Most blockchains record that something happened. SWSS Chain settles it — under a named legal owner, in a stated jurisdiction, with a certificate produced by consensus itself and verifiable by anyone who was never our customer. That is a different class of infrastructure, and it is running today, carrying seventeen products on one layer.
Development began in 2019, and what has been built since is not a general-purpose blockchain with real-world assets added on top of it. Settlement, identity, privacy and the agent economy are each a transaction class or protocol infrastructure in their own right — applied by every validator as a condition of admission, rather than deployed as applications above the chain that could be paused, replaced, or bypassed by deploying a second one beside them. That distinction is the whole of the engineering, and it is not one a blockchain can adopt later.
Mainnet is live and has run continuously since launch, following a validator-operated testing programme of more than 365 consecutive days. That is an interval most public blockchains never spend, and it is spent for a reason: a settlement layer cannot be shipped and hardened afterwards, because the guarantee it offers is worth exactly what the network was doing during the years nobody was watching.
SWSS Chain is a purpose-built, EVM-compatible Layer 1 engineered from the ground up as settlement-grade infrastructure for real-world assets. It operates with one-second block production, SCP consensus, zero-knowledge settlement privacy, on-chain identity infrastructure, the DEED-1 settlement standard, and a native AI Agent Identity transaction class for the agent economy. All seventeen products settle on that one layer rather than on seventeen platforms reconciled afterwards, and every transaction is denominated in SWSS Coin, the native settlement currency of the chain.
What Makes This Different
Most of this document is engineering. Four claims are not, and they are the reason the engineering was done this way rather than any other. Each is checkable by someone who does not trust us, and each is set out in full in a section of its own.
| The claim | Why it holds |
|---|---|
| Settlement is a transaction class, not a contract | A deed settles as a native SCP transaction carrying its legal metadata at the wire level. A contract can be paused, replaced, or bypassed by deploying a second one beside it, so its guarantee is only as strong as whoever holds its keys. A transaction class is applied by every validator as a condition of admission, and no deployment routes around it. The DEED-1 Standard |
| Finality is certified by consensus, and outlives the platform that used it | A settled deed carries a Finality Certificate produced by the validator set rather than by an application above it, and it is verifiable by a counterparty who was never a customer of ours. A record that depends on its issuer still being in business is a record with a counterparty attached. The Consensus Protocol |
| Identity precedes value | A party is established before anything settles, not reconciled afterwards. The identity layer is infrastructure at the chain, so the same verification governs a deed, a payment and an autonomous agent instead of each product maintaining its own idea of who a member is. The Identity Layer |
| Compliance is enforced at admission, not audited afterwards | A transaction that fails a protocol rule does not become a finding in a later report — it is refused entry, and the refusal is the record. Nothing partially valid is admitted and corrected later, which is the state most reconciliation exists to clean up. The Legal Framework |
Technology Foundation
swss thesis --explain
Everything else in this document is the engineering behind those five stages. The last one is the difference that matters: the certificate is produced by consensus rather than by an application above it, which is why it survives any platform that used it.
Settlement Economics
SWSS Coin has a fixed supply of 5B SWSS Coin, and no further minting is possible. The supply does not merely stay fixed. Under the Settlement Combustion Model, a defined micro-fraction of every deed settlement is permanently retired from circulation at the consensus layer, so circulating supply contracts as real-world settlement activity grows. The model operates across three layers.
Key Chain Parameters
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Chain Name | SWSS Chain Mainnet |
| Chain ID | 122605 (0x1DEED) |
| Testnet Chain ID | 122606 (0x1DEEE) |
| Block Time | 1 Second |
| EVM Compatibility | Cancun |
| Wallet Compatibility | Any EVM wallet supporting custom networks, including MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Ledger and Trezor |
| Wallet Configuration | Chain ID 122605 with RPC endpoint swssrpc.swss.io |
| Consensus Protocol | SwssChain Consensus Protocol (SCP v3.1.4) |
| ZK Settlement Privacy | SCP-ZK v3.3.0 |
| Identity Infrastructure | SWSS IVL v1.4.3 |
| Testnet Protocol Stack | Identical to mainnet. Both networks report the same client build, so a contract verified on one behaves the same on the other |
| Finality Mechanism | Byzantine Fault Tolerant Finality Attestation (BFTFA) |
| Certificate Signing | BLS signature aggregation. Certificate size is constant and does not grow with the validator set. |
| Settlement Standard | DEED-1 |
| Validator Classifications | Foundation, Institutional, and Custodian |
| Validator Registry | Held on chain and publicly verifiable, not in an off-chain directory |
| Validator Admission | Executed as an on-chain governance proposal. Voting authority is granted on execution, with no manual registrar |
| Validator Participation | Open to qualified institutions and custodians through the SWSS NodeX programme |
| Native Currency | SWSS Coin |
| Fixed Supply | 5B SWSS Coin |
| Supply Retirement | Transactional Settlement Levy, enforced at the consensus layer |
| Mainnet RPC Endpoint | swssrpc.swss.io |
| Testnet RPC Endpoint | testnet.swssrpc.swss.io |
| Explorer | swssscan.swss.io |
| Documentation | docs.swss.io |
| Website | swss.io |
| Whitepaper | whitepaper.swss.io |
| Status | LIVE |
Products At A Glance
Seventeen products operate on the SWSS Chain settlement layer. Ten are live or in live beta, four are in active development, and three are planned. SWSS Bridge operates within SWSS App and SWSS Governance within SWSS NodeX; both are counted as products in their own right. Each product is described in full in The SWSS Ecosystem, and delivery dates are tracked on Product Milestones. Where the protocol goes from here is set out in The Future of SWSS Chain.
swss ecosystem --converge
Seventeen products, and none of them keeps its own ledger. Every settlement in every family above becomes the same kind of record on the same layer, denominated in the same currency and certified by the same consensus — which is why a deed, a compute contract and an agent invocation can be read side by side without three systems being made to agree first. The alternative is not a worse blockchain; it is seventeen platforms and a reconciliation problem between them.
The claim this document defends is a narrow one, and it is worth stating plainly at the end of the summary as well as the beginning. A real-world asset does not need another blockchain to record that it exists. It needs a settlement layer that can be shown, by anyone, to have settled it — under a named legal owner, in a stated jurisdiction, with a certificate produced by consensus rather than by whoever ran the platform. Everything that follows is how that is built, and every claim in it is written so that it can be checked rather than believed.
What is SWSS Chain?