The paper

The Verifiable Launch: A Trust-Minimized Protocol for Audit-Gated Token Deployment

Farbod Ghasemlu · Drydock Org · draft of July 2026 · 29 pp

The canonical specification and intellectual foundation of Drydock Protocol. It formalizes the verifiable launch as a state machine with exact per-checkpoint verification predicates; proves liveness, conservation, and courier-indifference; analyzes adversarial founders, contributors, auditors, platforms, and the proof layer itself; shows why paying the auditor independent of findings dominates outcome-contingent payment; and costs the hard engineering — Solidity compilation inside a zkVM — with a tiered path that upgrades from attested to fully proven verification by verifier substitution alone. Section 8 is normative: an engineer can implement the protocol from it, and the reference implementation does.

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Preprint pending (Cryptology ePrint, Applications; CC BY 4.0). Corrections, prior-art pointers, and attacks on the model are welcome as issues — attacks that survive review are added to Section 4 with credit.