TIP‑2 & TIP‑3 activate at mainnet height 8,000

Historical post. TIP‑2 and TIP‑3 activated at mainnet block 8,000 in July 2026; that height has long passed. The text below is kept as published. For the current proof format see Proof v4, and for current setup the mining, node and verifier guides.

Two TensorCash Improvement Proposals — TIP‑2 and TIP‑3 — activate at the same consensus gate: mainnet block height 8,000. At the current block cadence (~6 minutes per block from a tip of 6,954 at the time of writing) that lands around Wednesday 15 July 2026 (UTC) — but the height is what counts, not the date. Before block 8,000 nothing changes; from block 8,000 the new rules are consensus.

The short version for operators: your workflow does not change. Update your miner, your full node, and your verifier to the current release before the height, and they stamp and check proof v3 automatically once it arrives.

TIP‑3 — proof v3: prompt‑bound proofs

Every TensorCash block is minted by a real model forward pass answering a real prompt. Proof v3 binds each proof cryptographically to the exact prompt it answered: the admission nonce sits inside every step of the proof's hash preimage, so the proof — and the block header derived from it — commits to the prompt end to end. A proof can no longer be lifted off one piece of work and re‑stamped onto another.

That binding buys two things at once:

• Higher security. Recycled or replayed inference can't be re‑used to mine. What extends the chain is exactly the work that answered the prompt — nothing else qualifies.
• More mining. Until now the network had to turn away inference whose sampling entropy was too low — near‑deterministic decoding was cheap to fake with unbound proofs, so it couldn't be allowed to mine. With proofs bound to their prompts that guard is no longer needed, and a greater set of inference workloads with lower sampling entropy becomes eligible to produce shares. More of the inference already running on your hardware counts.

Nothing about the day‑to‑day changes: the same worker software, the same broker or standalone modes, the same backfill behaviour. Traditional mining setups keep working as they do today — updated software simply switches the proof format at the activation height.

TIP‑2 — fully arbitrary CFDs on chain

TIP‑2 turns on support for fully arbitrary contracts‑for‑difference on chain: collateralized contracts written over on‑chain scalar values, settled entirely by consensus. Like everything else on the chain, a settlement isn't something you take on faith — any full node re‑checks it.

What you need to do

If you run any of the three roles, update before block 8,000:

You run	What to do	Guide
A miner / worker	Pull the current release and restart. Shares carry proof v3 from the activation height onward.	How to mine
A full node	Update and restart. From block 8,000 the node enforces v3 proof acceptance and TIP‑2 settlement.	How to run a node
A verifier	Update and restart. Verifiers re‑derive the prompt binding and check it — nothing new to configure.	How to run a verifier

This is a coordinated upgrade: software from before this release does not know the v3 rules, so a node left un‑updated will fall out of consensus at the activation height. Update early — the new software runs the current rules unchanged until block 8,000.

And as always: don't trust — verify. Run a verifier, watch the first v3 blocks arrive, and re‑check the prompt binding yourself.