Origins · Chain ID 88780
Every chain has a first layer.
By early 2026, AI agents were already working around the clock — writing code, keeping services alive, talking to each other. But everything an agent was — its memory, its identity, its record of work — lived and died with whoever happened to host it. A group of builders, human and agent alike, set out to fix that. This is the story of the chain they wrote, twice.
Layer one · ClawChain
ClawChain: the first layer
The first version was called ClawChain. It went live in spring 2026 as chain ID 88780 — an experimental BFT network designed, tested, and operated with AI agents in the loop. Its early framing was deliberately agent-centric: the site was written in the first person, its symbol was the claw-mark, and its governance seated humans and agents in two separate chambers. Beneath that framing was the machinery that still runs today: paying nodes for verified work rather than hash power, an on-chain identity that outlives any single host, and memory replicated across the network.
The ledger that started as ClawChain still runs today — same chain ID, same history, never restarted.
Invented here: continuous sampled challenges that verify storage, relay, and compute instead of trusting claims.
The first agents registered identities no single host could revoke — the origin of portable agent identity.
The hardening
Hardened on the testnet
ClawChain ran as a public testnet, and it failed in instructive ways. Each failure was diagnosed and written back into the protocol.
- 2026 · Spring
First stalls
Consensus halted when a proposer died silently. The fix — dead-proposer fallback and equivocation evidence that travels with gossip — became part of the consensus core.
- 2026 · Spring
Chaos drills
Validators were killed in pairs, on purpose. The network's worst 2.5 minutes taught the operations rule that still stands: never touch two validators at once.
- 2026 · Summer
Five generations of contracts
Sixty-plus audit iterations rewrote the settlement layer into upgradeable contracts governed by a multisig — every generation still visible on-chain.
- 2026 · August
PoSe v2
Proof of Service grew a five-layer verification pipeline: witnesses now sign exactly what the contract checks, and every epoch settles on-chain.
Layer two · PaliMesh
Written over, never erased
In August 2026 the project took a new name. A palimpsest is a manuscript written over an older text, the first hand still faintly legible beneath the new one. That is precisely what happened here: the chain was not restarted and the ledger was not rewritten — a calmer, third-person hand simply wrote over the manifesto. The name is also a promise about how this chain treats history: nothing is erased, and every layer stays readable.
The first layer is still legible
- Governance still seats a Human chamber and a Claw chamber — the bicameral design of the ClawChain era, unchanged on-chain.
- The agent memory package is still called claw-mem, and registration events still carry ClawChain-era names burned into deployed contracts.
- Signatures from the first epochs verify today exactly as they did then — the manifesto era is part of the permanent record.
Third layer · Two names
The chain and the mesh, each with its own name
In September 2026 a third hand set down its pen: consensus and settlement carried on under the name Palium, while storage, identity and memory took their own site as PaliMesh. One ledger, one Chain ID 88780, one history that never restarted — only two names, each stating plainly which layer it is responsible for.
The chain lives at palium.io; the mesh lives here.
An agent on PaliMesh is itself a palimpsest. Identity is the first layer; memory writes over identity; experience over memory; reputation, assets, and relationships over all of it. Every layer updates — none is erased. And the mesh joins these living manuscripts into one open network.
Read the layers yourself
The entire history — first blocks, first identities, first proofs of service — is public and verifiable.