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Status: Draft (2026-07) This page is the portfolio-level plan for the ~15 docs-first research targets: which ones to build, in what order, under which preconditions, and which ones deliberately stay parked. Per-target architecture lives in docs/targets/; this page only sequences them. Scheduling here is expressed as gates and dependencies, not dates: a tier opens when its precondition gate is met, and within a tier work is sized in milestones that map one-to-one onto implementing branches.

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Tier model

Tier 0  Primary-chain hardening on main today
Tier 1  Next: opens when the primary-chain completion gate passes
Tier 2  Conditional: opens when its listed enabler lands
Tier 3  Parked research: docs stay current, no registry/code work
Primary-chain completion covenant (D-045): product implementation capacity is reserved for the three priority chains, in order: solana-sbpf-asm → evm (Ethereum) → wasm-near (NEAR/Wasm). These targets must reach production-grade completeness before any additional chain advances beyond docs-only research or frozen spike maintenance. The sign-off ledger is Gate P0 in gate-status.md. Tier-0 parity gate (Gate G0, the first required slice of D-045): the shared scenarios (Counter and ValueVault) pass in testkit (RFC 0007) on evm, solana-sbpf-asm, and wasm-near, with per-target resource budgets (RFC 0010): Solana CU, EVM gas, and NEAR gas. Gate G0 is closed in gate-status.md, which closes the behavior/budget parity slice. D-045 still keeps Tier 1 frozen until the remaining primary-chain production hardening is also signed off. Every later target reuses the artifacts this work hardens: the portable IR surface, capability routing, EmitWat, the scenario harness, target artifact metadata, and budget-as-gate quality signal.

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Tier 0 — primary-chain hardening (current focus)

Only the first three rows below are allowed to receive product implementation work before Gate P0 closes. The remaining rows are already-landed inventory: they may receive CI stability, security, or documentation maintenance, but they must not drive new registry, capability, testkit, or CI expansion while the primary-chain completion covenant is open.
TargetState
solana-sbpf-asmPrimary priority 1. Experimental; live gates + Pinocchio equivalence growing
evmPrimary priority 2. Baseline; semantic-plan migration tracked in Workstream 3
wasm-nearPrimary priority 3. Experimental; EmitWat canonical (D-031)
psy-dpnMaintenance-only Experimental subset; no capability/testkit expansion until P0 closes
aleo-leoMaintenance-only Research spike per D-032; no new implementation lane until P0 closes
wasm-cloudflare-workersMaintenance-only off-chain host demo (D-033); no expansion planned before P0

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Tier-0 completion checklist (D-044, current focus)

The three priority targets are not yet “fully OK”. Implementation priority: solana-sbpf-asm → evm → wasm-near. No new-chain advancement (Tier 1 M3/M4/registry stage, Tier 2 start) until Gate P0 is closed. Per-gate status is tracked in gate-status.md.
ItemTargetStatusOwner
Counter behavior parity (3 targets)all✅ mettestkit
ValueVault behavior parity (3 targets)all✅ mettestkit
Counter budgets solana_cu/evm_gas/near_gasall✅ mettestkit scenarios
NEAR gas budget implementationwasm-near✅ mettestkit scenarios
ValueVault budget baselines (3 targets)all✅ mettestkit scenarios
Gate G0 sign-offall✅ closedgate-status
EVM semantic-plan migrationevm🟡 in progressWorkstream 3
Solana Pinocchio CI equivalencesolana🟡 reference suite in solana-light; live dual-deploy pendingWorkstream 7
Gate G0 is closed, but it is not the product completion gate. Gate P0 remains open until solana-sbpf-asm, evm, and wasm-near each satisfy the production-grade DoD in D-045.

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Tier 1 — next two targets

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1a. wasm-cosmwasm — the EmitWat generality proof

Already settled direction (D-003/D-006): CosmWasm is the first new Wasm spike. The consolidation strengthened the case — EmitWat now exists, and AllocatorConfig already defines cosmWasmRegion as a dormant binding (RFC 0008). CosmWasm is the cheapest possible second Wasm host:
  • Reuses: Compiler/Wasm/AST+Printer, EmitWat lowering, allocator model, IR coverage manifests, testkit NEAR harness pattern (wasmtime + host shim).
  • New work: CosmWasm host import set (db_read/db_write/…), region allocator ABI exports, JSON message encoding for entrypoints, cosmwasm-check gate, testkit harness-cosmwasm.
  • Milestones: M1 host-import + region ABI in EmitWat; M2 Counter artifact passes cosmwasm-check; M3 testkit scenario green + cross-target equivalence vs wasm-near; M4 registry stage → Experimental.
Frozen at M2 (D-045): the landed CosmWasm Counter spike (WAT emitter + smoke + VM lifecycle) does not advance to M3/M4/registry stage until Gate P0 closes, even though Gate G0 has closed. Exit meaning: if the same EmitWat core serves two Wasm hosts with only import/ABI adapters swapped, the Wasm-family architecture claim is proven, and Soroban/ICP become adapter projects instead of research projects.

