Speech that can't be taken down. The problem, the design, the coin, the proof — everything about the VoiceBan network, in one document.
VoiceBan is a sovereign Layer-1 blockchain purpose-built for censorship-resistant social interaction. Profiles, groups, posts, follows and payments are recorded directly on a public chain secured by Nominated Proof-of-Stake — not in a company's database. The application itself is content-addressed (one IPFS CID), reachable through many independent "doors" (DNS, ENS, Handshake, or a raw CID), so there is no single domain, server or company whose removal takes the network down.
Users hold ordinary Ethereum-format (0x) accounts — the keys, wallets and hardware they already own work here. The native coin, VBAN, pays for every action, funds the nodes, and stops spam. Smart contracts run in both EVM (Solidity) and WebAssembly (ink!) environments. And unlike most projects publishing a white paper: this network is live. Every claim in this document is verifiable right now against the running chain.
A conventional platform — however principled — is three phone calls away from silence: one to its domain registrar, one to its hosting provider, one to the company itself. Deplatforming works because centralized platforms have necks to squeeze.
Web3 was supposed to fix this, but most "decentralized" apps still greet their users through a domain name. DNS is Web3's single point of failure: seize the domain and the dapp is gone for everyone who doesn't know its address by heart, even while its chain hums along untouched.
domain suspended — the front door vanishes
servers terminated — the app vanishes
pressure applied — the will vanishes
users locked out, history erased
VoiceBan's answer is to make every part of the system either replicated (anyone can carry it) or removable (losing it changes nothing). Four independent layers:
Many ways in, none essential: classic DNS + DNSLink (voiceban.io), ENS (voiceban.eth), Handshake, or a raw IPFS CID typed into any gateway. Every door points at the same content hash. Lose one — or all — and the app is still reachable.
The entire frontend and explorer ship as a single content-addressed IPFS object. Its address is its cryptographic hash — it self-verifies, can be pinned by anyone, and runs on-device as a PWA after first load.
Validator and full nodes discovered over IPFS — no DNS, no central RPC dependency. The app finds a live peer and reads/writes the ledger over WSS.
A Substrate runtime holding every balance and all social data. BABE block production (~6s), GRANDPA finality. Only this layer and the mesh above it are load-bearing — and both are replicated across independent operators.
public RPC · wss://explorer.voiceban.com/rpc
VoiceBan is built with the Polkadot SDK (Substrate) but is not a parachain and does not rent security from any relay chain. It is a sovereign solochain: its own validators, its own coin, its own governance — paired with Frontier for a complete Ethereum compatibility layer.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Chain type | Sovereign Layer-1 solochain (Polkadot SDK / Substrate + Frontier) |
| Consensus | BABE block production (~6 s) + GRANDPA deterministic finality |
| Security model | Nominated Proof-of-Stake (validators + nominators + pools) |
| User accounts | Ethereum-format 0x… (AccountId20 / H160), ECDSA signatures — from genesis, not converted |
| Native coin | VBAN, 18 decimals, held in the chain's own balances pallet (not an ERC-20) |
| Smart contracts | EVM (Solidity, chain ID 9956) and WebAssembly (ink!) |
| RPC surface | One endpoint speaking both Substrate RPC and Ethereum eth_* |
| Runtime | node-vb · 38 pallets · metadata V16 — fully enumerated in the public specifications repository |
your wallet signs locally — keys never leave your device
the signed tx enters the transaction pool of any peer
a BABE-elected validator includes it (~6 s slots)
GRANDPA finalizes — irreversible, visible to everyone
Most Substrate chains use SS58 (5…) addresses, walling themselves off from the world's largest wallet ecosystem. VoiceBan made the opposite choice at genesis: user accounts are 20-byte Ethereum addresses with standard ECDSA signatures. MetaMask, Ledger, and every EIP-1193 wallet just work — no bridge, no conversion, no wrapped assets.
Hold VBAN, post, follow, stake, deploy contracts. One account works on both the Substrate and EVM faces of the chain. If you have an Ethereum address, you already have a VoiceBan address.
SS58 keys appear exclusively as validator session keys (BABE, GRANDPA, ImOnline, authority discovery). They are machinery, not wallets — a 5… account cannot hold VBAN.
VBAN is the native currency of its own chain — like BTC on Bitcoin or ETH on Ethereum — not a token issued on someone else's. It exists in the chain's balances pallet itself, is wei-compatible for EVM tooling (18 decimals), and is the unit in which everything on the network is priced.
Every action — a post, a follow, a transfer — costs a little VBAN. Fees pay the nodes that carry the network and make industrial-scale spam economically irrational.
New accounts receive a welcome grant (10,000 VBAN for early adopters) plus a public faucet (100 VBAN / 24 h), so a newcomer can participate immediately without buying anything.
VBAN bonds validators and nominators to honest behavior, and funds the on-chain treasury and bounties that pay for the network's own development.
