Institutions that evaluate a blockchain for trading or settlement tend to ask the same questions in the same order. Who runs the network? How are assets held? What has been independently reviewed? What happens when software fails? Where are the disclosures? This note answers each question for Somnia, using only public sources.
Who validates the network
Somnia is a proof-of-stake Layer 1 that went live with its Genesis release on 1 September 2025. About 60 validators were active at launch, Google Cloud among them, according to the mainnet announcement of 2 September 2025. Validators stake to take part and can be slashed for acting against the network.
The protocol documentation calls its design goal "sufficiently decentralised". It aims for a validator set large and spread out enough for censorship resistance and no single owner, with hardware requirements between those of a Solana node and an Aptos node so that performance holds. The documented target is 100 globally distributed validator nodes.
How assets are held
Institutional custody comes through established providers:
- BitGo Trust has supported Somnia, including the SOMI token, since 4 September 2025.
- Fireblocks supports Somnia for custody, staking and node operations; the integration was announced in August 2025.
- Ledger hardware wallets are supported.
These providers are listed on the somnia.network ecosystem directory.
Applications on Somnia keep users in self-custody. On dreamDEX, the order book, matching and settlement all run as smart contracts. A trader's balance stays at an address the trader controls until a trade settles, and no operator takes custody along the way.
What has been audited
Hacken audited the Somnia L1 and its PBFT consensus in May 2025, and Hacken has also audited dreamDEX. The Somnia documentation publishes an L1 audit report and a smart-contract audit report under Concepts → Audits, so reviewers can read the findings in full rather than a summary.
What happens when software fails
Production client software has bugs. Somnia's answer is a second, independent implementation called Cuthbert. Cuthbert re-implements execution and the database with third-party libraries wherever possible and without the performance optimisations of the main client.
Every validator runs every transaction through both implementations. If the two ever disagree, the validator stops voting and executing. A bug in the optimised client would therefore have to be reproduced exactly in a separate codebase to go unnoticed. The network has used this mechanism in production: the mainnet release notes record a hotfix on 11 May 2026 that addressed a Cuthbert false positive.
Operational predictability matters as much as correctness. Somnia's IceDB storage engine reports deterministic performance, and gas is charged for the actual cache and disk work a transaction does. Fees are therefore set by rules, not by an auction. The base gas price floor is 6 gwei, and a plain transfer costs 0.000126 SOMI at that floor (Somnia documentation, gas fees). Congestion pricing applies only under sustained load, up to a documented cap.
How the network changes
Protocol upgrades ship as named hard forks with published release notes:
- Genesis (1 September 2025): mainnet launch.
- Ingot (15 April 2026): added onchain Reactivity, session transactions and EIP-7702.
- Jig (6 August 2026): added sustained-use gas discounts and synchronous transaction submission.
Each release is listed with its changes in the Somnia mainnet releases page.
- Validators at mainnet launch
- ~60
- Mainnet announcement, 2 Sep 2025
- Independent execution implementations
- 2
- Somnia docs, Security
- Base gas price floor
- 6 gwei
- Somnia docs, Gas fees
Where to start
Teams running technical due diligence usually begin with three documents: the L1 audit report, the security page describing Cuthbert, and the mainnet release history. All three are public. Every transaction, every reactive callback and every agent receipt can also be inspected on the network explorer, which is the most direct check of all.