: “a signal used by computers or other devices to indicate that data transmitted over a network was received with errors or was otherwise unreadable … sent by a recipient to report that a specific, expected signal must be re-sent for some reason … NACK messages often include the ability to report on the reason the message is being NACKed” — And if they see the block is correct, they will send an acknowledged message, or ACK. Hence why the protocol is called Acki Nacki

• The Acki-Nacki isn’t just for posterity — it has teeth. When an Acki-Nacki finds that a block is not correct, they will send the NACK message to the network and the block producer will be stripped of all of his money and be kicked out of the network immediately.

Safety In Numbers

How Acki Nacki Is The Most Secure Consensus Algorithm

Now let's prove the security guarantees this protocol actually provides.

This protocol offers greater protection, by several orders of magnitude, than Nakamoto consensus on the Bitcoin network. This is because the chances that a block producer will issue an incorrect block and not be caught by Acki-Nacki and be issued an ACK message is so slim, that it is significantly slimmer than an incorrect block being issued on Bitcoin. If a malicious block producer has colluded with 49% of the network, the chances of them getting the next incorrect block without being NACKed is still (also) significantly lower than in Bitcoin. Moreover, even if a malicious actor has colluded with 49% of the block keepers and, in a DDoS attack, he pumped the other 51% of the network, — even with all that —the network will only stop, but will not be corrupted.

How? Well there are several possible attacks on this algorithm. One is an honest attack; I'm just a block keeper, I'm just a block producer, who happens to have a malicious block. My chances of being accepted are significantly less than in Bitcoin. Then if one colludes with 49% of the network, again, the chances are slim. But what if an attacker gets creative? If someone sends a block to only a part of the network, let’s say to only 49% of the network, signed under the pretense of not having, not needing any consensus. Would that block be finalized if it won’t go to the whole network? Well, once every node on the network gets the block, without needing validation, this block will be attested, and a message will be sent with the hash of that block signifying the acknowledgement of its difference. In other words, everyone will know exactly what the case is, including that of possible maliciousness. The block is finalized not when the block is received, but only when the attestations of another X percentage of the block keepers of the network are obtained. Nothing is built from this block. You don’t explicitly check it. But the information about it is broadcasted to the majority of the network in an act that would exponentially mitigate future danger, seeing as any successive block will have an ever decreasing likelihood of receiving an ACK message. All this adds roughly another 200 to 300 milliseconds of delay to this block. And therefore we're saying it's about a second full second to the actual finality.

There is no attack that can corrupt the block with even minutely sufficient probability. Malicious block producers will be NACKed in virtually every single imaginable case. We believe nobody will take that chance.

So what about trolls? Spammers who just produce one block after another in a giant wave? We bring up this question to illustrate another point about the interaction of finality and security in Acki Nacki. We need to wait for an ACK or NACK answer to be sent to the network. If we finalize the block too fast, a possible NACK will not reach all the block keepers. This is why, as we're going to release the block every 330 milliseconds, we're going to wait three blocks on average. A possible attack could be a block producer introducing new blocks too fast, on the assumption that the blocks will already be finalized before a NACK is sent. Therefore, when the block producer sends a block to the node, they must wait 330 milliseconds before an acknowledgement is sent out. This is not the case for the first block. But if the block producer immediately follows that block with another block, the block will just wait. So even if the block producer is starting to send many blocks at once, the network itself, through what we call the Broadcast Protection Mechanism, will also protect the timing at which blocks are verified to ensure a ACK or NACK message can always be sent; at, on average, 330 milliseconds per block, on top of the three stacked blocks. It’s worth noting that Acki Nacki is not a stacked protocol, but what it does is allow for sufficient time for the block to be finalized.

So what if an Acki Nacki will be lazy and won't verify any blocks? Well we have a mechanism protecting against that too. Upon detection, a lazy Acki-Nacki will be slashed. So they have every incentive to be active.

But we don’t think that simply saying Acki Nacki offers higher security guarantees than Bitcoin is interesting enough. Instead we looked for more unlikely scenarios, and we found that the probability of a comet hitting the planet Earth and destroying life as we know it, is higher than the probability that Acki Nacki will be broken in the same time period. That says it all.

What Did We Learn From All This?

Some Closing Thoughts

We claim that the entire issue with Web3 is pure technological limitation. The decentralized world computer could not be built because blockchains today just can’t sustain it due to issues of gas prices, block size, throughput, and finality. That’s what led to effectively the only real application possible in Web3 being financial services. And any system dealing exclusively with financial services is always going to be a breeding ground for malicious actors, like scammers… Cue the exclamations: “Sam Bankman-Fried is blah blah!” We know. It’s a product of the design and its limitations.

But, one way or another, it won’t be that way forever. No doubt when simple word processors were hot stuff, OpenAI was pure science fiction. And right now blockchains are the word processors, and things like decentralized governments and a fully anonymous internet are the purview of Isaac Asimov imitators. What is not speculation is that technology will progress, and GOSH is at the forefront of this with Acki Nacki.

What the world computer will look like we do not know, but what we do know is that a multi-core-processor-like consensus is this next big step that will ensure it looks like something. Here we see a horizon of new worlds, that we will mold into the old one, but imbued with hope and possibilities for immense advancements.

“My land in sight, a Kingdom of Peace… If only a man conquers her.”

Live from the Madlenianum Opera & Theatre in Belgrade; Mitja and other GOSH members take the stage to present Acki Nacki, a new and groundbreaking blockchain architecture which changes the rules of the game.

As part of the announcement, GOSH will be holding a Hackathon & Grant Program called the Underworld Computer on GOSH Hacks & Grants. The Hackathon will promote developing tooling, advanced features, and security. The Grant Program will include research in advanced cryptography, probability and game theory, and other possible improvements for Acki Nacki.

GOSH is also presenting a new Validator game called Die Last, where Validators will participate in the GOSH network and sustain Acki Nacki attacks. The aim is to make it through the brutal onslaught and those who Die Last will be rewarded. Note, after Die Last, all previous blockchain records will be childsplay.

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📆 Add to the calendar December 2nd 17:00

TL;DR

• GOSH is launching Hacks & Grants. A new tool integrated into DAOs on GOSH which allows any DAO to create its own Hackathon or Grant Program of any size directly from a decentralized repository

• As part of the launch of GOSH L2 we have partnered with Ethernity CLOUD, a decentralized confidential computing company, to provide a secure and tamper-proof environment for developing and deploying open-source software. Ethernity CLOUD is a key partner in the development of Hacks & Grants

• The first Hackathon arranged by Ethernity CLOUD using Hacks & Grants is designed with the precise mission of empowering volunteer services and civilians to build security solutions for the software that runs their operations

• Hacks & Grants includes an automated reward system, allowing users to tailor their Hacks & Grants program’s rewards to include any currency, be it dollars, euros, pound sterling, Bitcoin, Ether, ERC-20, or DAO tokens. Users can also bring different sponsors to their Hackathon, and the Hacks & Grant program supports multi-token reward pools

• All code, files, and results are stored in decentralized open source code repositories, meaning all Hackathon rules are automatically enforced on-chain, and in a trustless environment

• Grants on GOSH allow collaborative problem-solving events to be financed, and so sustained, for a longer period of time

• Hacks & Grants has no waiting period for entry

  ---

Introduction

As part of the launch of GOSH L2 we have partnered with Ethernity CLOUD to bring new levels of usability, security, transparency, and confidentiality to the world of open source software development. By combining Ethernity CLOUD's decentralized confidential computing ecosystem with GOSH, a secure and tamper-proof environment is provided for developing and deploying open-source software. Ethernity CLOUD as a company provides tools to empower any inventions and developments in need of security solutions incorporated inside their product. As part of the partnership, we are together launching a Hackathon on the newly released Hacks & Grants program on GOSH.

