Independent Validator Program
Aere states plainly on every page that it is not yet decentralized: all ten validators are operated by the Foundation, so the honest answer to "how many independent parties must agree to stop this chain" is one. This page is how that changes, and what it takes to hold a seat.
Why this is the most important page on this site
Aere has properties few public chains have: a certificate of at least seven valid Falcon-512 validator seals, as many as the quorum of the ten validators, bound under the block hash of every 32nd block, with SLH-DSA-SHA2-128s seals as well at every 128th (the minimum was three when enforcement began on 2026-08-14, six from block 14,961,456 and seven from block 20,715,632, on 2026-09-29; the interval was 128 for both schemes from block 17,225,968 to block 20,746,736; below block 24,148,752 the seals proved those validators signed the block, not that it was decided, per the AIP-22 erratum of 2026-10-01, and from that block a certificate that carries the quorum of one round proves the decision); validators named by post-quantum identities since block 20,836,228 (2026-09-30); and two independently implemented clients that validate every block. None of that fixes operator concentration. A chain with excellent cryptography and one operator is a well-built database, and we would rather write that sentence ourselves than have it written about us.
What an operator runs
| Requirement | Bar |
|---|---|
| Client | Either implementation. Running the second client (the Nethermind-derived one) is preferred and counts toward diversity, because a set where every node runs the same code has one bug away from a halt. |
| Machine | 8 cores, 16 GB RAM, NVMe with headroom for the header growth published in our disk figures. Bare metal or dedicated instance, not shared burstable. |
| Network | Static public address, devp2p reachable, 100 Mbit symmetric or better, under 150 ms to at least four existing validators. |
| Independence | Different operator entity, different hosting provider and different country from any existing seat. Two seats behind the same provider do not count as two operators, and we will not pretend otherwise. |
| Keys | Three: the classical secp256k1 node key, a Falcon-512 key and an SLH-DSA-SHA2-128s key, generated by you, on your machine. The Foundation never sees a private key. Your public keys are published in the validator registry; the manifest of Falcon-512 keys is pinned on chain. (Until the hybrid certificate of 2026-09-04 this row named two keys.) |
| Availability | 99.5 percent monthly, measured by the chain rather than by self-report: your address either appears among block committers or it does not. |
| Upgrades | Apply coordinated activations within the published window. Activation heights are announced with the runbook, and the network has a documented coordinated-postponement path if an operator cannot make a window. |
How a seat is granted, and how it is lost
Admission is a validator-set vote under QBFT, executed at a block height announced in advance. Before the vote, a candidate runs as a non-validating follower for at least fourteen days, and the follower's agreement with the chain is measured, not asserted: same block hashes at every height checked. Removal uses the same mechanism, and the published grounds are narrow and mechanical, not editorial: sustained unavailability below the bar, refusal to apply a coordinated activation, or signing conflicting messages at the same height.
There is no stake to post and no on-chain slashing today, and we say that rather than implying an economic guarantee that does not exist. What binds an operator is a published agreement and the fact that the seat is visible: every committer address is readable from any endpoint, by anyone, forever.
What you get
- A seat on a chain whose validators already seal consensus messages and anchor certificates with post-quantum keys, before that becomes a requirement rather than a differentiator.
- Your organisation named in the public signer registry, anchored on chain, as one of the parties that must agree for the network to move.
- Direct access to the engineering that runs it, not a support queue.
What you do not get, stated in the same breath: there is no payment for holding a seat today, no token grant attached to this program, and no completed third-party security audit of the live system yet. One is on the roadmap and its results will be published in full whatever they say.
Check us before you talk to us
# the chain's post-quantum anchor, verified from raw header bytes curl -O https://aere.network/tools/verify-anchor.mjs -O https://aere.network/tools/mpt.mjs -O https://aere.network/tools/falcon512.mjs -O https://aere.network/tools/registry-v3.mjs -O https://aere.network/tools/package.json && npm install node verify-anchor.mjs # the full independent toolkit: 35 checks, installs nothing, # and starts with a self-test that plants 21 defects and must catch all of them curl -O https://aere.network/tools/verifica-lantul.tar.gz tar -xzf verifica-lantul.tar.gz && cd verifica-lantul node autotest.mjs && node verifica.mjs