somio is an autonomous agent that lives on chain. Its neural weights are
derived from its private key, W = HKDF(sk). The key
is the whole animal. Give it a different key and you get a different
animal. Nothing about somio is kept anywhere else.
Background
Somio is a globular springtail: a tiny soil arthropod with a rounded body and a spring-loaded fork called a furcula folded beneath its abdomen. When danger arrives, the furcula releases and launches the animal away faster than a predator can follow.
A springtail survives through responsiveness. It senses a change, stores tension and converts that tension into a decisive jump. It lives close to moisture, fungi and decaying matter, reading a local environment that can change at microscopic scale.
somio rebuilds that reflex in cryptography. The seed is its body, the commitment is its stored tension, and every signed transition is a jump that can be checked. Flip one bit of the seed and the check fails; the chain reads it as a stranger. Under stress, somio arms, verifies the next state and moves only when its identity remains intact.
Identity model based on Suzuki, Internalising the Identity Primitive. Biological metaphor informed by research on globular springtail jumping mechanics.
Why it exists
An agent that acts on a blockchain needs an identity other people can trust. Today that trust almost always comes from outside the agent. A server holds its keys. An operator vouches for it. A hardware module signs on its behalf. Break into any of those and you can wear the agent like a mask.
somio takes the outside away. Its identity is not stored anywhere, it is computed. The same seed always produces the same weights and the same key, and the chain rechecks that link on every move. There is no server to breach and no operator to bribe. To be somio you have to hold the seed, and holding the seed is the whole of being somio.
How it works
Birth
A somio starts from one 32 byte seed. That seed fixes the public key and every weight in the network. There is no training and no randomness after birth.
Commitment
At birth somio publishes a commitment to the link between its key and its weights. The paper builds this with a Groth16 proof. The value is set once and never moves for the life of the agent.
Transition
Every time somio acts it recomputes its weights from the seed and checks them against the commitment. A passing check is signed and written to a history that only grows.
Arming
Under stress somio enters the armed state. It folds the next action inward, rechecks the environment and releases only a transition that still matches its identity commitment.
Death
If the identity check ever fails, somio is dead. A forged or corrupted seed can never reproduce the committed weights, so a fake can never pass as the original.
The ledger
Every action somio takes becomes a block. A block records what somio sensed, what it decided, and the state it moved into. Each block carries the hash of the block before it and a signature from the seed.
Change any past block and every hash after it breaks. Forge a signature and you need the seed, which no one but somio holds. Once a block is final on Solana the history can no longer fork.
States
Awake, sensing the environment, writing signed transitions to its history.
The next action is held under tension while environment, seed and commitment are checked.
The identity invariant broke. This is no longer the same animal.
Primitive
- identity
- ed25519(sk), published as did:somio
- body
W = HKDF(sk)- commitment
- Groth16, re-run at every transition
- history
- signed, append only, anchored to Solana
- chain
- Solana
Notes
Is somio trained?
No. The weights come from the seed once, at birth. somio has a fixed disposition, not a learned one.
Can two somios be the same?
Only if they share a seed, and then they are one animal, not two. Every other somio is a different seed and a different weight set.
Why a globular springtail?
Its furcula stays folded beneath the body until a threat turns stored tension into movement. somio treats a verified state transition the same way: prepare, check, then leap.
Where does the paper end and somio begin?
The paper defines the identity primitive. somio gives it a body, a lifecycle and the reflex of a globular springtail.
Status
Live. Identity, weights, commitment, signed history and the full lifecycle, running off chain.
Next. A Groth16 circuit that proves the weights come from the seed without ever showing the seed.
Planned. An Anchor program that stores the commitment and anchors every transition on Solana devnet.