Where the work actually stands.
An honest institution describes what it builds. It does not sell you a way in. Here is what already runs on the test network, what is built but switched off until the public network opens, and what is only on the horizon.
The hardest truth first: EgalChain runs only on a test network today. The public network opens when the protocol is ready. An independent external audit is wanted and pursued — and it has not yet started; I won't make it the one thing that holds the network from the people it's for. There is no launch date here, because I won't invent one.
What works today, on the test network.
Everything here runs and verifies on the test network. Where a row mentions income, the honest qualifier holds throughout: it is real only if the network is genuinely used, it can be worth zero, and nothing is promised.
- Transfers & reserve check Sending ES to anyone — including someone with no account yet — works right now. (testnet) And you don't have to trust a node: a light wallet, in a plain browser, recomputes the block's state fingerprint itself and compares it to the chain.
- Run a node The network is open by design: it listens on the public internet at port 48080, and a node can find it on its own through a seed (seed1.egalchain.xyz); the wallet app already reaches the chain over testnet.egalchain.xyz. (testnet) One thing is still missing — the front door: once the signed node binaries are published, running egalchaind --testnet will let anyone validate every block for themselves, with no account, no gatekeeper, no approval. The architecture is decentralized to its core; the binaries are what will let you prove it rather than take our word for it.
- Credit for a miner, on their own A miner can borrow ES alone — no guarantors. A score they build from zero to twenty, by repaying, sets how much they can take against their own mining; then a slice of every block they find repays the loan by itself. (testnet) Built and running — no one has borrowed for real. Bounded by what their mining can back, and nothing is promised.
- Cooperative credit And for someone who doesn't mine — a seamstress, a village cooperative, a migrant — six miners can vouch for them, peer to peer, and a share of those guarantors' earnings feeds the loan each block. (testnet) Built and running — no one has borrowed or lent a real cent. Every ES lent is backed by EGL set in reserve.
- Savings (ES staking) Locking ES to earn a share of real network activity. (testnet) The income is real only if the network is used, worth zero otherwise. Savings strengthen the soundness calculation; they are not seized to cover defaults.
- Governance Three storeys — a question put to the world, a quadratic vote on settings, a constitutional core decided one-miner-one-voice. (testnet) The machinery runs; votes are only fully safe from cheating once the passport layer is active, and that layer is dormant today.
- Humanitarian fund Five percent of every block, with quadratic matching that rewards the number of givers, not the size of gifts. (testnet) A project must first be endorsed by about fifty verified people from at least two countries — the anti-fraud gate lives in the consensus path.
- EgalWitness Writing a document's fingerprint, with a date and a signature, open to anyone with a wallet. (testnet) It proves a file existed on a date, not that it is true — it is not a court, and the file itself lives elsewhere.
- Constitutional invariants The humanitarian 5%, the 10% shared dividend, the reserve floor, the 75% supermajority, the 30-day timelock — carved into the code now, not a future promise. (in the code) No vote can move them; the deepest rules change only by a coordinated upgrade of the whole network, in the open. Incorruptible by vote, not by secession.
- Proof-of-Impact A project can choose — never forced — to keep a transparency trail: photos, bills, the infrastructure it builds, anchored so anyone can recompute that each piece is real, with every spend of ES tied to who received it. It turns the state's travel rule the other way around: not the authority watching the citizen, but the giver seeing where the money goes. It does not make a project honest — a perfect folder can still hide a fraud — and it earns no extra money: what it earns is attention, the projects that show everything shown first, and it is that attention, freely given, that funds them. (testnet) Built and running — the anchored trail, the state-root commitment, and the independent verify all in place; no real project has kept one yet. The door open to all, the spotlight earned.
Built but dormant, waiting for the launch.
These mechanisms are built, compiled, and tested — but switched off on purpose. They turn on only when the public network launches. I will not let you believe they are running for real today.
- Passport identity The network verifies a passport itself, draws an anonymous fingerprint, then forgets the document — verify, then forget. A community path covers those struck from the world's registry. (dormant) The test network runs a stripped-down version, so passports are not being verified for real today. During verification it discloses a brief, bounded leak rather than hide it.
