I want to share a language I’ve been working on recently: Trident.
This is not production-ready software. It’s a community preview — meant for exploration and play. But I believe it contains ideas that could shape where Neptune goes next.
Honest Disclosure
I’ll be upfront: I would never have been able to write software this sophisticated on my own. It was mostly written by Claude with my guidance — the architecture, the design decisions, the triangulation strategy, and the vision were mine; the volume of code was the machine’s. So expect chaos. Expect bugs. Expect rough edges everywhere.
But Trident existing is better than Trident not existing. I hope it marks the beginning of a new era in Neptune development.
Gratitude
I want to thank the Triton and Neptune creators. I genuinely enjoyed building this. You inspired me. You gave me the path to verify compiler correctness. And through that process, I discovered some pieces I believe are essential for superintelligence.
A Note on Correctness
Of course it’s not possible to develop something this complex in two weeks and trust it blindly. So how do I know it produces working output? The honest answer: I can’t.
Instead, I used a triangulation technique. Three sources of TASM:
- Formally compiled — Trident compiler output
- Handwritten — Claude-authored TASM
- Neural compiled — neural compiler output
I ran the prover on real data and verified results with triton-verify. If at least one version works, the model can fix the other two. By the end I got results that are good enough to play with. I hope you enjoy them.
The Gold Standard
I’m proposing something here that I believe could define the future of Neptune: the Gold Standard.
This comes from a decade of my pain with tokens — going all the way back to Mastercoin in 2013. Every standard I’ve seen treats tokens as dumb ledger entries. The Gold Standard treats them as capability-bearing proof objects.
The core of it is the PLUMB framework — and this was a genuine aha moment for me: everything can be expressed as a token with a capability, because proofs compose. A token isn’t just a balance. It’s a proof that you can do something — own, stake, govern, access, compute, verify. And because STARK proofs compose, these capabilities compose. Tokens become living things.
But here’s the hard part, and I won’t sugarcoat it: proving really sophisticated programs on Neptune will eventually demand serious quantum computing capabilities. No shortcut possible. Understanding proving complexity will be essential to designing anything non-trivial on top of the Gold Standard. This is not a limitation to hide from — it’s a design constraint to embrace. And I hope Trident can help reason about that complexity before you hit it.
Trinity
I also built something weird — the thing that really drove me.
Trinity is, I believe, the first example of a provable program demonstrating that FHE, neural inference, LUT-based cryptographic hashing, Poseidon2, programmable bootstrapping, and quantum circuits can all execute inside one STARK trace — with data-dependent coupling between phases.
Basically, I managed to blend every piece of rocket science I’ve been researching into a single provable execution.
I won’t disclose the benchmark results here — I’ll leave that discovery for you. But I can reveal that using a GPU-based prover I built (not ready for release yet), the Trinity test demonstrates feasibility of private quantum neural networks today.
Where Trident Is Going
One more honest disclosure: Trident does not belong to Triton VM.
Triton VM is the first target, yes — and a great one. But Trident is powered by an intermediate representation, the architecture designed specifically to compile to other provable ecosystems and even more traditional blockchain and non-VM targets. Self-hosting will eventually be done on a more compact VM optimized for collective computational graphs that I’m working on. Trident is designed to be a language for verifiable computation broadly, not a language for one specific vimputer. Neptune is where it starts. It’s not where it ends.
I share this not to diminish the relationship with Neptune, but to be transparent about the trajectory. The work I’m doing here is real, the contribution is real, and I want this community to benefit from it fully — while knowing the full picture.
The legend says it’s a weapon from the future.
And this weapon can’t be held by those who can’t hold it.
cargo install trident-lang
trident --help