Independent Validator Program
Aere states plainly on every page that it is not yet decentralized: all nine 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: hybrid post-quantum consensus that refuses to finalize a block without Falcon-512 validator signatures, live since block 14,050,000; a certificate of those signatures bound under the block hash every 32 blocks; two independently implemented clients that agree, both readable from public endpoints. 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 | Two: the classical secp256k1 node key and a Falcon-512 key, generated by you, on your machine. The Foundation never sees either private key. Your public Falcon key is published in the signer registry, which is anchored on chain. |
| 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 consensus is post-quantum, 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 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