ORIEN is a quantum-proof payment network with no blocks and no global ordering. A payment is final in a fraction of a second and never waits behind other people's payments. Everything rests on one cryptographic assumption: the BLAKE3 hash function.
Two round trips to > 2/3 stake; ~115 ms of 162 ms is wire travel.
4 validators syncing votes & confirmations to a single disk.
Hash-based one-time account keys, Merkle key trees & batch roots.
4-year half-life, released via contention-free epoch work shares.
A payment says “account A, payment #7, send 5 to B.” Each validator votes for it if it has never seen a different #7 from A. Votes from validators holding more than two thirds of the stake make a certificate, and two conflicting payments can never both get one because any two such groups share an honest validator.
The payment is final once as many validators confirm they recorded the certificate. The receipt holds both sets of signatures.
Every payment is signed with a hash-based one-time key and names the key for the next payment. “Never sign two different #7s” and “never use a key twice” are the exact same rule, and validators enforce it.
Every address also commits upfront to a Merkle tree of sixteen spare keys, used after a checkpoint if a key ever gets burned by signing twice.
Hash-based signatures are larger than elliptic-curve ones, so signing one by one would waste keys and CPU. Instead, a validator collects every vote and confirmation requested over the last few milliseconds into one Merkle tree and signs its root once.
One validator signature covers the whole batch — 10 to 28 concurrent payments in local load tests — and each receipt carries only its short Merkle branch.
The signed order says: "account A, payment #7, send 250 to Carol, next key is k₈, spare root is S." No mempool orders it against strangers; only A's own sequence number matters.
Last seen from alice: #6
Last seen from alice: #6
Last seen from alice: #6
Asleep (1 of 4 may be down)
Payments never wait for blocks, yet a payment network still needs to rotate validator keys, onboard and slash stakers, pay out fees and released coins, prune old receipts, and free any account locked by a split double-signature.
About once an hour, validators pause for a few seconds and agree on a checkpoint — a Merkle root of all account balances. Interrupted payments survive checkpoints untouched and remain finishable by any copy of the wallet via orien resume.
Every validator forces its votes and confirmations to disk before replying. No in-memory-only benchmark shortcuts.
Two-step finality waits for two disk syncs in series, and here all four validators contend on one SSD. Before confirmations were added, the same test ran at 1,400–1,650 payments/s.
Four validators spread across a laptop (v1), a home desktop on the same LAN (v2), and a VPS 57 ms away holding two (v3, v4) so the network stays up while either home machine sleeps.
cargo test --release -p orien-net --test devnet throughput -- --ignored --nocapture(account, epoch, number) whose BLAKE3 hash with the epoch's seed falls below a target. Validators accept shares throughout the epoch and pin them in their closing statements just like payment certificates, so no proposer can tilt the tally.100M cap · 4-year half-life · 0 at genesis
Coins release by elapsed wall-clock time between checkpoints rather than checkpoint count, so closing an epoch early or late never changes total issuance.
Merkle state root over accounts in address order, short account proofs, atomic per-epoch storage folders, double-sign evidence retention, balance check on every vote, validator key reserves.
ledger/state · crypto/merkle · net/store
Epoch numbers on votes and certificates, owner signatures preserved on certificates, signed confirmations after disk sync, 12 KB receipts carrying both quorums, proof-verified wallet advances.
ledger · net · cli
Signed orders carry kind (payment, stake, unstake), maximum fee ceiling, next ordinary key and the 16-key spare root so future stages never strand an unfinished order.
ledger · net/keys · crypto/hash
Pure-logic Tendermint-style close with deterministic checkpoint validity and scripted adversarial simulators covering split votes, silent proposers and withheld decisions.
ledger/agree · ledger/close
Validator freeze, WAL journal forced to disk before any signed message leaves, checkpoint chain, automatic validator key-tree rollover at 50% use, and stuck accounts freed onto spare keys.
net/closer · net/node · net/client
Stake and unstake orders locking coins against a validator key-tree root and address, epoch-boundary validator set updates, and stake slashing for double-voting or key reuse.
Designed · next to build
Flat fee taken from the sender (bounded by the order's fee ceiling) and paid out at each checkpoint to active validators in proportion to stake.
Designed · crates/ledger, crates/net
Zero-allocation genesis anchored to a future Bitcoin block hash, 100M cap on a 4-year half-life curve, and proportional checkpoint payouts to pinned BLAKE3 work shares.
Rules accepted 2026-11-14
genesis.json today, and spam protection via per-payment fees arrives in Stage 5.orien resume) across checkpoints, never silently replaced.Want the full protocol rules or to try breaking a local devnet?
Every safety rule, adversarial failure found in simulation, and CLI fault-injection command is documented.