About φNet
Why φNet Exists
The global service economy runs on contracts. Most of those contracts are invisible to any ledger, settled through trust alone, and contested through processes that are slow, expensive, and opaque. φNet exists to change that — one auditable, on-chain service receipt at a time.
The Problem
Most blockchains were designed for speculation, not services. Their fee models reward block producers at the expense of participants. Their governance is informal at best, captured at worst. Their economic parameters drift with sentiment rather than real service costs.
Service contracts — consulting, SaaS, professional services, digital delivery — have no on-chain representation. There is no auditable record of what was agreed, what was delivered, or what dispute resolution was applied. When payments go wrong, remedies are off-chain, slow, and unequal.
The result is a gap between what blockchains promised (trustless coordination) and what they deliver (speculative asset settlement). φNet is built to close that gap for the service economy specifically.
No auditable contract completion
Service receipts exist off-chain or not at all. Counterparties have no shared, tamper-evident record of delivery.
No on-chain dispute resolution
Disputes go to email threads, chargebacks, or lawyers. No protocol-level evidence trail, no deterministic outcome.
Extractive fee models
Standard chains capture value for insiders. Block rewards inflate at the expense of participants who do real work.
Informal governance
Protocol upgrades happen through social consensus, off-chain votes, or unilateral developer action. No quorum. No audit trail.
Architecture
The φNet Approach
Deterministic governance
Every parameter change — fees, validator weights, insurance ratios, protocol version — must pass an 11-of-16 BFT quorum vote recorded on-chain. No unilateral action by operators or developers. No informal off-chain coordination. Every proposal has an on-chain ID, a voting window, a full audit trail, and an immutable activation record.
Non-extractive by design
The φNet fee constitution is encoded in protocol parameters, not operator policy. Every transaction fee is split by the chain itself: 62% to validators, 25% to the treasury, 8% to the insurance pool, and at least 5% burned. The Economic Governor (EG0–EG2) continuously adjusts base fees to match real service costs — not speculative demand — using a deterministic control loop with on-chain audit records.
ARIA attestation
Every service receipt bundle submitted to the chain is first validated by the ARIA Attestation Service — an independent, deterministic scoring engine. ARIA evaluates delivery completeness, counterparty signatures, and timing proofs against a configurable rubric. Receipts are accepted on-chain only when ARIA returns an HMAC-signed proof with a score above the governance-set threshold. No ARIA proof, no settlement.
Protocol parameters
The Operational Constitution
φNet's key protocol parameters are not configuration files — they are constitutional constraints that can only be changed through an on-chain quorum vote. The Operational Constitution defines the boundaries within which the network operates: who can validate, how fees are shared, what diversity is required, and what uptime is expected.
Read the Operational ConstitutionPositioning
Service Economy, Not Speculative Finance
φNet is not designed for speculative token trading. It is designed for governed service commitments and verifiable execution outcomes.
Economic policy is governance-bound and replay-verifiable. Fee parameters are adjusted by a deterministic control loop — not market sentiment. Every change requires an on-chain quorum vote with a full audit trail.
The distinction matters. A network built for governance-first coordination makes different architectural tradeoffs than one optimised for throughput or speculation. φNet chooses determinism, auditability, and containment over raw performance.
Governed by protocol, not operators
Economic parameters require 11/16 BFT quorum to change. No validator cartel can unilaterally adjust fees, weights, or treasury fractions.
Deterministic, not sentiment-driven
The Economic Governor (EG0–EG2) adjusts fees based on measured utilisation versus target cost. No oracle dependency. No governance-exempt emergency levers.
Auditable by construction
Every governance decision, every fee adjustment, every emergency safety mode activation is recorded as an EDL event with a deterministic replay path.
No monetary value in Phase 0
Phase 0 testnet tokens cannot be exchanged or withdrawn. They exist to test protocol behaviour under real governance and emergency conditions.
Team
Who Built This
φNet is designed and built by ARIA Research Ltd, a protocol research organisation focused on non-extractive economic infrastructure for the service economy. The codebase, specification documents, and decision records are maintained as a transparent, auditable record of every architectural choice.
Principal designer
Lee Smart