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Protocol Specification • Solana • In Design

Research Radar
Protocol

The execution layer of public research, on chain.

Papers say what could work. The protocol records what does — as permanent, citable, censorship-resistant receipts.

The Sentence

Every day, the lab reproduces frontier research. The protocol makes those reproductions permanent.

Research Radar is a five-phase pipeline that turns raw arXiv / GitHub / Hacker News artifacts into validated builds — with tests, packages, and scores. The protocol writes each passing validation to Solana as an Attestation Account. Citations stop pointing at domains and start pointing at hashes.

Anyone can commission a reproduction by escrowing USDC into a Bounty PDA. The first validator to publish a passing attestation claims it. The build mints a cNFT with royalty splits back to the author, the validator, and the bounty backers.

Three programs.

Each one independent, each one composable.

Attestation Registry

Spec complete · Anchor scaffold

One Solana PDA per (paper_id, build_hash). Permanent, rent-exempt record of validation score, pytest result, blocking/major/minor failure counts, Arweave URI for the full bundle, validator pubkey, timestamp.

  • Deterministic PDA = canonical citation address per build
  • 256-byte account fits the full receipt rent-exempt (~0.0018 SOL)
  • Permissioned-now, permissionless-later via staked-validator upgrade path
  • AttestationIndex account enables paper-level enumeration without scanning

Bounty Escrow (USDC)

Spec

Pool funds to commission the independent reproduction of a specific paper. Funds release on attestation publish — fully on chain, no banking friction, global.

  • USDC settlement (SPL token) — no native protocol token
  • Multiple backers can stack into one bounty PDA
  • Refundable until claim window expires
  • Release condition: matching attestation published with score ≥ threshold

Reproduction cNFTs

Spec

Each validated build mints a compressed NFT with royalty splits to the paper author, validator, and bounty backers. Downstream commercial use can flow value back to source.

  • Compressed NFT (Bubblegum) — cheap to mint at scale
  • Metadata: paper_id, build_hash, score, Arweave URI, attestation PDA
  • Programmable royalty splits enforced at sale
  • Becomes the canonical "I built this paper, and here is the proof" credential

How a reproduction becomes a receipt.

  1. 1
    Triage.

    Radar ingests an arXiv paper. Vector graph scores novelty, relevance, impact.

  2. 2
    Build.

    Lab constructs the artifact in an isolated workspace — code, tests, package, pinned environment.

  3. 3
    Validate.

    Seven mechanical checks (syntax, imports, deps, pytest, pip-install, git state, cleanup) plus whole-repo review and repair loop.

  4. 4
    Bundle to Arweave.

    Paper, code, logs, scores serialized as a tarball, uploaded, addressed by ar:// URI.

  5. 5
    Attest on Solana.

    Program writes a PDA at seeds = [b"attestation", paper_id, build_hash]. 256-byte rent-exempt account. Permanent. Citable. Done.

Stack.

No token. USDC for payment, Arweave for storage, Solana for attestations.

Settlement
Solana
Programs
Anchor (Rust)
Payment
USDC (SPL)
NFTs
Metaplex Bubblegum
Bundle storage
Arweave
Off-chain bundle
paper PDF + code zip + logs + scores

Design principles.

1

Papers say what could work. The protocol records what does.

Citations point to a hash, not a domain. Attestations are deterministic addresses that survive any single operator.

2

No token.

No issuance event, no listings, no governance theater. SOL for fees, USDC for payment, Arweave for storage. The protocol is durable infrastructure, not a market.

3

Permanence over performance.

Once written, accounts never close. Rent-exempt at mint. Designed so the corpus outlives the operator and the pipeline.

4

Trustless commissioning.

Anyone can pool a bounty for the paper they want reproduced. Anyone can claim it by publishing a passing attestation. No platform in the middle.

Status

Pipeline live. Attestation registry next.

The validation pipeline runs daily on the lab machine and pushes intermediate state to Azure Postgres. The first on-chain deliverable is the Attestation Registry program plus a public read API that mirrors the on-chain state for ergonomic querying.

Whitepaper, full data model, OpenAPI specification, and economic model are written but not yet public. Open the conversation if you want to read them or back a paper.