State of the network · 18 September 2026
One line
A well-run empty chain. Blocks are perfect, user transactions are zero, governance has never been exercised, a single sudo key of unknown custody sits above everything, and the bridged value on-chain would not cover a month of hosting for one validator.
Method. Every route of portal.rootnet.live (the polkadot-js apps fork, "Seed v11.0.0", apps v0.150.1) was opened in a real Chrome window on 2026-09-18 and its text and a screenshot captured — 31 routes, including the sub-tabs. Where the portal shows a number, it was cross-checked with direct RPC queries against wss://root.rootnet.live/archive/ws. Numbers below are what one day showed, at the block quoted. The ecosystem map is the companion piece: who is involved; this page is what the chain is doing.
Liveness — flawless
| Observed | |
|---|---|
| Best block | #31,107,177 (finalized 3 behind) |
| Block time | 4.000 s, std-dev 0.001 s over 50 blocks; target 4 s |
| Forks | 0 in the window |
| Peers | 38, not syncing |
| Runtime | spec 84 — Release/11.84.0, 21 Oct 2025, the last release ever published |
| Total issuance | 12.0000 B ROOT; inactive 38.28 ROOT |
The "archive" RPC is not an archive
root.rootnet.live/archive discards state beyond ~256 blocks (about 17 minutes): a state query at depth 250 works, at depth 300 returns "State already discarded". Block bodies are still served through the raw chain_getBlock RPC, but polkadot.js's api.rpc.chain.getBlock fails on them as well, because it asks for the runtime version at that block. Anything the docs say about querying history through this endpoint is untrue today; you need your own archive node. Appendix A has the depth as measured at the last build.
Activity — zero
240 consecutive blocks (16 minutes) contained no user transactions at all — no signed extrinsics, no ethereum.transact, no distinct signers; only the timestamp.set inherent. The explorer's "last events: 1" per block is the same fact from the other side. A second 10-minute window an hour earlier gave the same result.
Against that, the chain carries the footprint of the Futureverse era:
| Population | Count | How |
|---|---|---|
Accounts (system.account keys) | 3,672,276 | full key scan |
| FuturePasses minted | 3,457,643 | futurepass.nextFuturepassId |
| NFT collections | 620 | nft.nextCollectionId |
| Assets (fungible) | 221 (ids to 223) | portal Assets page |
3.5 million wallets and nobody transacting is what a mass airdrop looks like eleven months after the company that ran it went into receivership.
Staking — the only live economy, and it looks like one operator
| Observed | |
|---|---|
| Validators | 18 active / 51 seats · 0 waiting (the RPC showed 19 two days earlier) |
| Nominators | 2,005 active / 6,759 with a nomination |
| Staked | 3.1 % of issuance vs 50 % "ideal"; 373.6 M ROOT bonded |
| Min bonds | validator 100,000 ROOT · nominator 25 ROOT |
| Era / session | 1 day 20 h · 4 h 24 min (era 1382) |
| Last era's validator reward | 0.073 ROOT |
| Vortex cycles | 1–7 Done; cycle 8 not created; 1.27 M VTX outstanding |
Eleven of the eighteen validators have exactly 100,000 ROOT own stake (the minimum bond), 1.00 % commission, between one and eight nominators, and 15–20 M ROOT nominated by those few accounts. Three are FuturePass accounts (0xFFfFfFFf… prefix). That is the signature of one party running many seats and nominating itself. Only two look like public validators: 0x2546…6744 (53.7 M ROOT, 140 nominators, 5 %) and 0x177d…30b1 (18.4 M, 206 nominators, 5 %). Three validators are oversubscribed at the 256-nominator cap, so their excess nominators earn nothing. Operators are not identifiable on-chain — no identity pallet — and the explorer that carried labels is paused; Gen3's gen3-eu-1/2 are the only seats anyone has publicly claimed.
Five unapplied slashes totalling ~963,540 ROOT are queued for era 1394 — cancellable only by governance, which (next section) has no members.
Governance — empty chairs, one key
| Body | State |
|---|---|
| Democracy | 0 proposals, 0 referenda, ever. 28-day launch period added in the last release; never used |
| Council | 0 / 5 seats, 0 candidates, 0 runners-up; 25-minute term. The calendar fires "Election of new council candidates" every session with no one to elect |
| Technical committee / Treasury | not exposed by the runtime (routes fall through to the explorer) |
| Scheduler | nothing queued, no active schedules |
| Sudo | still present. Key 0xEEcD0474a25a61Bf02A651C0b0beeC893aa44B5C — the same address that owns and administers ROOT, XRP, Vortex and RLUSD. One key can do anything to the chain, and who holds it after Futureverse's assets passed to 50T Holdings is not public |
Bridged value — near zero
On-chain supply of the assets that come over the bridges (owner 0x6D6f646c65726332307065670000000000000000 = the erc20peg pallet):
| Asset | Supply on TRN |
|---|---|
| XRP | 424,764 |
| ETH | 17.6 |
| USDC | 22,680 |
| USDT | 9,474 |
| DAI | 32 |
| RLUSD | 1,002 |
| ASTO | 12.7 M |
| SYLO | 1.49 B |
| IMX, WBTC, wstETH, DYDX, LINK, HEX, LDO, BLUR, cbETH, UNI, PRIME, PEPE… | 0.0000 |
Of the 221 assets, 109 are DEX LP tokens (almost all dust — LP ROOT-SYLO 30.6 units, LP SYLO-ASTO 87,646), roughly ninety are 2024-era memecoins (PorkJet, Rootdaddy, HOTDOGKING, "New Zealand Road Cone"…), and the rest are game tokens — The Third Kingdom's stone / alloy / gold / ooze / gems, Zerpmon's ZRP and crystals, Prysm vouchers, THINK.
The portal itself
Address prefix 193, in-browser account storage disabled by default, one RPC method (system_peers) refused as unsafe. Nothing else broken. It is the last piece of TRN tooling that fully works, and it is a stock polkadot-js apps build pointed at the chain.
What this means
- For a builder: the base layer is real and fast, the SDKs are on npm and the source is mirrored, but there is no history RPC, no explorer, no testnet, no governance to petition, and an unknown party holds root. You would be the ecosystem.
- For a holder / nominator: 3 % staked at 0.07 ROOT per era per validator, with a self-nominating set and a million ROOT of slashes pending against a governance that cannot cancel them.
- For anyone assessing "who is actively involved": on this day, the answer the chain gives is the validator operators — probably one or two of them — and nobody else.
Sources & reproducibility
- Portal captures: 31 routes, 2026-09-18 09:30–10:10 NZST, Chrome (headed) via Playwright; twelve screenshots above, in
docs/public/state/2026-09-18/. - Chain queries:
@polkadot/apiagainstwss://root.rootnet.live/archive/ws—staking.activeEra / validatorCount / minValidatorBond / minNominatorBond / unappliedSlashes / erasValidatorReward,sudo.key,council.members,democracy.publicPropCount / referendumCount,vortexDistribution.nextVortexId / vtxDistStatuses,futurepass.nextFuturepassId,nft.nextCollectionId,assetsExt.nextAssetId, a fullsystem.accountkey scan, and every extrinsic of blocks 31,107,409–31,107,649. - Companion pages: Ecosystem map · Timeline · the handover · Appendix A · endpoint health.