I am from STL, so naturally, Nelly holds a special place in my childhood and heart. “Grillz” - “ROB THE JEWELRY STORE AND TELL’ EM MAKE ME A GRILL”

Thus far, the iOS app works flawlessly and all of the entry points needed to turn on the network work perfectly in tests.

Now I’m building out all of the Rust components that drive the actual shdwDrive v3 network itself.

Meaning, the consensus mechanism and the gossip network.

5. Consensus Must Be Mobile-First and Bandwidth-Respectful

DAGGER is built for phones. It assumes spotty connections, 5G or Wi-Fi, and limited resources — and still delivers fast, secure consensus.

4. Every Node Is Equal — Until Trust Expires

Every device in the network is an equal participant, but only if it stays active and proves it’s secure via device-level attestation. If a device stops checking in or can’t prove it’s real, the network simply ignores it.

3. Finality Should Be Emergent, Not Imposed

Finality happens when enough of the network has observed an event — not because of a round number or election. It emerges from the DAG itself.

2. Consensus Should Be Asynchronous and Leaderless

DAGGER avoids leaders, rounds, or global sync. Events propagate freely through gossip, enabling continuous progress across disconnected, mobile nodes.

1. Trust Comes from Hardware, Not Humans

Nodes prove they’re real and unmodified using hardware-backed attestation, not by holding tokens or credentials. Trust is earned at runtime, not assumed by default.

shdwDrive v3’s consensus engine returns to the first principles that I had been championing to our former team for almost two years…

Somewhere along the line they strayed tremendously from first principles.

By the time shdwDrive v2 launched, the consensus engine for v2 was this aberration that had somehow started using libraries that are widely known for being incompatible with mobile devices…

Again, my fault for trusting.

The existing consensus engine for shdwDrive v2 is garbage (and basically non-existent).

Somehow, we went from a fully functioning consensus engine (remember Solana XRoads when we debuted the mobile testnet?) to a barely functional mess.

It’s my fault for giving people too much freedom and trust.