The Call

We call upon you, all builders of things digital and bold, to join us in escaping the shackles of time, raise aloft ideas from the bosom of your keyboard, and join Hacks & Grants, for a series of Hackathons designed to let you realize your groundbreaking ideas quickly, and with recourse only to your spirit and ability.

Hackathons are a short competition with an active phase lasting two or three days, with one of the main features of a Hackathon being that they are short. This allows for fast conversion of ideas to projects or projects to products. In emergency situations, quickly arranging volunteering teams under the roof of a mission can make a vital difference. And the first Hackathon arranged by GOSH as part of Hacks & Grants is designed with the precise mission of empowering volunteer services and civilians to build security solutions for the software that runs their operations in these, as we all know, times of life and fate. 

What Exactly Is Hacks And Grants?

Hacks & Grants is a framework that allows any GOSH user to build their own Hackathon or Grant Program directly from their decentralized repository. They are designed to be inclusive and meritocratic, allowing you to build open communities in which the experts that judge and give feedback to participants are not some emerald-clad throne dwellers but active members of communities on GOSH. Expert Tags, a unique feature of any Hackathon on GOSH, allow expertise to be quantified and seen by all, so that any participant knows exactly who is giving feedback and allow any judgement to be weighed by the community accordingly.

Hacks & Grants also uses an automated reward system, allowing users to tailor their Hacks & Grants program to include any format. Not only, like in other Hackathons, do winning participants get rewarded, but all of it is also built-in and automated — be it dollars, euros, pound sterling, Bitcoin, Ether, ERC-20, or DAO tokens. Users can also bring different sponsors to their Hackathon, and the Hacks & Grant program supports multi-token reward pools. The rules are transparent, with all code, files, and results stored in decentralized open source code repositories, meaning all Hackathon rules are automatically enforced on-chain, and in a trustless environment. Hacks & Grants also allow users to grow their developers’ community, find partners, or partner with GOSH. Hackathons are all about collaboration, and GOSH allows anyone to tailor their Hacks & Grants program to any group effort. It is worth noting here that Hacks & Grants has no waiting period for entry.  There will be several iterations in this series of Hacakthons hosted by GOSH, but let us discuss the first one.

A Hackathon For Volunteer Services

The first Hackathon run by GOSH is tailor-made for security solutions for volunteer services who are dealing with emergency situations worldwide. Their effectiveness, the impact it could have on the world, in any locality, depends entirely on the tools that people on the ground have at their disposal. This Hackathon is expressly designed to provide, refine, and deliver security solutions to those who lay their time, and on occasion lives, on the line.

An example of one such solution is to ensure greater protection of communication channels between volunteers, organizations, and civilians. Communication security is a common problem because it essentially deals with protecting the information that volunteers are exchanging between each other. Civilians are all too often not aware at all about how to protect themselves, not only in terms of physical health and condition, but also in terms of cybersecurity. For this reason one of the stated aims of this Hackathon is to provide targeted educational products for civilians so that they can better understand how they can manage their data, contact those in need without risk, deal with the onslaught of misinformation, and use cybersecurity and media security guidelines to protect any and all of the information that they are exchanging in their time of need.

Knowing what information you should or shouldn’t send, how to decipher scams, social engineering, measuring the honesty of people you don’t personally know — these are all cases that can be termed as ‘awareness about security.’ And GOSH can satisfy any and all prerequisites for raising such awareness. This event allows developers to realize solutions to these urgent quandaries faced by volunteer services and individual civilians. 

But this is just one example. In practice, any security solution for those in need that can be proposed by a participant, can also be realized. Hacks & Grants is a framework for any Hackathon’s execution, so that we need not rely on one single solution.

There are 2 essential features of GOSH that make it the most secure, reliable, and effective platform today offered to people in need of security and collaboration. On top of being a control version system, GOSH allows anyone to collaborate on and share documents in a fully decentralized (and even anonymous) way. This means anyone who works with docs, tables, notes, planners, calendars, or any other tool, doesn’t need to rely on centralized cloud providers for the security of their information. As one can imagine, for those trying to organize themselves efficiently and at times in a manner clandestine-by-necessity, this function makes a world of difference. But arguably an even more important feature are the mechanics for determining honesty; quantifying expertise; and for honest, transparent, and weighted decentralized decision making. These we put as one feature because they all provide the single crucial function of full accountability and effectiveness for those who would otherwise have no other place to turn. GOSH is offering decision making instruments for honest Hackathon execution that, we hope, can make decentralization the standard.

But What About The Bit Called ‘Grants’?

Grants, in this case, allow for competitions that last longer and are more vast in scope than a single Hackathon. As we’ve mentioned earlier, one of the advantages of a Hackathon is its short duration, which means dynamic decision-making, quick innovation, and problem solving. But even the most successful of Hackathons aren’t necessarily fit for all purposes. Certain solutions take years to develop. Grants on GOSH allow collaborative problem-solving events to be financed, and so sustained, for a longer period of time. One of the main mechanics in-built to GOSH that serves as an instrument for the execution of more durable Grants competitions is the vesting of tokens over a prolonged period of time. 

A Short Video About How To Set Up Your Hackathon or Grant Program:

Alert, Alert

Hackathon #1 is called MinD Hack, as in ‘Man In Danger.’ You can help him from wherever you are, coming very soon.

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TL;DR

• GOSH GitHub Sync is an easy way to enable GOSH DAOs to work side by side with GitHub Repositories

• Build Consensus around your code and organization through DAOs on GOSH while continuing to use GitHub’s familiar development tools

• Using GOSH GitHub Sync is easy, with a step-by-step guide to setting it up included below

Introduction

A year ago we introduced the Login with GitHub option to easily migrate your repositories to GOSH when you sign up. Now we are enhancing this capability enabling continuous synchronization of your GitHub and GOSH repositories.

Synchronize your GitHub repositories with GOSH, and work with both platforms side by side. Changes in a GitHub repository appear in GOSH, offering both the benefits from GitHub features, convenience, and efficiency; while not compromising the decentralization of code and governance, as assured by GOSH.

Here’s How It Works

github-actions are triggered by changes in the github repository and execute their script. User’s changes will be pushed automatically to GOSH. The script will clone the repository, and its history, and push these branch changes to the matching branch in GOSH.

