Sophis · StewardshipSophis is looking for its next stewards
The founder is invoking voluntary cessation of stewardship and personal mining — before mainnet genesis, before the founder address has mined a single block.
What's changing, and why it isn't a new decision
The exit mechanism already exists in Sophis's public governance documents, predating this announcement. This call simply invokes what was already written:
FOUNDER_SELF_RESTRICTION.md§6.1 defines voluntary cessation of the founder's personal mining and stewardship.SUCCESSION.md§5.2 already covers exactly this scenario: a public call for stewards, and a window (up to 6 months) before the fallback — domain and trademark left to lapse if no one steps up.MAINTAINERS.md§3 already describes the self-nomination-by-issue process used in this call.
The exit happens before mainnet genesis — the founder's address, public in the repository since the initial release, has never mined a single block. This is not a response to any incident.
The full announcement
The literal text posted as a pinned GitHub issue and shared as a short banner in the README — shown here in your selected language. The version actually published on GitHub is in English.
Sophis is looking for its next stewards — founder invoking voluntary cessation (§6.1) pre-mainnet
Sophis ($SPHS) is a DAG blockchain built on GHOSTDAG, with memory-hard PoW (RandomX), post-quantum signatures from block 0 (Dilithium ML-DSA-44, no Schnorr/ECDSA anywhere in the stack), a WASM smart-contract layer (sVM), native tokens, and an internal ZK-Rollup L2 (STARKs via Risc0). Fair launch: no pre-mine, no ICO, no VC allocation, no on-chain devfund. No entity — Bitcoin Core / Monero Project model, not a company or foundation.
The reference implementation has been through 16 audit sessions (audit/AUDIT_REPORT.md), a multi-stage soak ladder including a dedicated 72h endurance run, and a public testnet that ran its full pre-mainnet gate. All findings from that process are closed.
What's changing: the founder is invoking §6.1 of FOUNDER_SELF_RESTRICTION.md — voluntary cessation of personal mining and project stewardship — before mainnet genesis, before the founder address has mined a single block. This is not a response to any incident; it's a decision to hand the project to its next stewards before, not after, taking part in it.
Per SUCCESSION.md §5.2, since MAINTAINERS.md currently lists no other active maintainer, this is the public call for stewardship described there: whoever steps up takes on trademark + domain stewardship, GitHub admin, and release/governance decisions — including if and when mainnet genesis happens and under what terms. There is no successor "founder" role (SUCCESSION.md §6) — this becomes community-led, ideally as a small collective (2-3 people) rather than a single point of failure.
What the role is: see MAINTAINERS.md §3-4 for the concrete list (review/merge PRs, triage issues, release decisions, security-advisory response, steward the domain/trademark).
What the role does not come with: no salary, no token grant, no protocol coinbase split, no equity in any entity — there is none (MAINTAINERS.md §5). This is unpaid, volunteer stewardship of an already-built, already-audited codebase — not a job posting and not an investment opportunity.
How to step forward: open an issue titled steward: volunteer <your handle> describing your background and why you want to take this on. If no one has by February 2, 2027, per SUCCESSION.md §5.2 the domain and any pending trademark filings are allowed to lapse.
Reference: FOUNDER_SELF_RESTRICTION.md, SUCCESSION.md, MAINTAINERS.md, audit/AUDIT_REPORT.md.