Neptune

sea of freedom

About Neptune

Neptune is a peer-to-peer anonymous cash protocol featuring privacy, scalability, and post-quantum security. To our knowledge, it is the first blockchain protocol to integrate zk-STARKs on Layer-1 (where they belong). It is definitely the first blockchain protocol to feature mutator sets, a novel solution for achieving privacy without sacrificing scalability. As a cherry on top, Neptune also supports arbitrary logic; together with privacy, this support makes Neptune a private smart contract platform in addition to a competitor for the world's best possible money.

Besides these technical features, a number of strategical decisions set Neptune apart from other projects that also aim to build blockchain-based money or smart contract platforms:

  • The asymptotical limit on the token supply is 42'000'000. The concrete number is irrelevant; the fact that this limit exists is the relevant feature. It guarantees that once you have a slice of the pie, that slice will never shrink.
  • The premine is 1.98%. It exists to raise funds to bootstrap the project. The vast majority of tokens will be mined competitively by market players who pay the market price, market players who in exchange for their reward help secure the network. You can be one of them.
  • The network is secured by proof of work. As a result, the canonical chain is objective because it is tied to physical resources. The network can autonomously resolve natural or even malicious forks, without requiring the intervention of trusted parties.
  • The founding company will dissolve on December 31, 2025. After that, the responsibility for fixing any remaining issues falls on a community of volunteer developers. This course of action is necessary because any project that cannot motivate a decentralized governance structure is either incapable of adaptation, or decentralized in name only.

Neptune is currently under development. Check out (or checkout) the github repository for a more detailed picture of the status quo.

If you prefer IRC instead of Telegram, you can find us in #neptune on Libera.Chat.

Contributors

Advisory board

Backers

Niko Kipouros
Zachary Williamson
Jan Xie