How To Set It Up

Step 1, Prerequisites

• Create a separate bot account in GitHub, and register this bot on GOSH

• Add this bot to the DAO with the repository you want to synchronize

• GitHub Sync requires CONFIG_JSON and GOSH_URL set up

• You need only a single bot for the whole DAO

Step 2, For CONFIG_JSON set up to copy bot credentials

• You need to copy config.json content under ‘Show’

• Go to repository settings > Secrets and variables in GitHub, and press ‘New repository secret,’ and add credentials

Hint: you can use CONFIG_JSON once for your whole organization

Step 3, GOSH_URL

• GOSH_URL is a variable in github-actions. It must point to the GOSH repository (the one we sync changes to)

By clicking on ‘New repository variable:’

Step 4, copy/paste

Enable github-actions by creating a /.github/workflows folder in your GitHub repository. You can also create it in your user interface and copy the content below, and GitHub will create the folder for you automatically. Create a gosh-sync.yaml file inside, in this aforementioned folder and add this content:

name: Sync with Gosh

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  sync:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      -
        name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          # Only a single commit is fetched by default, for the ref/SHA that
          # triggered the workflow. Set fetch-depth: 0 to fetch all history for
          # all branches and tags.
          fetch-depth: 0

      - name: Sync
        env:
          CONFIG_JSON: ${{ secrets.CONFIG_JSON }}
          GOSH_URL: ${{ vars.GOSH_URL }}
          GOSH_TMP_BRANCH: github_${{ github.ref_name }}
        run: |
          # install GOSH Git Remote plugin
          wget -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gosh-sh/gosh/dev/install.sh | bash -s
          export PATH="$HOME"/.gosh:"$PATH"

          # set user secrets
          echo "$CONFIG_JSON" >~/.gosh/config.json

          # sync github -> gosh
          git remote add gosh $GOSH_URL
          git switch -C $GOSH_TMP_BRANCH
          git push -vv gosh

After this is done, all of the changes pushed to GitHub will be seen on gosh (except the branches’ names). Starting from this first commit onwards, every change to your GitHub repository will be mirrored to GOSH. For example, if there were changes in a main branch in GitHub, these changes will appear in github_main branch in GOSH and once DAO decides to accept those changes they can create a proposal to merge changes from github_main branch into main, inside GOSH.

For more news about GOSH:

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TL;DR

• GOSH Ethereum Layer 2 (GOSH L2) is the fastest, most scalable, and first and only Freemium-model Ethereum L2 on the market

• This is ensured because GOSH is an advanced scalable asynchronous multi-threaded TVM-based blockchain, tailored for a sharded development environment on top of Ethereum, providing high speeds and great scalability, and allows select partners to run smart contracts on-chain for Free

• GOSH L2 is an operating system on top of Ethereum with an aim to become an interoperable operating system of all blockchains

• Any DAO on GOSH can become Ethereum Layer 2 with a click of a button. DAO members can choose to have their token available on Ethereum, effectively making any project its own L2. And because GOSH L2 supports ERC-20 Tokenization, GOSH offers easy ecosystem integration for any project

• GOSH decentralization and security is guaranteed by Ethereum. In final production, all contract state transitions on GOSH L2 are verified by Ethereum, withdrawing funds from either blockchain is easy, and to break the system would require both Ethereum and GOSH to be corrupted or stopped simultaneously

• GOSH L2 is launching with 12 Partners: The Government Blockchain Association (GBA), Ethernity Cloud, DeVote, GEX, DeSci World, Q, deScier, WOW DAO, Pruvendo, Hero2Quest, Triscale, Viete

• GOSH L2 includes free transfers between wallets, so users can transfer ETH for free inside GOSH, with USDT functionality coming soon after

• GOSH  is a production ready on-chain Git DAO platform that can be accessed via app.gosh.sh while GOSH L2 is a fully trustless solution, accessible with limited functionality as a Beta right within the GOSH user interface

  ---

Part I: Why We Don’t Need New Layer 1 Blockchains

Just typing the words “why Ethereum…” into a Google search yields suggestions reflecting two very common, and diametrically opposed, views about the future of the world’s foremost blockchain network not named BTC. Namely: “Why Ethereum will fail,” and “Why Ethereum will succeed.” This discourse is no doubt vital, if a bit of a nuisance, and like most things in Web3, we can’t possibly make a definitive statement about what will happen in two decades one way or another. What we can rely on are facts, of which the most striking is that since Ethereum, not a single new Layer 1 blockchain has succeeded in achieving its own stated aims. We don’t say this to criticize and point fingers, most things are beyond our control. No, we say this to truly ask: What is the motivation to build a new Layer 1 blockchain?

Ethereum is a winning proposition. The majority of blockchain developers build projects for Ethereum, and speak to any of them to ask why and they’ll point you to users, liquidity, decentralization — in other words, they’ll point you to the fact that Ethereum works.

At this point I hear you, dear reader, rising from the chair and wailing: “It’s slow!” “It’s expensive!” And various expletives of ever increasing hurtfulness. And yes, you are correct: That’s precisely why we built GOSH L2, to take what already works on Ethereum, and fix what doesn’t. Many of the new L1s (like Solana, Aptos, Everscale, NEAR, etc.) have great, but really great, tech. They are lightning fast, scalable, cheap… But they have not achieved mass adoption. As a result, because the architecture of most L1s requires a stake be put down, these smaller chains are always (yes always) effectively centralized. GOSH was, until recently, no exception. An obvious issue solved by GOSH’s new Ethereum Layer 2 functionality.

The reason, at its core, for why a blockchain needs to be decentralized is to ensure a group of colluders does not jointly agree to corrupt the state of the blockchain. This is the central guarantee any blockchain must provide. Having a decentralized network is the most effective, and workable, solution to this conundrum. With the launch of its Layer 2, GOSH’s decentralization is secured by Ethereum; providing, for the first time, a full guarantee of the incorruptibility of the GOSH blockchain. This is ensured by the ability of Layer 2 to prove any state on the blockchain. If there is a threat that someone corrupts the network, users can securely retreat from Layer 2 back to Ethereum. If a proof is written to verify the state of Layer 2 and any subsequent stage gets compromised, users can revert to the preceding, uncompromised state. Should a Collator maliciously create a compromised block, the system will revert to the state of the previous block. This is because a verified and intact Layer 2 state exists on Layer 1. Hence, if any transition in Layer 2 gets corrupted, the previous clean state can be used as an exit point. This also emphasizes censorship-resistance: because users can exit if any form of censorship emerges, there is zero incentive for a Layer 2 to censor transactions. All block producers always possess the potential to censor on any blockchain, but because exit actions are uncensorable by design, it serves as a guarantee of censorship-resistance. In Bitcoin or Ethereum it is always possible any block producer could refuse to include a transaction in a block. If a user can’t find a single block producer who would include their transaction, it is effectively censored — and effective transaction censorship happens every day in BTC and ETH. That does not mean they are not censorship-resistant however. Censorship-resistance is not an absolute possibility to post anything at all, after all the dissemination of information is never purely individual and always, by necessity, includes other people. So when we say censorship-resistance what we mean is that the power of censorship is not concentrated in one single party.

Returning to GOSH’s decentralization being secured by Ethereum: In the final stages of Layer 2 production, all contract state transitions on GOSH L2 are verified by Ethereum, withdrawing funds from either blockchain is easy, and to break the system would require both Ethereum and GOSH to be corrupted or stopped simultaneously

And so the aim of GOSH L2 is to take the unadopted, and revolutionary, advances in blockchain innovation and bring them to where they can benefit users en masse. And in so doing to ensure the decentralization of GOSH.