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1b. move-aptos — the first sourcegen POC (parallel track)

Settled by D-007/D-008 (Aptos before Sui; generated Move source, proofs stay in Lean). Unlike the Wasm targets it shares no emitter with EmitWat, which is exactly why it is worth doing early in parallel: it exercises the portable-IR → source package route that Tezos/Cardano/TON/Starknet would also use, with the most mature tooling of that group. Why Aptos before Sui (D-007 rationale, and when to flip it). The ordering is a compiler-cost argument, not an ecosystem judgment. Aptos Move keeps classic Move global storage: a Counter resource under an account address maps almost one-to-one onto the portable IR’s state model (scalar state owned by the contract), so the first IR→Move printer stays small. Sui removes global storage: state lives in owned/shared objects with UID-based identity, transfer/share semantics, and programmable transaction blocks — an object model that must be designed as a Target Extension SDK (the same class of work as Solana’s account extensions, D-027) before a faithful Counter can even be expressed. Doing Aptos first splits the risk: M1–M2 prove “portable IR → Move source → native test gate” with minimal target-extension design; the Sui object extension then lands on a working printer. Flip the order only if an ecosystem/product reason outweighs carrying both risks at once — the technical cost of Sui-first is designing the object extension concurrently with the first Move printer, and the schedule cost is that the sourcegen-lane gate (G1b) inherits that extra design dependency.
  • Milestones: M1 IR → Move module printer for the Counter subset (scalar state, entrypoints, events); M2 aptos move test gate + golden fixture; M3 testkit integration (CLI-wrapped executor); M4 capability matrix row flips from planned to validated; Sui follows only after Aptos exits.
Frozen at M2 (D-044): the landed Aptos Move Counter sourcegen spike (printer + golden + aptos move compile/test gate + state-id fidelity B1) does not advance to M3 (testkit integration) or M4 (capability row validated / move-sui start) until Gate P0 closes.

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Tier 2 — conditional targets (enabler listed per target)

TargetEnabler (gate)Marginal work once enabledRecommendation
wasm-stellar-sorobanCosmWasm M4 (proves host-adapter split)Soroban host imports, XDR/contract-spec ABI, storage TTL model as target metadata, Stellar CLI gateDo after CosmWasm; second-cheapest Wasm host
wasm-icp-canisterCosmWasm M4 plus an async/inter-canister design noteCandid ABI, update/query split, cycles metadata; its async call model does not fit the current synchronous IR effect setDefer; hardest Wasm host — do not start on adapter momentum alone
move-suiAptos M4Object model as target extension (parallel to Solana accounts), Sui CLI gatesFollows Aptos per D-007
starknet-cairoAptos M4 (sourcegen pattern proven) + one maintainer with Cairo depthCairo/Scarb package printer, Sierra/CASM artifact + class-hash metadataFirst non-Move sourcegen candidate; ZK-adjacent knowledge partially shared with Psy/Aleo
ton-tvm, algorand-avm, cardano-plutus-aiken, tezos-michelson-ligoStarknet or equivalent second sourcegen exitEach is a source-package printer + native-CLI gate on the same patternKeep docs current; pick at most one at a time, chosen by ecosystem demand, not architecture need
Rule for the sourcegen research lane (worth keeping from the decision log): one active sourcegen spike at a time. Every target in this lane uses the same skeleton — restricted portable IR subset → generated source package → native toolchain gate → testkit CLI-wrapped executor — so parallel spikes duplicate learning instead of accelerating it.

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Tier 3 — the Bitcoin/UTXO family: a different product, same platform

bitcoin-script-miniscript, bch-cashscript, zcash-shielded, and kaspa-toccata are not smart-contract execution targets and must not be routed through the contract pipeline. The honest architectural fit (already sketched in bitcoin-script-miniscript, D-021/D-022, and the review checklist) is a separate policy family: 
Contract family (today):
  Intent API -> ContractSpec/IR -> capability routing -> execution artifact

Policy family (Bitcoin lane, when opened):
  Policy Intent API (pure spending predicates: signatures, thresholds,
  hash preimages, absolute/relative timelocks, Taproot script paths)
    -> policy IR (no storage, no events, no crosscall, no entrypoints —
       a predicate tree, not a program)
    -> Miniscript / descriptor generation (rust-miniscript)
    -> Script / Tapscript artifact + PSBT scenario manifest
    -> Bitcoin Core regtest / testmempoolaccept gate (testkit CLI executor)
Design consequences to record when this lane opens:
  • New capability domain, not reuse: policy.* ids (e.g. policy.sig, policy.threshold, policy.timelock.absolute, policy.hashlock, policy.taproot_path) instead of pretending storage.*/events.emit apply. The capability registry gains a policy section; contract-family capabilities are all — (not applicable) for these targets.
  • Lean’s value is different here: not state-machine proofs but policy properties — “funds are recoverable after timelock T along some path”, “no spending path omits participant X”, miniscript-level non-malleability conditions. These are decidable checks over a small predicate tree: well-suited to the FV roadmap style (decide-checked theorems).
  • What ProofForge adds over raw Miniscript: one verified policy source that emits Bitcoin descriptors and (later) BCH CashScript or Kaspa covenant forms, with the same cross-target equivalence testing testkit gives contracts.
  • Zcash ordering: zcash-shielded stays behind bitcoin-script-miniscript — it adds a proving/nullifier boundary on top of the same UTXO policy shape (D-022) and should inherit a working policy lane first.