- Institutional settlement Licensed bridges, the institutional settlement unit, a regulator's three-of-five key set. Built, verified by the network itself, tested. (dormant) No bank settles today, and nothing can until a regulator's keys are placed at a ceremony to come. The network flatly refuses a commercial operator's settlement order — a closed door in the code, not a stated intention.
- Regulator key-slots Ten key-slots exist day-one: five active, five zero-initialised and reserved for a later phase, activable without a coordinated upgrade. (dormant) All dormant until the key ceremony places real keys.
The external audit — wanted, not awaited.
The external audit has not started. I won't pretend it has, and I won't pretend it's unnecessary — I want that outside opinion, and I'll pursue it. But I won't make it a veto over the network's opening: a protocol built, tested, and verifiable by anyone shouldn't be kept from the people it's for because an outside process takes its time.
The protocol is already covered by more than a thousand passing internal tests and exhaustive internal audits — and that is not a clean sheet: the external audit by an independent firm is the outside opinion still to seek. Internal rigour is not the same thing as an outside opinion, and an institution that conflates the two is hiding something. And the deepest audit isn't any firm's stamp at all: the source code and the whitepaper will open, and then anyone — you, a journalist, a rival — can verify the protocol from the ground up, trusting no one, not even a certified auditor. That is the guarantee no single firm can give, and it is why the external audit, though wanted, is not the gate the network must wait behind.
Here is the path we want, in the order we'd choose it — with no dates, and with the network's opening not held hostage to step one:
- 01The external audit.An independent firm reviews the whole protocol. No firm is engaged yet, and I name none.
- 02Signed node binaries.Published with their fingerprints, so you can verify what you run before you run it.
- 03Key ceremonies.The acquirer two-of-three keys and the regulator's custodian key set are placed — in the open.
- 04The public network opens.Distributed seed nodes come up, and the chain people actually use begins.
And this is why the source code and the whitepaper stay closed for now — until the protocol stands on its own. I would rather tell you the real reason, frankly: until the protocol is proven, I don't want its foundations — the guaranteed reserve, the proof that a human is unique, the governance — taken, broken, and used to deceive people by passing for EgalChain. The day it stands on its own, they open — and then anyone can audit the protocol from the ground up, trusting no one, not even a certified auditor.
The horizon — v1 first, then the vision.
Everything below is directional. It may evolve, and some of it may never ship. I keep it clearly apart from what is in hand, so the two are never confused.
The first version is built to serve one to ten million people well, not to claim eight billion on day one. Eight billion is the vision — reached over time, in phases, after the network is real — not a number I'll pretend is already true.
- v1 scope A working public network for roughly one to ten million people, then a multi-phase path outward. Building for eight billion on day one would be a way to ship nothing well; the scale grows as the network earns it. (direction)
- Mobile app & NFC A native mobile wallet that reads a passport's chip over NFC, so verification happens in your hand. (direction) Planned, no committed quarter — and the point where more established partners and developers will be most needed. If that's you, get involved.
- Merchant rails An integration kit so banks and partners can offer ES without rebuilding everything. (direction) A spec, not code — kept on the horizon, never described as imminent.
- Wider horizon A peer-to-peer marketplace settled in ES, loans backed by more than one kind of asset, ES used as a broader digital currency. (direction) Specs only, no code, no dates — directional, may evolve.
- Cooperative community credit The path beyond the six-guarantor loan: a whole community pooling and lending to its own members, so inclusion scales with the number of people who organize rather than the number of miners willing to vouch. Further out, the same idea grows up — groups anywhere in the world forming and running small cooperative institutions of their own, on their own terms, above the protocol's floors, and accountable in the open. EgalChain would put people in contact and give them the tools; it would not own or operate what they build: not a bank handed down to them, but the power to build one together — a real institution's reach, in the hands of ordinary people who choose to organize. That is the hope we are working toward. (direction) A theory, not code, and post-launch at the earliest.
- Sub-network governance Letting communities govern their own sub-networks, a post-launch idea on the far edge of the map. (direction) May evolve, may never ship.