Network operations

Who operates chain 2800 today, and where the path from here is written down.

Who operates the validator set

The AERE Foundation operates the validator set today. Ten validators, quorum seven of ten.

The Foundation stewards the protocol, maintains the open-source codebase and funds contributors through a public grants program. What it does, how it is funded and how to engage with it is on the Foundation page.

What that means for a verification you run

Every check offered through rpc.aere.network is, in the end, performed against a machine the Foundation operates. That is true of every chain's public endpoint, and it is the reason the node package, the genesis file and the exact follower options are published: so that a check can be run somewhere else.

If a result matters to you, run it against your own node. See Run a node.

Audit status

The network has not completed a third-party security audit. The proofs, conformance tests and verification tools published by the project are its own work, offered so that anyone can re-run them rather than take them on trust.

Client diversity

Nine of the ten validators run the AERE client, which is Hyperledger Besu with the published patches. Since block 18,083,404 (2026-09-11) the tenth validator runs a second, independently derived client, built on Nethermind: it proposes its share of mainnet blocks and seals with post-quantum keys like the other nine. Every block is validated by both implementations. With nine validators on one implementation, the second client adds an independent check, not yet fault tolerance. Until 2026-09-11 the second client produced blocks on the public test network only.

Note added 2026-10-07. Until 2026-10-05 this page still said that the second client "produces blocks on a public test network" and that moving it into mainnet production "is a validator-set decision rather than a code question". That text predated the admission of 2026-09-11. It was found in a review of the pages cited by a written interview and corrected on 2026-10-05, before the answers were sent; a reader asked about the old sentence two days later, and this note records it. The evidence is on the chain: qbft_getValidatorsByBlockNumber returns nine addresses at block 18,083,403 and ten at 18,083,404, and qbft_getSignerMetrics on the public endpoint shows the tenth identity proposing its share of blocks.

Where the path is published

The decentralization path is set out in the project roadmap and in the whitepaper, both of which are linked from the About page. This documentation covers how the chain works; the roadmap covers where it is going.