Part II: The Vision Behind GOSH L2

Instead of fragmenting the community of people who care about decentralization by building a new Layer 1, the principle behind GOSH here is to unite all blockchain networks into a single interoperable operating system. Whether or not Ethereum or Bitcoin or anyone at all emerges as a leader in the blockchain space, GOSH will execute this principle either way. The proof protocols that run GOSH L2 can be adapted to any blockchain. For some networks this will require more adaptation than to others, but for all: It can be done. And Ethereum is, today, the most practical solution to ensuring the decentralization which is at the core of this project to build a single operating system for all of Web3.

The natural next question is why not use, for example, Cosmos, which built a layer of interoperability across all blockchains? The answer is: it’s not just about interoperability. Meaning, it’s not about one blockchain communicating with another… it’s having one blockchain guarantee another. And Cosmos does not provide what we call outsourced decentralization. Interoperability is not a guarantee. 

Part III: Free For All, All For Free

The cornerstone of GOSH’s mission to build an interoperable operating system for all blockchains is not only about closer cross-network integration; it rests on the free use of the blockchain that is afforded possible by GOSH Ethereum Layer 2. A free blockchain allows anyone (developers, scientists, government officials, environmental activists, gamers, financiers, etc.) to leverage the technology of a decentralized, distributed ledger — it’s security, immutability, transparency — while using it exactly as they would Android, or Linux. We believe that the only way for Web3 applications to compete with Web2 is not, as has previously been suggested, the easy management of seed phrases or other such appeals to efficiency. While it is important to make products that are easy for users to navigate, what is most important is to make it free.

Let us look to the past to illustrate our example: The voiceover IP revolution would not have happened if it was just cheaper calls. By the 1990s (especially with calling cards having become commonplace) calling was already very cheap. After the breakup of AT&T in 1984, the price of long-distance and international calls tremendously decreased. It was sometimes as low as 1¢ per minute. And none of this had any real bearing on what the world of telephone communication would become once Skype burst onto the scene with free calls and clear voice quality. That was a revolution. Telecommunications companies tried to compete by moving their minutes to voiceover IP, promising better quality, decreasing prices ever more, but still, still 1¢ per minute could not compete with free. The same thing is happening with blockchains now. We have per transaction costs, except on GOSH… This is GOSH’s raison d’etre.

But how, I hear you ask, will you protect against spam? There are many free product providers (think GitHub, YouTube, or your own darling mother), with an option to pay for premium services. And that is what GOSH replicates with what we call the Free Zone, where any decentralized application can be built, distributed, and used for free. Only apps in the Zone can benefit from free smart contract usage — if you want to build your app for free, you must submit it to the Free Zone, which is governed by the GOSH DAO. The DAO votes for acceptance into the Zone, in line with the requirements set out to make sure people don’t spam or extract gas to wallets. The DAO will check contract code, and decide whether or not to host a contract. It’s as simple as that. 

Part IV: O, What A Freemium Blockchain Can Do

Let’s agree on a premise: The only truly successful use case for blockchain technology today — built at scale, playing a major role in the discourse around and adoption of blockchain, having generated trillions of dollars in growth — is financial trading (And yes, NFTs are purely about trading). One of the reasons behind this is because today the only real avenue decentralized projects have of generating revenue is through tokenization. GOSH offering free app development and a platform on which to distribute them, is in fact GOSH offering decentralized businesses new avenues of revenue generation that go beyond trading and tokens.

Returning for a moment to Ethereum being a pricey platform to use, we claim that the only transactions people are willing to pay for are financial transactions. So that could mean transferring someone else money, for which they are prepared to pay an, at times significant, fee. But ask people to pay ongoing fees to use an app, and the scope of apps on the market concentrates around finance. Take away the fees and new possibilities appear, offering users of blockchains the chance to really use them.

With GOSH’s Free Zone our aim is very simple: Any decentralized application can be built, distributed, and used for free. GOSH L2 launches with 12 partners (The Government Blockchain Association (GBA), Ethernity Cloud, DeVote, GEX, DeSci World, Q, deScier, WOW DAO, Pruvendo, Hero2Quest, Triscale, Viete), each of which represents a new unique application on, and for, GOSH; planting the early seeds of what will, we hope, be a slew of new revolutionary use cases never before seen in Web3.

One of the important steps GOSH has taken to ensure that such uses of GOSH L2 remain, in every way, decentralized, was to offer functionality for any DAO on GOSH to become Ethereum Layer 2 with a click of a button. With GOSH L2, the members of any DAO can choose to have their token available in Ethereum, effectively making any project its own L2. And because GOSH L2 supports ERC-20 Tokenization, any project’s integration across ecosystems is, well, easy.

GOSH L2 includes free transfers between wallets, so users can transfer ETH for free inside GOSH, with USDT functionality coming soon after. 

Part V: Some Quotes From Our Partners

“From the beginning, GOSH has played an integral part in driving discourse on blockchain adoption in the private and public sectors through the AI and Secure Software Supply Chain GBA Working Groups. GOSH becoming a Layer 2 on top of Ethereum now offers exciting opportunities to drive blockchain adoption in a way that ensures decentralization, security, and efficiency.”

— GBA Executive Director Gerard Daché.

“Adding an Ethereum Layer 2 functionality on top of a decentralized git on-chain was a major driver in uniting DeSciWorld with GOSH. The potential offered by cross-network integration to the advancement of decentralized science is immense, and we look forward to seeing the many use cases that come from it.”

— DeSciWorld Founder Joshua Bate.

“We are thrilled to offer GOSH support through this new stage of development and provide all their users with the infrastructure to run development tasks privately and with the highest level of security. GOSH Ethereum Layer 2 is, without a doubt, going to open the door for more developers to benefit from their unique software development environment.”

— Ethernity Cloud Founder and CEO Iosif Peterfi.

GOSH  is a production ready on-chain Git DAO platform  that can be accessed via app.gosh.sh while GOSH L2 is a fully trustless solution, accessible with limited functionality as a Beta right within the GOSH user interface.

We will be posting more about GOSH L2 and our launch partners. Don’t miss out and:

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In the world of software development, security has never been more paramount. As dependency trees grow more intricate, the threats to the integrity of software supply chains also expand. Recognizing these challenges, AnyTree has been pioneering tools and methodologies to ensure this integrity. So much so that today developers can rely on GOSH AnyTree to guarantee the security of their software delivery.

We also find that offering this guarantee through the use of the GOSH platform alone, as in a monolith, is very restrictive. This is why GOSH is proud to announce that AnyTree now works with any Git storage. Developers worldwide use GitHub, GitLab or private Git servers as their primary code repository, so now there’s no need to change their workflows, no need to upload any private or public repositories to any external service, and they can keep using their favorite package managers, and be sure that their software supply chain is secured by GOSH AnyTree.

Today, the keystones of scientific research are reproducibility (which is arguably more important even than repeatability) and verifiability. It's not always possible to reproduce everything, but scientific research of worth should be able to do so to some degree. But when we talk about software a problem arises: We are talking about reproducibility in a world where we don't have pure function in real life, and so, at a high level, reproducibility and verifiability are dependent entirely on the very code they are supposed to reproduce and verify. Deep SBOM on AnyTree is a tool designed to solve this cyclical problem. And it isn't just a fancier version of the traditional SBOM.