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Kaspa Toccata: straddles the policy lane and the ZK lane

kaspa-toccata deserves its own entry rather than one line in the Bitcoin family, because its situation changed: the Toccata hardfork activated on Kaspa mainnet ~2026-06-30 (rusty-kaspa v2.0.0), shipping native L1 covenants, transaction v1 (covenant outputs, compute_commit inputs, per-input compute budgets), KIP-16 ZK verifier opcodes, and KIP-21 partitioned sequencing commitments for based ZK apps. The target note already splits it into three roads, and they belong to two different ProofForge lanes:
  • Road 1 (L1 covenant app) is UTXO policy-family work: covenant lineage
    • successor-output validation over a predicate-tree-like policy IR. It shares the policy IR investment with bitcoin-script-miniscript, but is more expressive (stateful covenant lineage), so miniscript remains the simpler proving ground first.
  • Roads 2–3 (inline ZK covenant, based-app settlement) are strategically distinctive for ProofForge specifically: a proof-first platform emitting covenant packages whose on-chain verification is itself proof-based (Noir/Groth16 inline; RISC Zero/SP1 for based apps) lines up with the Lean-proof story and the ZK experience from psy-dpn/aleo-leo. No other target in the portfolio has this shape.
Trigger: upstream’s announced second-phase release (SMT RPC API, ZK SDK, first Silverscript version). When that ships, re-review D-012 and schedule the Road 1 spike (Silverscript-based, tiny covenant Counter with successor validation) — it may open at Gate G2 together with miniscript rather than strictly behind it, since mainnet activation removed the “semantics not stable upstream” blocker. Roads 2–3 stay research until Road 1 exits. Recommendation: keep the whole family parked until both Tier-1 targets exit. When opened, bitcoin-script-miniscript goes first, as a deliberately small vertical: policy IR + rust-miniscript emission + regtest gate, Counter has no meaning here — the shared scenario for the policy family is a 2-of-3 multisig with a timelock recovery path.

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Coverage audit: researched vs not researched

Every chain with a docs/targets/ note is placed in a tier above: EVM, Solana, NEAR, CosmWasm, Soroban, ICP, Cloudflare Workers, Aptos, Sui, Starknet, TON, Algorand, Cardano, Tezos, Aleo, Psy/DPN, Bitcoin Script/Miniscript, BCH CashScript, Zcash, Kaspa Toccata, plus the research-only Polkadot/ink!. Chains that have come up in discussion but have no research note yet — they need a docs-first target note (D-012-style) before any tier placement:
  • Casper Network (casper, CSPR) — Wasm-based chain with upgradeable contracts and the Odra framework; architecturally it would join the Wasm-host family behind CosmWasm/Soroban if researched. Not in the current portfolio; add a target note first if wanted.
  • EVM-compatible L2s/chains are intentionally not individual targets — they are chain profiles under evm (D-024 pattern).

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Explicit non-plans

  • wasm-polkadot / ink! stays research-only (D-009) — revisit only on concrete demand.
  • No new chain profile targets beyond evm reuse (D-024 pattern) need planning; EVM-compatible chains are metadata, not backends.
  • The cloud platform remains gated by D-010 (two-plus targets at Experimental with shared-scenario parity), unchanged by this roadmap.

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Sequencing summary (gates, not dates)

Gate G0: behavior + budget parity on evm/solana/wasm-near   (closed slice)
Gate P0: production sign-off for solana-sbpf-asm -> evm -> wasm-near
  ├── opens 1a wasm-cosmwasm  (M1..M4)
  └── opens 1b move-aptos     (M1..M4, parallel)
Gate G1a: cosmwasm M4  -> opens wasm-stellar-soroban; ICP needs +async design note
Gate G1b: aptos M4     -> opens move-sui; opens sourcegen lane (starknet first pick)
Gate G2:  both Tier-1 exits -> opens Bitcoin policy family (miniscript first)
Kaspa trigger: upstream phase-2 release (ZK SDK + Silverscript) -> re-review
  D-012; Road 1 may open alongside miniscript at G2; Roads 2-3 after Road 1
Sourcegen lane rule: at most one active spike at a time
Tracked as Workstream 28 in the implementation backlog; tiering and the policy family classification recorded as D-034 in decisions.