Tokens on Verge,
with balances you can prove

TRUST

You can prove what you own

Every token metaprotocol has the same hole, and it is not a small one: you ask an indexer what you hold, and you believe it. Runes and BRC-20 offer nothing else. If the indexer is wrong, or lying, or quietly running patched software, you have no way to find out.

Verge Runes closes it. Anyone may compute a merkle root over the entire balance set at a given height and publish it on chain. Your wallet then verifies its own balance against that root with a short proof, and never has to trust whoever answered the query.

Publishing is permissionless, which is what makes it work. Two indexers that disagree at the same height publish different roots, and the disagreement is on chain, immediately, for everyone, signed by whoever got it wrong.

NAMES

A name costs something, and nothing is destroyed

Runes made names free and released the short ones on a four-year unlock schedule. It did not produce fairness: bots raced every unlock and the good names went to squatters, who paid miners for the privilege. The name was never free. Only the recipient of the money changed.

On Verge the same design would be worse. Relay fees are 0.2 XVG/kB, so there is no accidental cost filter at all, and a single operator could take every desirable name for pocket change. So a name costs a deposit, set by its length, and it exists for one reason: to make mass registration ruinous while leaving one good name affordable to a real project.

Nothing is burned, and nothing is paid to anyone. It goes into an output that only you can open, four years later, and then it is yours again. Every fee model eventually has to answer who receives the money, and every answer names a party with a stake in the protocol. This one answers nobody, for four years. Waiting is the cost, so fifty names still ruin a squatter, and there is no beneficiary written into the rules anywhere.

A name can carry separators, and they cost nothing. The coin itself is always the bare letters: type DOG•GO•TO•THE•MOON and what goes on chain is DOGGOTOTHEMOON plus a few bits saying where to draw the bullets. It is priced on its fourteen characters, and wallets render the spaced form.

That also means re-spacing buys nothing. DOG•GO•TO•THE•MOON, DOGGO•TOTHEMOON and DOGGOTOTHEMOON are one coin, so once somebody has it the other spellings are gone too. Without that rule a good name could be squatted a dozen times over and the whole schedule would stop meaning anything.

There is no unlock calendar, so there is no date to camp on. Allocation is first come, names are unique, folded to uppercase, and permanent.

MINTING

Minting has a price, and the coin's creator sets it

An open mint on a cheap chain is not really open, it is free. A mint transaction pays the mempool floor of 0.1 XVG, so taking an entire 21,000,000 supply issued a thousand at a time costs around 2,100 XVG in total. That is not a deterrent, it is a rounding error, and nobody would create a coin on those terms.

So a mint pays a price, and it pays it as an ordinary transaction fee. The miner of the block receives it, exactly as with any other fee. Nothing is locked, nothing is destroyed, no address appears in the protocol, and the money ends up funding the chain's own security.

The protocol refuses to choose that number. Any constant it picked would be fixed in XVG and permanent from the first coin ever created, while the thing it is trying to express is a value in dollars. 20 XVG is a few cents today. A hundredfold move in the price of XVG would price minting out of reach for reasons that have nothing to do with the coin it was meant to protect, and there is no oracle available that does not introduce somebody to trust.

A creator choosing on the day prices their mint at what XVG is worth on the day. A coin made two years from now carries a judgement made two years from now, with nothing governed, revised or agreed by anybody in between. The incentive also lands where the knowledge is: set it too low and one participant takes the whole mint, too high and nobody mints at all.

THE REST OF IT

What else is in the protocol

LIMITS

What it deliberately does not do

Stated here rather than discovered later. Each of these is a decision with a reason, not an oversight waiting to be patched.