Slithy uses a Bitcoin-style public ledger so balances, blocks, and treasury payments can be independently verified.
Slithy Tove white paper
A small proof-of-work network with a public reading fund.
Slithy Tove, Slithy for short, is built around a simple idea: let people run a wallet, help secure a transparent network, and see part of every block reward flow into a literacy treasury that can be checked by anyone.
The current design uses yespower proof of work to keep normal-computer mining in scope and reduce early hardware concentration.
Each block reserves a fixed share of new coins for books, reading materials, literacy programs, and direct mission costs.
Abstract
Slithy Tove is a transparent proof-of-work cryptocurrency with a built-in literacy treasury. The network keeps the familiar structure of a public blockchain: transactions are signed by their owners, grouped into blocks, and ordered by proof of work. Miners secure the chain and receive most of each block reward. A fixed share of each block subsidy is paid to a public treasury address for children’s literacy.
The project does not try to be everything. It is not a privacy coin, a smart-contract platform, or a promise of financial return. It is a small, public, auditable network with one clear social purpose: make it easy for ordinary people to help create a fund for reading.
1. Why Slithy exists
Most people will never run a command-line miner or read a protocol specification. That should not exclude them from helping a network or understanding where the money goes. Slithy starts from the user side: a simple wallet, clear mining controls, visible network status, and a treasury balance that does not need trust in a private report.
The name is a nod to Lewis Carroll and to the project’s mission. The point is not to wrap finance in storybook language. The point is to keep the mission close enough that it cannot be forgotten: a portion of the network’s new coins should support children learning to read.
2. Design principles
No premine.
Coins should begin through mining, not a private founder allocation.
Public ledger.
The treasury must be visible from ordinary chain data.
Simple participation.
A desktop wallet and miner should be usable by people who are not crypto specialists.
Mission funding at the protocol level.
The literacy share should not depend on voluntary donations after the fact.
Honest language.
The project should avoid claims it cannot prove, especially around price, adoption, or future exchange listings.
3. Network model
Slithy follows the basic peer-to-peer model used by Bitcoin-like networks. Nodes receive transactions, check them against the consensus rules, share valid transactions with peers, and accept the chain with the most valid accumulated work. Each full node can verify the full history for itself.
This matters because the literacy treasury is not meant to be a black box. Anyone should be able to run a node, inspect the chain, and confirm that the treasury output appears where the rules say it should appear.
4. Proof of work and mining
Mining gives the network a shared ordering of transactions without appointing a central operator. A miner builds a candidate block, searches for a header that satisfies the current difficulty target, and broadcasts the block when it finds one. Other nodes reject the block if the transactions, reward, treasury output, or proof of work are invalid.
Slithy targets 2-minute blocks. Difficulty adjusts from observed block timing so the network can respond when miners join or leave. The goal is not to guarantee that every laptop earns coins. The goal is to keep early mining understandable and broadly reachable while the network matures.
5. Block reward and literacy treasury
The first reward era uses a 10 SLTHY block subsidy. The miner receives 90 percent of the subsidy and the literacy treasury receives 10 percent. Transaction fees are paid to the miner. In normal terms, a 10 SLTHY subsidy block pays 9 SLTHY to the miner and 1 SLTHY to the treasury, plus fees to the miner.
The treasury share is part of the block validity rules. A block that omits the required treasury payment or sends the wrong amount should be rejected by honest nodes. This makes the treasury funding regular, public, and easy to audit.
6. Treasury use
The literacy treasury is for children’s books, reading materials, literacy programs, and practical costs directly tied to that work. The public website should show the treasury address, balance, incoming funds, outgoing grants, and plain-language notes about what each grant supported.
Spend keys must not live on the website server. Public reporting should use public chain data or view-only tooling. The treasury can only be trusted if the project treats custody, reporting, and spending rules as separate responsibilities.
7. Wallet and user experience
The Slithy desktop app is designed to combine wallet basics, mining controls, treasury visibility, and update checks in one place. The app should make the safe path obvious: create or open a wallet, back it up, see whether the network is reachable, and start or stop mining without copying long commands.
Automatic updates are part of the launch plan because a young network will need fixes. Updates must be signed. The app should not install unsigned packages, and update status should be clear enough that a normal user knows what is happening.
8. Nodes and resilience
A node is a machine that checks the chain and shares valid data with peers. The project can launch with official seed nodes, but it should not depend on them forever. Community-run nodes make the network healthier by giving new wallets and nodes more places to connect.
Public nodes should expose peer-to-peer service. Wallet RPC should be restricted unless the operator intentionally runs a public service with proper limits. This keeps the network open without turning every node into a public wallet backend.
9. Fair launch posture
Slithy should avoid a premine, hidden founder reward, or private sale. The project’s mission funding is visible in the treasury split instead. That is cleaner than pretending there is no project cost and then relying on informal donations or private reserves.
The fair standard is simple: publish the software, publish the rules, publish the treasury address, and let the chain start from those rules.
10. Risks and limits
Slithy is experimental software. A transparent proof-of-work chain can still face mining concentration, software bugs, weak liquidity, exchange rejection, network attacks, user mistakes, and regulatory uncertainty. A mission does not remove those risks.
Nothing in this paper is investment advice, a fundraising offer, or a promise that SLTHY will have market value. The strongest version of Slithy is not built on price claims. It is built on working software, public rules, and visible literacy funding.
11. Influences
Slithy learns from earlier networks without trying to copy their purpose. Bitcoin showed the durable shape of a peer-to-peer proof-of-work ledger. Litecoin and Dogecoin showed that simpler payment-focused networks can be understandable to normal users. Ravencoin showed how a Bitcoin-based fork can state a narrow purpose clearly. Decred, Dash, and Zcash showed different ways that block rewards can fund ongoing work or public goods.
Slithy’s difference is the target of the treasury. The project is not funding a protocol company or a governance system first. It is creating a visible reading fund as a native part of the chain.