A traditional SBOM offers a list — a static representation of software components. In contrast, the Deep SBOM provides developers with an unprecedented level of visibility. It's not just about identifying the components but ensuring that they reproduce precisely the same artifact every time they're built directly from their SBOM. The idea is simple yet profound: by detailing every step, every resource, and every dependency in the process as this process is ongoing, discrepancies become glaringly evident. Such transparency is vital because even minor deviations can open doorways to vulnerabilities. If it only works one way (as in: you create your artifact and then record what you use) there is always room for a mistake. Developers need to prove that the SBOM you get in the end includes the same artifact they got through the process of building. And there was no such tool that could produce an artifact from SBOM, until now.

Currently, when developers use a SBOM, they can't really trust it. It already mitigates some threats, but not a lot of them. It's still vulnerable because they have no real guarantees that the SBOM is correct, which can be disastrous for security. With AnyTree, if developers use an empty SBOM and say: “Build me an artifact!” they will get an empty artifact or you will have an error. It depends on their policy, but either way they will get nothing that can threaten their system and that they are not aware of.

Consider the practical implications of this. In the conventional world, the SBOM is a snapshot. If the process of artifact creation is dynamic, there can always be discrepancies between two SBOMs. With Deep SBOM, however, everything a developer uses, precisely, step by step, can be reproduced in exactly the same way. And because there's an auditable trail from the source to the artifact, offering an undeniable guarantee that everything aligns, its correctness can be verified.

Usually this is when authors note that even with such rigorous checks and balances, there's always the human element.

Manually reviewing every line of code, every library, and every patch is exhausting and, frankly, unsustainable. Deep SBOM bridges the gap between manual audits and automated security. While developers can audit the entire code base, the efficiency of the Deep SBOM means they only need to verify its accuracy to ensure everything downstream is secure.

They can build an artifact in such a way that they split it into stages and can prove that at a certain point they didn’t use more than is required in any one stage.

How to use AnyTree on GitHub (Example for Rust)*

1. Clone https://github.com/gosh-sh/anytree repo

2. Run make install to build GOSH AnyTree tool

3. Generate sbom.json for your Rust project using Python script located under tools/python/generate-sbom.py

Note: either copy script to your cargo project and run `python3 generate-sbom.py` or check and configure variables in script

After running the script you should get the following output at the end

Updated SBOM written to sbom.json

And generated sbom.json file in the following format https://github.com/gosh-sh/anytree/blob/dev/tools/python/sbom.json

4. Now you can use sbom.json to build your app

anytree build sbom.json

After running the script you should get similar output at the end:

Successfully copied 15.8MB to

/home/user/.cache/anytree/builder/anytree-builder-69a20ddf-b0cf-46ea-923a-f208fcd8357a/target

And your artifacts will be accessible in this folder

In the event of a hash mismatch error you will know that something is wrong when you see this:

*To use another programming language, please contact us directly

Functional usefulness of DeepSBOM can, of course, be extended with standard SBOM tools, and if you need any changes to the DeepSBOM format AnyTree supports extended compatibility with the tools you are using, just reach out to us. 

It opens you a lot of possibilities to secure any set of dependencies, from which one can infer that the result is also secure by induction. Currently the problem is that this induction is not connected. Today, developers have pieces of the map, some of which show minefields, while others don’t; unless one has the whole picture, one cannot make global assumptions, only local ones. AnyTree is built to give developers a full image of everything they need to know about their software supply chain, including all potential dangers…

It’s worth noting, however, that while the integration of AnyTree for Git offers an enhanced layer of security, it might not include the full array of features available on GOSH. But it's a start, especially for those who already trust their private Git repositories and signature setups, this integration provides an additional blanket of assurance. Immutable builds, detailed dependency trees, and a deeper dive into software components become accessible without the need for a drastic shift in infrastructure.

At the core of AnyTree’s philosophy is the idea that you shouldn't have to trust anyone, any tools provider for your software’s security. Using AnyTree on GOSH allows you to benefit from trustless signatures, so you don't need to actually trust any signature provider. These are guarantees that GOSH gives even if you take our word for it or not. But, if you already trust your private repository server, your signature set up, and your source code, then now you can use AnyTree to build your code, giving you immutable builds based on your trusted infrastructure, offering additional protection to your software supply chain, so that all bugs and intrusions to your repository will be recognized immediately. And if you don’t trust it enough — just use a GOSH repository instead, and complete the circle.

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Introduction

GOSH introduces AnyTree — a software deployment system built to guarantee the security of your software supply chain. AnyTree is the result of 12 months of work to offer businesses a comprehensive solution to software security. The GOSH Docker Extension, unveiled at DockerCon 2022, was the first step, enhancing the security of Docker Containers so that developers can be sure their builds were never at risk. GOSH has worked alongside Ambassador Labs to ensure the integrity of Docker Containers. The addition of the GOSH AnyTree Firewall for Telepresence offers an extra layer of security, verifying the authenticity of Docker containers and any changes made to them, and builds Docker containers exclusively from approved sources. This commitment to security has led us to spearhead the Government Blockchain Association (GBA) Secure Software Supply Chain Working Group (SOSSEC) working group.

Software Supply Chain Attacks Are An Ever-Present Threat

Software supply chain attacks have evolved into a persistent existential threat to businesses, necessitating significant investment in protective measures. The total cost of software supply chain cyberattacks to businesses is predicted to exceed $80.6 billion globally by 2026, up from $45.8 billion in 2023, according to Juniper Research. The fact is, code produced by developers is, as a rule, not secure (most developers aren’t security experts) adding to the cost of protecting the product once delivered.

One new, and particularly acute, vector of attack is on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence models, through Data Poisoning. Attackers can manipulate and tamper with machine learning training data, meaning algorithms learn from this corrupted data, resulting in ineffective, compromised, and even harmful models.

Reinventing Software Supply Chain Security

With AnyTree, any mutations of your code, down to every dependency, as well as operations, including builds and every artifact, are logged, timestamped, signed, and verified by Executable Distributed Ledger Technology (eDLT).

AnyTree secures not only your builds, but also the source code itself, because GOSH is the only (as per our knowledge) formally verified git implementation. Every single object in code delivered by AnyTree is wrapped in a special executable ontology object, making AnyTree an unparalleled tool to allow businesses to log, and clearly tell what they are deploying where.

Preventive security measures employed by AnyTree guard against unwanted code, even in statically linked dependencies. They also ensure the security of your delivery before the container is built. With AnyTree, you can verify the package contents and the methods and materials used in its construction.

AnyTree’s robust cryptographic proofs ensure the immutability, attribution, and objective timestamping of all artifacts in your delivery process. This means software distributed through AnyTree is:

• Secured at the source, with all dependencies, build, and compiler environments

• Built in isolation, and cryptographically signed and timestamped

• Based on GOSH's pioneering Deep SBOM technology, which extends the SBOM surface to all build environments, and describes not only what but also how something was built

This means that when you use AnyTree, whatever apps developers distribute or use, are delivered exactly as they are intended to be — code developers didn’t write is never included.

Deep SBOM extends the SBOM surface to include all build environments. It is impossible to inject malicious commits backwards on GOSH, and very hard to miss dependency tampering during the CI/CD process when using Deep SBOM.

Integrating GOSH Builder with AnyTree can prove builds on a developer machine and a server (or a cloud) are identical. GOSH Builder uses signed declarative build descriptions which include all dependencies within their environments, and have full control over the build process. GOSH Builder isolates builds, only giving access to immutable components. The resulting container or package can be fully validated versus sources and build environments with consistently reproducible results. They also include objective timestamps securing not only the source and resulting build but also the process itself.

