ProtoLedger
The Canonical Standard for Distributed Ledger Design
ProtoLedger Core is an open specification for what an honest blockchain must be. It defines ten canonical principles — measurable, falsifiable criteria derived from the founding promises made by distributed ledger projects between 2008 and 2020.
It is published under the Apache 2.0 licence. Anyone may fork it, challenge a score, or build scoring tools on top of it. The ProtoLedger Index applies these principles to score every major blockchain quarterly.
ProtoLedger Core v1.0
The complete specification. Ten principles, scoring rubric, methodology, and challenge process.
Apache 2.0 · May 2026
The Ten Canonical Principles
No single party can alter the ledger without meeting the Byzantine fault threshold.
Consensus power must be measurable, permissionless, and resistant to concentration.
All cryptographic primitives must resist attacks by quantum computers.
Transactions must be private unless the sender explicitly opts into transparency.
A confirmed transaction must be irrevocable — mathematically, not probabilistically.
Energy expenditure must be proportional to useful computational work produced.
The consensus protocol must be formally specified and machine-verified.
Protocol upgrades must be encoded in the state machine, not decided by social convention.
Validators must be structurally prevented from extracting value by reordering transactions.
Governance participation must be anchored to unique human identity, not token holdings.
Challenge a Score
Every score in the ProtoLedger Index is challengeable. If you have on-chain evidence that a score is incorrect, the challenge process is public and the methodology is fully documented.
How to challenge a score →