Intro to Liqua

Liqua is a continuous, liquidity-native molecular chain — emission, decay, validation reward and governance quorum are all functions evaluated every block, with no epochs or halving cliffs. This codex is the operator's manual: how to run a peer, how to mine, and how to validate — using the real binaries that ship in this repo.

What Liqua is

Liqua takes the molecular / dual-seed design and ships it as a working chain. Five mechanics define it, and each is specified in full in the canonical spec (§0–§8):

• SOMA-256 (§1) — the content hash. A house construction on audited BLAKE3 whose Merkle tree mirrors the cell→organ stack; keccak-256 at the EVM membrane.
• ve-lock (§2) — vote-escrow staking on a sliding scale up to 4 years. Longer lock → more ve-weight and a modest reward boost (capped at +50%). Principal is withdraw-locked until expiry.
• Locked-liquidity list (§3) — every lock is published to a public proof-of-lock dashboard.
• Continuous emission (§4) — block reward = smooth decay envelope × validation work performed × a bounded fast-twitch term, evaluated per block.
• Reward-in-instance (§5) — block reward is escrowed in a generated (public, private)-seed instance and claimed via a gated L2 tool. claim path — roadmap
• 98% governance (§6) — both rollback and parameter change require 98% of attesting ve-weight in a rolling window.

The three roles you can run

A Liqua deployment is made of three operator roles. Start with whichever matches what you want to do — each tutorial is self-contained and uses only the binaries in this repository.

Architecture at a glance

One node boots the whole stack — BOOT IS GENESIS (R7). Mining and validation are surfaces layered on top of the same molecular primitives in chain/:

                          ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  operator surfaces  ───▶ │ miner CLI/dash  GPU pool  validator connect │
                          └────────┬───────────────┬─────────────┬──────┘
                                   ▼               ▼             ▼
   SOMA-PoW seal (§4)     Ethash → SOMA bridge     ve-lock + §1e attest (§2)
                                   │               │             │
   ┌───────────────────────────────┴───────────────┴─────────────┴──────┐
   EVM execution  state · tx · produceBlock · stateRoot = SOMA · keccak membrane
   ├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
   protocol  STATUS genesis-gate · tx / block gossip (dedup + relay)
   ├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
   transport  encrypted TCP · secp256k1 ECDH → ChaCha20-Poly1305 frames
   ├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
   discovery  discv4-style UDP · Kademlia k-buckets · lnode:// identity
   └──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
                  identity = a booted genesis instance (R6 · instance = auth)

Quickstart · bring it all up

Everything is plain Node ≥18 with audited crypto deps. Two install roots: the chain surfaces live in liqua/, the networking node lives in liqua/node/.

# ── chain surfaces (miner · pool · validator) ──
cd liqua
npm install

# ── networking node (peer / discovery) ──
cd node
npm install
cd ..

The fastest way to see Liqua running is the Server Hub — a local control panel with a launch all button for every server:

node server-hub.mjs            # opens the panel at http://localhost:7071

Or start the pieces directly — each is its own tutorial:

node miner/cli.mjs run         # SOMA-PoW miner + dashboard  → :8010  (see Mining)
npm run pool                   # Ethash GPU pool  → stratum :3333 · dash :8030  (see Mining)
node miner/validator.mjs       # validator node + connect page  → :7100  (see Validator)
node node/start.mjs --seed genesis --port 30303   # peer node  (see Peer)

Pick your path

Canonical surfaces

The docs are the operator's manual; these are the source-of-truth surfaces they point at.

Roadmap · what isn't built yet

Honest scope — this codex documents what runs today and flags what doesn't. These gaps are called out again inside the relevant tutorials, and each is a candidate for its own future codex page.

The §5 claim seam — the one I kept flagging as highest-leverage — is now closed and verified. The remaining items are infrastructure (governance UI · L1 persistence + NAT · genesis-block sync).