Empowering Secure Software Distribution with AnyTree

As an Executable Distributed Ledger Technology (eDLT), AnyTree provides concrete cryptographic guarantees when storing git objects, and tracing software. It enables you to confirm whether or not a software came from GOSH. If it didn't, it alerts the developer.

Consider package delivery, a potential attack vector in the software supply chain. AnyTree's cryptographic guarantees allow you to secure the delivery of any package you use today without changing your delivery methods.

AnyTree works with almost any package manager, user, or server applications. Whether you are using NPM, Brew, APK, or any other package manager, AnyTree facilitates their secure delivery.

Conclusion

In conclusion, GOSH AnyTree stands as an answer to the escalating challenges in securing software supply chains. Recognizing the increasing threat posed by software supply chain attacks and their financial and product security implications, AnyTree provides a comprehensive, robust solution for developers and businesses by securing code at the source, guarding against unwanted code, and ensuring the security of software delivery. AnyTree is easily integrated into existing delivery methods without alteration, so businesses can accurately log, verify, and safely distribute their software products with minimal changes to workflows.

Whether the threat comes from data poisoning or dependency tampering, AnyTree's robust cryptographic proofs and pioneering Deep SBOM technology offer a level of protection heretofore elusive to businesses that usually rely on a wide variety of tools and plugins that are difficult to manage, and often work only by verifying software after it has already been delivered. With AnyTree, developers and businesses have a single tool that ensures their software supply chain's security, integrity, and traceability during the development process, and at any point in delivery; meaning what you deploy is exactly as it is intended to be, without surprises or threats from unknown or unwanted sources. This not only guarantees the security of the software supply chain but also contributes to substantial cost savings by mitigating the risk of cyberattacks. AnyTree represents a significant step forward in creating a safer, more reliable software development and distribution environment in the face of evolving cyber threats.

If you would like to learn more about AnyTree for your business and secure your software supply chain:

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Part I: Give It To Me Straight, Doc

One of GOSH’s much touted aims is to secure the software supply chain. This matter has become of late ephemeral, somewhat hush, even nebulous perhaps. We have spoken at length about open source management, decentralized science, and other such matters, but we know why you’re really here. Supply chain security is the matter on everyone’s mind, and now, at last, the solution GOSH has been developing since its inception has seen a major breakthrough:

GOSH is proud to introduce AnyTree — the first software deployment system secured by a blockchain

TL;DR

• Software distributed through AnyTree is secured at the source, cryptographically signed, and based on Deep SBOM technology pioneered by GOSH, which describe not only what, but also how something was built

• On AnyTree, whatever apps developers distribute or use, are delivered exactly as they are supposed to be — only code developers write is included

• AnyTree secures the delivery of any package you use today. AnyTree works with almost any package manager, (including NPM, MAVEN,... ) user or server applications — the way you deliver packages today, you deliver them with AnyTree

• AnyTree Packages can be downloaded from Docker Hub, GOSH Docker Desktop Extension and AnyTree native applications (coming soon)

• If an app is distributed by AnyTree it is guaranteed to be secured by GOSH with all its dependencies, build and compiler environments, built in isolation and cryptographically signed and timestamped

• GOSH has collaborated with Ambassador Labs to assure the integrity of Docker Containers. The GOSH AnyTree Firewall for Telepresence adds an extra layer of security for Telepresence users by verifying the integrity of Docker containers as well as any changes made to them and builds Docker containers only from approved sources

• AnyTree utilises standard Docker Containers secured by GOSH Builder and is currently available as Beta on Linux and is coming soon to Mac and Windows

Part II: The Meat

“It’s not that you wrote a bug in your code — it is that other people wrote bugs in their code and you’re using what they built.”

This is a quote from a recent MIT lecture on software supply chain security by Jon Gjengset. In order to best explain GOSH’s latest advancement to securing the software supply chain — AnyTree, for those of you who don’t like TL;DR passages and like to jump right into the meat (we salute you) — we will address key points Mr. Gjengset makes in his lecture step by step.

“Supply Chain security is basically these three questions:

1. What Are You Deploying Where?”

The conclusion the speaker arrives at when outlining the steps businesses and developers can take to know what code they are deploying where is quite simple: every deployment should be logged.

The seemingly natural solution, chosen by some supply chain security providers, should be transparent logs. In one of our very first articles we outlined why we chose to avoid transparent logs as our central solution:

• “Logs stored on servers are centralised by nature. This means that, by inherent design, all their critical operational infrastructure relies on many potential points of failure”

• “The transparency log cannot be altered unless the root is altered. But there is no trustless infrastructure to independently verify this. As a user, you need to trust the certificate”

• “Only on the blockchain is it possible to prove ‘order of time’”

Indeed the keyword is ‘blockchain.’ Though much maligned, blockchain is primarily a distributed ledger, and so being in agreement with the speaker’s claim as to the importance of logging we naturally set out from an assumption that blockchain technology is an ideal solution to the problem of how to survey what you’re deploying. The only catch, the one thing needed to make this solution feasible is: in order for this to work everything must be deployed on the blockchain.

If you don't have a relationship between your logs and the blockchain, you shouldn’t trust them at all.

With AnyTree, any mutations of your code, down to every dependency, are logged on the blockchain; AnyTree operations, including builds and every artefact (and Deep SBOM itself!) are all, you guessed it, logged on the blockchain.

We achieve this through a unique blockchain architecture in which every single object on GOSH is wrapped in a smart contract that is executed instantly upon a user’s command — this is what allows us to build AnyTree, an unparalleled tool to allow developers to log, and clearly tell what they are deploying where.

“2. Do You Know Where It Came From?”

“How do you know?” Asks Mr. Gjengset on the 14th minute, “Even if somebody puts on their website ‘we checked everything, trust us,’ they have a stamp on there and they signed their name, it doesn’t really matter if you don’t have a way to verify that they actually went through the steps.”

In tackling the origins problem in software, we again invoke our use of the blockchain. Signatures and any commits made on GOSH are immutably produced on-chain. This, in effect, means that any apps developers distribute or use on AnyTree are delivered exactly as they are supposed to be — only code developers write is included — and can be traced back to the source and verified that they were really built on GOSH.

While blockchain technology has most notoriously been used in the development of cryptocurrencies, we feel the potential of a decentralised ledger is somewhat limited in just that one use case. The fact that GOSH AnyTree is a blockchain product means that when, as we mentioned before, something is traced, verified, and produced on-chain, it does not require you to trust any additional party or take on any new dependency, to trace its origin. GOSH AnyTree provides concrete cryptographic guarantees when storing git objects, and tracing software, that allows you to know whether or not it came from GOSH. And if it didn’t, you know there’s a problem.

Let us give an example: A major potential attack vector in the software supply chain is the suspect security of package delivery. With the aforementioned emphasis placed on cryptographic guarantees, AnyTree allows you to secure the delivery of any package you use today, without changing the way you deliver packages.

AnyTree works with almost any package manager, (including NPM, MAVEN, Python, etc.) user or server applications. If you use AnyTree to build your NPM, Maven, or Python package, you have full visibility of what goes into it, and where it came from. Something you just don't have while building with a current package manager.