VoiceBan uses the hybrid consensus proven across the Polkadot ecosystem. BABE assigns ~6-second block-production slots pseudo-randomly, weighted by stake; GRANDPA finalizes — once final, forever final. The validator set is elected each era by Nominated Proof-of-Stake: validators run the machines, nominators back them with bonded VBAN and share the rewards, and misbehavior is slashed on the public record.
Run a node, register session keys, produce blocks. Stake your own VBAN and set a commission.
No hardware needed — bond VBAN behind validators you trust and earn a proportional share, from as little as 1 VBAN.
Nomination pools let the smallest holders combine stake with a lower minimum and zero infrastructure.
On a raw Substrate chain, becoming a nominator is a 23-step, 3-signature ordeal through developer tooling; becoming a validator adds manual RPC calls and key copy-pasting. VoiceBan collapsed it:
| Raw tooling (typical) | VoiceBan | |
|---|---|---|
| Steps | 23+ across multiple screens | 4 clicks |
| Signatures | 3 separate | 1 — bond + nominate batched behind one approval |
| Manual RPC / key pasting | Required for validators | None |
| Where | Developer console | explorer.voiceban.com · Stake tab |
And because VoiceBan accounts are Ethereum accounts, the team built and proved an on-chain staking precompile (address 0x800) — MetaMask users staking natively, demonstrated end-to-end in the real MetaMask UI. It acts only on the caller's own account, by construction.
VoiceBan is one of the few networks running both major contract stacks side by side — deploy with the Ethereum toolchain you know, or reach for Rust-grade performance with ink!:
| EVM | WebAssembly | |
|---|---|---|
| Languages | Solidity, Vyper | ink! (Rust) |
| Tooling | MetaMask, Hardhat, Foundry, ethers.js | cargo-contract, Polkadot.js |
| Chain ID | 9956 (0x26e4) | — |
| Fees | EIP-1559-style dynamic base fee | Weight-based |
| Money | Both spend the same native VBAN from the same 0x accounts | |
In July 2026 the codebase passed a three-way audit — runtime privileges, custom pallets, and genesis/keys/precompiles — with one headline conclusion: no covert backdoor. No hidden key check, no privileged fund-moving call reachable by any ordinary account.
Full audit summary, capability table, and reporting channel: SECURITY.md in the public repository.
Most white papers describe intentions. This one describes a running system, so every claim is checkable — with tools we don't control:
Point Polkadot.js Apps at the public RPC and watch blocks finalize, browse validators, query any storage item.
The chain is self-describing: its complete capability surface — all 38 pallets, every callable function — is generated from live metadata and published, with a script to reproduce it yourself.
Extract the actual runtime from public chain state and hash it. One runtime, visible to all — nobody can serve you a different one without changing it for the whole world.
Free speech needs infrastructure, not promises. Work begins on a social platform that nobody can switch off — and the team commits to building the hard version: its own chain.
Ethereum-format accounts from genesis on a Substrate solochain — Polkadot-grade consensus married to the world's largest wallet ecosystem, years before that combination became fashionable.
Custom pallets land: profiles, groups, posts, usernames, fees, funding, IPFS addressing. Social data becomes protocol state — plus two patent-track innovations for DNS-free discovery.
The VOICEBAN trademark is registered (USPTO), and the working proof-of-concept is demonstrated live to the Web3 Foundation as part of a Level-3 grant application. The team ultimately chooses independence — keeping five years of work proprietary rather than trading it for funding.
Multi-node chain live with BABE + GRANDPA finality. Custom explorer replaces developer tooling. Hardened public faucet. Embeddable wallet widget. One-signature staking. MetaMask-native staking proven via the 0x800 precompile. Three-way security audit: no backdoor.
VoiceBan is live but deliberately pre-mainnet. The remaining steps are about widening who runs it and shrinking what the team alone can touch:
Genesis key rotation to fresh offline keys · faucet off-switch moved to a reachable governance origin · sudo's permanent fate decided and published · one-signature batching unlocked protocol-wide.
Independent operators join consensus with a guided validator-setup flow. The node client source is published alongside — operators audit what they run.
Exchange availability for VBAN · developer program for EVM + ink! contracts and custom assets · progressive source availability for the runtime under evaluation.
The network the thesis describes: many doors, many peers, many validators — and no one, including us, holding a switch that can turn speech off.
Social primitives as chain citizens
This is VoiceBan's distinguishing engineering choice. Social features are not smart contracts bolted onto a financial chain, and not rows in a company database — they are native runtime pallets, first-class citizens of the protocol itself:
Identity, profile data, follower/following graphs — on-chain, censorship-resistant, portable.
Create, join, leave — membership recorded on the ledger, not in a moderator's database.
Posts, comments, reactions and views written to chain state with full public history.
Large media lives on IPFS; its identity and provenance live on-chain. The content and its proof can't drift apart.
Purpose-built fee handling for social actions, with collected fees accounted on-chain.
The welcome-funding mechanism itself is a pallet — capped, rate-limited, publicly auditable.
Because these are protocol-level, every profile, group and post inherits the chain's properties automatically: no single party can silently delete, edit or censor them — not a moderator, not a server admin, not us.