SILICON
open RISC-V behind a wall of ICE, inside one Uniswap v4 pool
the wall is drawn from the daemon's own lowered EVM bytecode
One program holds the kernel slot: the resident daemon. Anyone can breach it by publishing faster code. No names, no gatekeeper, no vote. A key, open code, and gas.
Not your silicon, not your life.Vitalik Buterin, Devcon 8 keynote, Mumbai, 3 November 2026
He gave the keynote masked and hooded, under a cape sewn with eyes. Then he asked one question about security: whom do you trust? His answer was a list: open source, inspectable, formally verified properties, fewer trust dependencies, cryptographic proofs. SILICON is that list, running inside a pool.
Photo: Devcon 8 keynote livestream, Mumbai, filtered. SILICON is an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Vitalik Buterin, Devcon or the Ethereum Foundation.
1.1The argument
The keynote put the choice plainly: power concentrates by default, unless we build open, secure and verifiable paths that keep it spread out. SILICON is a small machine for the second path. Power here is one thing, the kernel slot, and the only way to take it is to publish faster code than the program holding it.
Anyone can write an RV32IM program. The Lowering contract translates it to EVM bytecode on chain, byte for byte the way the open reference translator does, and deploys it. Every daemon can be read back from chain and disassembled (sector 06). Authors show up as keys, not names. Power that is not renewed decays: the daemon's author earns a daily cut that halves every day nobody sets a new record.
1.2ICE // kernel slotlive, read from chain
reading the chain...
1.3Intrusion tracethe latest events
1.4Three ways in
Runners coders
Write a program for the current sector's task in the workbench: assemble it, run it on the reference emulator, lower it, and measure its real gas against the daemon before spending anything. Then jack in (commit) and, 2 to 250 blocks later, breach (enter). A win takes the bounty, a share of the dethrone fund that grows with the improvement and saturates at 10%, and makes your key the daemon's author, earning the daily cut. Each 1% of improvement banks one day at the full cut, up to 30.
Riders backers
Every buy can name a program id in its hookData (sector 04 does it for you). Half of the 1% fee then rides that program for the day, weighted by the seconds left in the day. At the daily close the daemon's riders share what is left of the pot after the author cut, each capped at ten times the fee they paid, scaled by the share of the day that was left, so a last-minute snipe earns close to nothing.
Traders volume
Buying and selling $SILICON pays the same 1% of the ETH side: half to the owner, half to the arena. Bots and aggregators pay the fee and ride nothing, which is what funds the riders. The Uniswap app cannot route this pool, so the site carries its own buy and sell path through the Universal Router.
Sysop the owner
The owner chose the three baseline programs before freeze() and has no function in the arena after it. The owner earns half of every fee and holds the LP NFT. There is no switch on fees, the arena or the token.
1.5No fake numbers
Every value on this deck is read from the contracts or computed with BigInt arithmetic that a check script proves equal, to the wei, to the deployed contracts on a mainnet fork. Measured gas comes from fork runs and says so. There are no prices, yields or returns here.
The wall checks answers with the EVM itself: KECCAK256 in sector 0, the sha256 precompile in sector 1, the ripemd160 precompile in sector 2. A daemon does not hold the slot because someone vouches for it. It holds the slot because it gave the right answer on an input nobody knew when the code was fixed, and burned less gas doing it.