Because it is based on cryptography to verify the origins of your software, AnyTree allows you to see the source code used to build this package, and mitigates against a multitude of attack vectors by ensuring that nothing else, no malicious scripts, makes it in. Now, of course, if you are a malicious developer and you maliciously put only malicious code into the package, we cannot secure against that. Mr. Gjengset’s rule applies:

“Ultimately you’re at the mercy of authors. What this means is, when you’re taking dependencies, you want to think really critically about who you are taking dependencies from.”

But most workflows do not come down to a simple “pure vs. purely malicious” dilemma. Most packages, even tainted ones, have a clean source, otherwise no software would ever work. And any package you deliver with AnyTree is secure and stays secure — offering both developers and end users transparency of the code and the tools with which it was built.

“3. What’s In It?”

Perhaps the major challenge to software supply chain security is observability, and the "What's In It?" aspect of observability is arguably its most important part. Once you have a solution, you can have an observability tool that is connected to your monitoring or other frameworks, and that constantly monitors your infrastructure. This can be done proactively, or to observe, say, a Kubernetes cluster and report on what is currently on it. You can then build everything else on top of this, such as check actions and triggers for security vulnerabilities.

To effectively monitor something, one must have a deep understanding of the object being monitored. This is a challenging task, as it requires a thorough knowledge of the object's inner workings. The only way to do this is if you have a very detailed and up-to-date software bill of materials (SBOM). Currently, however, these are always written post-factum. This is insufficient, as it does not provide real-time information about the object's contents. Deep SBOM was created to address this need, providing a comprehensive view of the contents of your supply chain in real time. Here’s how it works:

• All repositories on GOSH are bound by the same immutable timestamped history

• While Git users with Repository Owner Keys can insert malicious code recalculating the repository history, it is practically impossible to inject malicious commits backwards on GOSH

• AnyTree adds to this security by making it very hard to miss dependency tampering during the CI/CD process. Since it is impossible to rewrite a blockchain’s history, GOSH in general and AnyTree in particular give users an unprecedented level of Software Supply Chain Component trust, and Deep SBOM is a big reason why

• Deep SBOM extends the SBOM surface to include all build environments. Other SBOM solutions only work with Artefacts, meaning they have no knowledge of build processes and cannot account for built process vulnerabilities

• An artefact could be built with different compiler optimization options. For example, a C compiler optimization, as allowed by specifications, removes code that is used to perform checks to detect integer overflows. Or, an artefact could include a static link to a library with potential vulnerabilities (e.g.: “static linking SSH library”)

• Integrating GOSH Builder with AnyTree can prove builds on a developer machine and a server (or a cloud) are identical

• Solutions such as HashiCorp Vagrant deliver reproducibility by copying the whole development environment. But there is no guarantee that the developer machine is not compromised

• GOSH achieves these same results with declarative build descriptions which include all dependencies within their environments and have full control over the build process within GOSH Builder

• GOSH Builder isolates builds, only giving access to declared components

• The resulting container can be fully validated versus sources and build environments with consistently reproducible results

• An example of an integration would be: A developer can send a build description to the Cloud and validate that the result is exactly matching the description, and that the Cloud provider could not include anything into the build.

• The hash mismatch between a container built by GOSH Build on the server and user machine’s build will mean probable compromise of a user environment, Making the Cloud solutions trustless from the developer’s point of view

We can make an analogy with poker: if you know what cards your opponent has, you have perfect visibility. However, if you do not know what cards your opponent has, you have to make assumptions, which reduces the quality of your decision-making; leads you to make approximate probability assumptions, and means you do not know if you can win or not until all your decisions have already been made. We use this example to illustrate how visibility is highly dependent on what is inside, as you can only speculate about what you cannot see. You do not have this problem with Deep SBOM, as it allows you to see strong relationships right from the beginning of the development process, meaning you can observe the parts and the whole much like a database of vulnerabilities. 

Part III: Conclusion

The problem of an absolutely secure supply chain is generally unsolvable by maths, but the only technique that can be used, and GOSH’s solution to this problem, is to ensure visibility and integrity, and provide immutability and trustless tools — almost as in constant surveillance of — for your software supply chain. This is what AnyTree is about.

With AnyTree, developers can build images and distribute them across their network. Because AnyTree works with almost any package manager, user or server applications, developers use AnyTree without needing to change the way they distribute software, but still benefit from an array of security guarantees. They check their images with Deep SBOM and uses GOSH Build to safely build reproducible containers in an isolated environment. This allows them to distribute software for the host machine. If something goes wrong in any stage of the supply chain, any user can backtrack everything to the precise point where the error was introduced. This tool guarantees that every image is signed on GOSH and the integrity of every file. A software developer on GOSH, wanting to distribute his package, can create their container, and ship it to Docker Hub (AnyTree Packages can be downloaded from Docker Hub and the GOSH Docker Desktop Extension) — and the user, when installing, can verify this image is built on GOSH, signed on GOSH, by the author of the image. 

AnyTree is the first software deployment system secured by a blockchain. With AnyTree all of the points of failure in the CI/CD process can be seen and verified, and AnyTree allows developers to clearly see every single back door they have in their code, and in the external code they use.

AnyTree utilises standard Docker Containers secured by GOSH Builder and is currently available as Beta on Linux and is coming soon to Mac and Windows. Try it now: https://gosh.sh/anytree

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GOSH’s one year anniversary is fast approaching. At this occurrence we thought it best to go back to our foundations and talk a bit about the blockchain, and more precisely about how GOSH is a very peculiar blockchain indeed. In many ways, the blockchain we have built has little in common with any other network. And we would like to regale you, dear reader, with the reasons, innovations, and unique applications achieved in this, our laborious year zero; as well as introduce to you for the first time a new feature on GOSH: Paid — a tool allowing open source developers to unlock the value of their code.

Part I: Why We Did It

Ok, so perhaps the title is a bit misleading — if you think of it, GOSH isn’t the peculiar blockchain, rather, many others in the blockchain space have a tendency to complicate, convolute, and offer outright bizarre solutions to problems that don’t apply. The whole principle of a decentralized ledger was to offer trustlessness and transparency. But it’s not a simple technology for most everyday users to understand. And this fact has led to many corners of the crypto space to be so engulfed in shadow, let alone transparent, that bad things happened. At the end of it all, many people just don’t understand what is going on. Perhaps then the most peculiar thing about GOSH is that we break from this status quo, and do our best to offer clear, simple, and transparent solutions to problems faced by open source developers today.

GOSH offers blockchain products which, at their core, work to prevent the monopolization often found in meritocratic systems, software security breaches, and confidence tricks. We have spoken about these at length. But let us now touch on some other innovations we needed to employ as a prerequisite to building a usable, scalable, and universal git on-chain/distributed open source Foundation.

Part II: GOSH’s Blockchain Innovations

The Free Service Area

The first of these prerequisites was to build a blockchain that offers free use. If this sounds unusual, that’s because it is. So far nobody has achieved blockchain use with zero gas payments — nobody until GOSH that is. On GOSH any developer can build their code for free just like on any other git. Only this git is fully on-chain.

