When a rung falls, markets settle and vaults lock
Sponsors fund discrete-log bounties on six curves, from just past the classical record up to secp256k1 and Ed25519. When a solver claims one, its Solana account reads Solved: hedgers’ markets on it settle and Q-Vaults keyed to it lock, with no oracle.
Today every rung reads Open
- T-256k
- T-255e
- C-160
- Q-224
- Q-192
- Q-160
How a rung falls
A solver proves k without revealing it
The claim is a Schnorr proof over the rung, the recipient and a job nonce. A leader or searcher who copies the transaction can only pay that same recipient.
begin_claim records the moment
The rung’s event time is the time the claim began, so a fall that takes more than one transaction to verify still counts before an expiry it beat.
Anyone cranks the verification
step_claim walks the scalars’ bits through a Jacobian accumulator, 16 bits per transaction. For Q-160 that is 11 steps, 13 transactions with begin and finalize.
finalize_claim sets RungState to Solved
The bounty pays the recipient in the same instruction. A rung that is Solved stays Solved.
Everything that reads Q-160 acts
Markets on Q-160 resolve YES. Q-Vaults with Q-160 as their trigger reject the Ed25519 path. With C-160 still Open, the quantum-signal market resolves YES.
- RungState
- Solved
- event_ts
- begin_claim time
- step_claim
- 11 of 11
Every rung sits past the public classical record
Q-160, the lowest rung, takes about 211 times the work of Bitcoin puzzle #135, which is still open. Up the Q-rungs, classical cost grows by 216 a rung while the logical qubits a quantum attack needs grow by 288.
C-160
classical control: same classical cost as Q-160, secp256k1-class qubit count
- Curve
- generic curve over secp256k1’s 256-bit field, ~160-bit subgroup
- Classical cost
- ~279 ops
- Logical qubits
- ~2,330
- Scaled from Google 2026
- ≈ secp256k1-class qubit count
- Verification
- joins the ladder when its point count is certified
- Bounty
- —
- RungState
- —
Markets settle on RungState
A market on a rung is two SPL tokens. Lock one USDC and get one YES and one NO, then sell the side you don’t want on any SPL venue. At settlement the program reads the rung’s account: YES wins if the rung fell by the expiry, NO wins if it didn’t.
- Settlement fee
- 1.0% of winning redemptions
- Fees swept
- 70% CANARY buy and burn · 30% bounty vaults
- Collateral
- USDC
- Q-160 open-interest cap
- ~$10M
YES price by expiry: the market-implied odds that Q-160 falls by then
- Markets
- None open on this rung yet. Expiries in v0: 2027-12-31, 2028-12-31, 2030-12-31.
Q-Vault closes the Ed25519 path when its rung falls
A Q-Vault answers to two keys: your wallet’s Ed25519 key for everyday SOL spends, and a Falcon-512 key you keep offline. Ed25519 spends inside an instant budget go through at once, and the budget refills only after a full delay with no instant spend; larger ones wait out the delay, which the Falcon key can cancel. The Falcon key moves any asset at any time. The vault also names a trigger rung. When that rung reads Solved, Ed25519 stops working for this vault, permanently.
- Falcon-512 public key
- 897 bytes
- Falcon-512 signature
- 666 bytes
- Verification on Solana
- 365–390k CU
- Q-160
- Balance
- 100 SOL · 10,000 USDC
- Instant budget
- 5 of 5 SOL left
- Delay
- 48 h
- Act on the sample vault to see what it allows.
Sponsors fund a bounty on every rung
A deposit can’t be withdrawn before 2040-01-01. It pays the solver when its rung falls; after that date, each sponsor’s non-transferable Token-2022 receipt reclaims its share of what is left. 30% of protocol fees flow back into the bounty vaults, and the protocol takes no cut of sponsorship.
- Total in bounty vaults
- —
- Sponsors
- —
- Receipts
- —
- Q-160 sponsors
- —
- Funded
- —
- From fees
- —
- Paid out
- —
CANARY is bought with fees and burned
1,000,000,000 CANARY, all of it sold in one public launch with no presale, team, investor or reserved allocation. The protocol’s 70 % of every settlement fee buys CANARY on the market and burns it. CANARY is never collateral, never a resolution input and never a vote on rungs or vaults.
- Supply
- 1,000,000,000
- Public launch
- 100 %
- Settlement fees that buy and burn
- 70 %
RungState: one account per rung, and the same six states as JSON
Each rung is one account at the seeds ["rung", id], read directly by any Solana program. The status feed serves the same six states as JSON, with the slot they reflect.
- canary_rungsimmutable after audit (authority revoked)
- canary_markets3-of-5 multisig, 7-day timelock in v0; frozen in v1
- canary_vault3-of-5 multisig, 7-day timelock in v0; later a Falcon-gated Squads multisig
- Canary opens once its programs are on chain
…Read the six rungs’ state
The status feed is public and needs no key. Programs read the same six accounts on chain.
Rung status unavailable