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 after an independent external audit — and that audit has not yet started. 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.
- 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.
- Proof-of-Impact A project can choose to keep a transparency trail: photos, bills, the infrastructure, the purpose — each one fingerprinted on-chain and kept on a permanent, decentralized archive, with every euro of ES traced to the recipient who received it and openable from the explorer. It borrows the spirit of the regulator's travel rule and turns it the other way around: not the state watching the citizen, but the giver seeing where the money goes. A trail 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: projects that keep the trail are shown first in the validation feed, and it is that attention, freely given, that funds them. (planned) Open to propose, promoted when good will is shown.
- 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.
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 comes first.
The external audit has not started, and it is the last step before the public network opens. I won't pretend otherwise, and I won't pretend it is unnecessary.
The protocol is already covered by 1,035 passing internal tests and exhaustive internal audits — and that is not a clean sheet: the external audit by an independent firm is exactly what remains. Internal rigour is not the same thing as an outside opinion, and an institution that conflates the two is hiding something.
Here is the order, with no dates attached to it:
- 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 until the audit and a stabilized public network. 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, everything opens. Not before.
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.
- 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.
- 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.