We achieve this through the GOSH Free Service Area. Fees on GOSH are not paid to Validators but are instead transferred to the Free Software Giver — these fees are used to replenish the Special User Wallet contracts to automatically pay for gas fees of other contracts in the Free Service Area. These contracts can only transfer tokens between other contracts within the Area and are not transferable outside, meaning they are pure Utility Tokens. These tokens are SHELL coins, here used as a Unit of Account for Payment Gateways. (SHELLs are themselves very peculiar, but more on that later).

So in effect this means any developer can use the GOSH blockchain for free, without paying any gas, and sell their services using Fiat Payment Gateways without a need to KYC/AML. This payment Gateway is built into GOSH.

With this we solve the issue as to why a developer would pay to use one git when others are free. Offering a Freemium Service on the GOSH blockchain is perhaps the central innovation from which all others hail.

Shell Coin

Another reason why GOSH is a very peculiar blockchain is the SHELL coin, the very units of account in the Free Service Area.

SHELL coins are the primary Utility Tokens of the GOSH blockchain, they are used to pay gas and fees. Anybody can buy the SHELL coin using their credit card for (and always for) $1. SHELL doesn’t have reserves, or rather, due to it being bought through credit card payments equalling a dollar in perpetuity, the supply of SHELL is equal to the supply of US Dollars, which, of course, is infinite.

This is a crucial point for repelling the recent attacks by Mr. Gensler, of SEC fame, towards Stable coins, claiming that since they are backed by some fiat currency reserves they are in fact Money Markets. And as such required to be regulated by this very same SEC. Of course.

The principles of SHELL are the following two statements:

• We do not promise that buyers will ever redeem this coin for the same value they pay

• And the only promise we make is that buyers will never generate revenue by investing in SHELL coins

Indeed, we do not promise that SHELL will even hold value. This is because seeing as buyers will always be able to purchase 1 SHELL for $1 from GOSH, if buyers wish to sell it on the market, the price could be lower, but will not exceed a dollar — an assumption made out of the most basic understanding of the market rationality. (If our assumption is wrong please contact the US Federal Reserve for a comment.)

In the event many people no longer need their SHELL and sell it on the open market, as the price plummets down near zero with the vigor of a skydiver, it is all the same to us. Seeing as few people in this eventuality will consciously choose to buy SHELL for a dollar when they could buy it for a fraction of that, fewer SHELL will be issued and, with the supply being fixed, as a result of market conditions, it will in time return to the price of $1.

The SHELL coin is backed by nothing, just like most fiat currency, and, in many ways, it is a sort of fiat currency on-chain. It provides the same guarantee on-chain as the guarantee provided by any central bank, in full compliance with the central bank, as a direct result of the central bank. As far as we know, this has never been attempted. 

One of the guarantees a central bank offers is a unit’s withdrawal for a unit’s deposit. We make the same guarantee. Here’s how:

When GOSH collects a dollar for the purchase of a SHELL coin, these come from a pool (an infinite, or should we say infinity, pool) of SHELLS. When any SHELL holder wants to sell their SHELLS for a dollar, they will be able to post them in our pool and get priority. This means that the next person who wants to buy 1 SHELL for $1 will buy it from that SHELL holder looking to sell, rather than from GOSH.

She sells sea-SHELLS by the seashore, and those SHELLS are free floating currency.

Part III: GOSH For Open Source Developers

We have mentioned earlier that:

• GOSH is a blockchain which accepts credit cards without a need for KYC or any kind of business registration. SHELL is a feature of GOSH which functions exclusively as a unit of account. Because there are no reserves, we don't guarantee that it will not fall in price, but we do guarantee that SHELL will always be counted as one dollar. So if you paid $1 from your credit card for SHELL, and you paid inside the system with this coin, then the price of this coin will be regarded as costing $1

• As noted previously, your DAO token is convertible to DAO Karma — the voting token of any DAO on GOSH — which, in turn, is not transferable or tradeable

These two points are the very backbone behind GOSH’s latest feature…

GOSH Paid 

GOSH Paid membership offers developers a new way to unlock the value of their code while keeping software open. DAOs will now be able to lend Karma as a monthly subscription to those looking to support open source, called Paid Members, through a simple credit card transaction. With GOSH Paid DAOs set up subscription tiers they’d like to offer paid members. In exchange for their contribution, members will receive voting power in a DAO as Karma. DAOs decide how much Karma members will receive when setting up GOSH Paid, and can change GOSH Paid settings at any time. Paid Members will then be able to create and vote for proposals and tasks in that DAO for as long as they are a subscriber. DAOs can offer additional features to Paid members for each subscription tier.

One of the peculiarities of GOSH Paid is that if a member stops paying their subscription, the Karma will expire. It’s ‘ephemeral Karma.’ It is impossible to capitalize on it in any way, meaning it cannot be resold and is in fact a pure utility service and nothing else.

A developer’s Karma, on the other hand, won’t expire — they contributed to this repository and so are permanent members.

Enterprises who use a particular repository (here governed as a DAO) can now, instead of hiring someone to maintain it, become Paid Members. This has a three-sided effect:

• It saves them money. A lot of open source development today is wasteful to nobody’s benefit. Instead of paying a part-time salary to a maintainer, enterprises can be sure the software they use is sustainably run, at a set price, without compromising their professional input

• Open source developers can tangibly benefit from people using their software. Open source has to stay free-to-use. But without any incentives, maintaining it often becomes a matter of endless forks, code rewritten over and over again, and (as previously mentioned) money dumped into development processes as though they were a void. If enterprises save money in GOSH Paid, then developers enjoy the opposite effect: With GOSH Paid, developers can be sure that from what money is spent in open source, they receive every penny. Software should be free as in free speech, not as in free beer

• When enterprises pay, they get a voice. GOSH Paid is no donation service. In GOSH Paid, subscribing to a DAO offers enterprises a voice for decision-making in open source software. As long as they pay they can review, vote for, and participate in the discussion of the work being done by a DAO. On top of this, DAOs also benefit from a wider pool of contributors

We offer GOSH Paid as a new tool that open source developers can use to unlock the value of their code. DAOs on GOSH are a self-governed, scalable solution to perform the functions of open source Foundations in a distributed way — GOSH Paid is a crucial step to realizing this. Why? Because open source, governed through DAOs, can now be financially supported by users and enthusiasts, all while keeping it free to use, and so, open.

Part IV: Conclusion

We could say, in the end, that what makes GOSH such a peculiar blockchain is: all the things that open source developers hate about blockchains are not a part of GOSH. It’s free to use. It solves the problem of funding in open source not by making outlandish promises but through a subscription service in voting tokens which can expire. It runs on floating currency (that has both infinite reserves and no reserves at all).

Indeed, we have designed GOSH to offer possible solutions to a specific set of problems and using the blockchain to that end is equally a question of a user’s convenience as of our hardset beliefs. On GOSH you don’t need to write extensive scripts on top of your code for it to be secure. You can, and we very much encourage developers to do so, but even without this there is an in-built security and censorship-resistance guarantee that comes with building your code on-chain.  On GOSH you don’t need to worry about stablecoin reserves, or how long it’ll take a smart contract to execute. And on GOSH, open source developers do not need to rely on bureaucracy and centralized bodies to earn a living. We always knew that to achieve all this, GOSH would need to be a very peculiar blockchain that works differently from all the others.

Now, at last, we can proudly sing of its merits.

We will be talking more about GOSH Paid in the coming weeks so stay tuned.

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