Chain Evolution

An Evolution is the chain deliberately becoming a different thing than it was — a governed consensus upgrade, ratified by the network rather than deployed to it. Evolutions are how Impactium changes, and they are also how it keeps time.

They are designated by ordinal: Evo1, Evo2, Evo3, and onward.

What paces them

Evolution spacing is set by two things together: an on-chain population threshold and governance consensus. Not by elapsed time, not by release readiness, and not by a feature being finished.

That is a deliberate choice about what an era costs. A threshold measured in participants cannot be reached by shipping harder — the network has to actually grow into it. Tying the gate to adoption rather than to engineering is what stops an Evolution from being something the builders can simply decide to declare.

A Voice is a verified Entity

The unit those thresholds count is the Voice, and a Voice is one verified Entity.

Because Entities include organizations (#O) and families (#F) as well as people (#E), a Voice count is a count of accountable perspectives, not of individuals — a family is one Entity holding one shared perspective, and so is an organization. And because an Entity is never its key, counting Voices is not counting accounts either: keys rotate and keyholders change while the Entity, and its Voice, persist.

What is built today. There is no Entity verification state on chain. An Entity carries its fingerprint, class, lineage, public key and sequence — nothing that marks it verified or pending. In practice registered and verified are currently the same set, because the network is closed and every wallet is referral-spawned by an existing member, so nothing unvouched-for can exist. The distinction only acquires teeth when the vetted set opens and identity verification becomes the gate — which is also when a threshold first needs evaluating.

EVO — Evaluated · Validated · Originated

EVO stands for Evaluated · Validated · Originated, and the tense is the point. Each term is a past participle, because an Evolution names what the network has become, never what it intends:

• Evaluated — the era's work was assessed against the criteria it was given
• Validated — governance ratified that assessment
• Originated — a capsule originated from it, carrying the era forward

This is the same discipline the rest of the system applies to impact: the record holds what happened, not what was hoped for. An Evolution is a completed act by the time it has a number.

What an Evolution mints

Every Evolution mints an Evolution capsule, and it carries three things at once:

The capsule carries	What it does
the compacted record of all on-chain contributions to that point	the boundary summarizes history rather than discarding it
a residual entitlement	everyone who contributed shares in all future impact on the chain, in proportion to what they contributed so far
a contract stating the next Evolution's criteria	the conditions the network must meet to become its next version

That third property is what makes this a living chain rather than one that merely gets upgraded. The terms of the network's own succession are on chain, ratified, and readable by anyone — so the roadmap is an artifact the network holds, not a document its authors hold.

It also means this page describes the mechanism; the chain carries the criteria. Anything written here about a future era is a plan. What binds is the contract in the most recent capsule.

And the criteria are not written in advance by the network's authors. Each Evolution's conditions are debated during the Evolution before it, by the participants who will have to meet them. So an era's terms are set by the people it will govern — not handed down by whoever happened to be present at the founding.

Why the criteria live on chain. A roadmap held by its authors can be quietly revised by them. A criteria contract cannot: changing what the next Evolution requires is itself a governed act, visible and attributable. The difference matters most exactly when it is most tempting to move the goalposts.

Evolutions keep time

Evolution as time is not a metaphor: Impactium's unit of time is the Evolution. Block height gives a correct ordering, but it is not a unit — height 4,000,000 tells you the chain moved, not that it became anything. An Evolution is one deliberate, ratified change to what the network is, so time measured in Evolutions has divisions that mean something.

The calendar this produces is not uniform, and that is correct: a chain that changed six times in its first year and once in its tenth is telling the truth about itself. Fixed periods would flatten exactly the signal worth keeping.

This is where the COA fingerprint's temporal anchor comes from. An action is located in time by the Evolution it happened under — $C0.@E1 reads "chain zero, at Evolution 1".

What is built today. x/upgrade schedules and cancels governed consensus upgrades (MsgScheduleUpgrade, MsgCancelUpgrade). That is the whole of it. No capsule is minted, no contributions are compacted, no criteria contract exists, and no fingerprint carries an @E anchor. Everything else on this page is recorded design.

Evo1 — Genesis

Genesis is what Evo1 mints. The founding token: the Impactivism manifesto and the Civicognita charter alongside the compacted contributions, historical impact, ratified Constitution, and founders' residual registry. It is the moment the record becomes permanent.

Threshold: 1,000 Voices. Its criteria are set:

• a fully secure end-to-end experience with on-chain encryption
• Bliss at the fuller-IRM bar — multiple real pipelines, inter-organization impact exchange happening, and Bliss serving at least one other dApp
• a ratified Universal Constitution carrying ≥1000 Voices

Evo1 also retires the founding ceremony. The ceremony exists to produce the founding record, so it is scaffolding: once the record is sealed, the scaffolding comes down rather than lingering as a special path nobody uses.

Evo2 — the network governs its own evolution

Threshold: 100,000 Voices.

At Evo2 the root-gated upgrade authority expires. Until then a founding key can schedule a consensus upgrade; after it, the network changes only by governance.

This ordering is deliberate and load-bearing: self-governance comes before wider participation. Inviting people into a network where a single key can still force a consensus upgrade would ask every newcomer to trust a key they did not choose and cannot see — the concentration of power the whole system exists to disperse.

Evo2 is also where non-human invites are planned to become available, widening who may be referred beyond human personal Entities.

The thresholds

Each Evolution requires the network to have grown roughly a hundredfold since the last:

Era	Voices
Evo1	1,000
Evo2	100,000
Evo3	10,000,000
Evo4	1,000,000,000

Evo1's and Evo2's are set. The rest are shape, not settled figures — by the mechanism above, Evo3's threshold is Evo2's network to decide, and it may reject this progression once it has evidence nobody has today.

At Evo4 — a billion Voices — the founder's stated intent is to no longer hold majority influence on the chain. That is a ceiling placed on one's own power, with a number and a deadline attached, and it is measurable rather than aspirational: vote weight is computed, so whether any founding party holds a majority is a query rather than an opinion.

Beyond the scoped path

Later Evolutions widen participation and execution — the vetted set opening, and eventually an executor that lets applications run without being compiled into the node.

The scoped sequence ends in an Evolution that mints the first Planetary Capsule. First is the operative word: it is the end of what can be scoped from here, not the end of the series. More Evolutions follow as humanity reaches new scales of civilization, because each growth phase teaches something the previous one could not.

Evolutions do not stop at Universal Voice either. That threshold is something the world crosses, not a governed act the network performs — so it ends a phase without ending the sequence.

The Prime Directive every era inherits

Sustainability of humanity in balance with environment holds at every scale. It is not one Evolution's criterion to be met and moved past; it is a standing constraint each era inherits, whatever else its contract requires.

It is also why Environmental is the one ImpactDomain whose disclosure is required public. A directive that survives every Evolution cannot depend on anyone choosing to disclose against it.

Referral is permanent across all of them

No Evolution removes referral. Every wallet is created by referral, at every scale and in every era, because that lineage is what the Chain of Impact and residual flow along. What later Evolutions widen is who may be referred.