Layer 1 blockchain
Saga ticker SAGA
Summary
Proof-of-stake chain (ssc-1) built with the Cosmos SDK and CometBFT consensus. SAGA holders delegate to validators, and a block commits once validators holding more than 2/3 of voting power precommit it, assuming less than 1/3 is byzantine. Besides balances and staking, the chain keeps the registry, billing and escrow records for chainlets, the separate application chains Saga provisions, and a liquid-staking module added in the December 2025 1.0 upgrade and configured by the March 2026 v4 upgrade. A live query on 2026-09-27 found node software 4.0.0, 16 bonded validators out of a maximum of 21, and a 21-day unbonding period. Saga is secured by its own validators, not by Cosmos Hub stake. 18121516171833
Design
- System
- Layer 1 blockchainThis profile describes the Saga Security Chain (chain ID ssc-1), a sovereign Cosmos SDK chain secured by its own SAGA-staked validators. Chainlets such as SagaEVM are separate chains registered on it, not rollups and not part of this ledger. In June 2026 the Saga company said it had handed long-term operation of the blockchain to Alapin Holdings and refocused on AI agents; the chain was still producing blocks on 2026-09-27, so it is still described as an operating layer 1 rather than as history.
- Settlement family
- Cosmos SDK
- Scarce resource
- Stake (proof of stake)
- State model
- Accounts
- Finality
- Other
- Who makes blocks
- Validators take turns proposing in proportion to their voting power, per the CometBFT specification. Saga's node docs describe an active set made of the validators with the most delegated stake. On 2026-09-27 the largest validator held about 32% of bonded stake and the two largest about 44%, more than the one third that can stop block production.
- Fork choice
- No fork choice in the Nakamoto sense: each height is decided by more than 2/3 precommits, and if more than 1/3 of voting power is offline the chain stops rather than forks. Conflicting commits would need more than 1/3 of voting power to sign twice, which is attributable, but governance proposal 22 (July 2025) set the share of stake burned for double-signing and for downtime to zero, so misbehaviour no longer costs stake. The proposal text says a double-signing validator is still permanently removed from the set.
Qualifications
- Ibc · Applies. Saga runs IBC with on-chain Tendermint light clients. On 2026-09-27 only 7 of its 32 clients were active and 25 had expired. Of 16 open token-transfer channels, 7 ran over an active client (including Osmosis, Stride, Neutron, Secret, Axelar and the hub chainlet); both Noble channels and those to Injective and dYdX sat on expired clients, which cannot verify new transfers until governance restores them. IBC links independent chains; it does not make them layer 2s of Saga.
- Shared security · Contested. Saga's docs describe chainlets secured by the security chain's validators using Cosmos Interchain Security, with Saga itself as the provider, not the Cosmos Hub. The node software includes the interchain security library, but on-chain settings read on 2026-09-27 show the feature switched off and no chainlet registered as a consumer. Saga does not draw security from the Cosmos Hub.
- Slashing · Partial. Governance proposal 22 (July 2025) set the share of stake burned for double-signing and for downtime to zero; downtime now brings a 10-minute jail, and the proposal says a double-signing validator is still permanently removed. Saga's node docs still say staked tokens can be slashed. Commits still follow the 2/3 voting rule, but misbehaviour is not currently punished by loss of stake.
- Finality · Partial. A block is final once validators with more than 2/3 of voting power precommit it, and blocks do not reorganise in normal operation. This profile does not count that as finality backed by stake, because governance proposal 22 set the stake burned for double-signing to zero; reverting a committed block would cost validators their seats, not bonded SAGA.
- Chain stewardship · Unknown. Saga's June 2026 announcement says long-term operational responsibility for the blockchain passed to Alapin Holdings, and saga.xyz no longer mentions the blockchain. The node repository listed no release newer than v4.0.0 (tagged 2026-03-06) on 2026-09-27. Saga's press release says Alapin will oversee the network's continued operation as independent infrastructure; no statement from Alapin itself was found, and who now maintains the docs and node releases is unknown.
- Tps · Unknown. No classified throughput figure was found or recorded. A September 2026 sample of about 100,000 blocks averaged about 5.7 seconds between blocks, which is an interval, not a capacity measure.
Tradeoffs
- Emphasizes
- Scalability
- Gives up
- Decentralization and economic security on the base chain. The validator set is small (16 bonded, capped at 21), two validators together could halt block production, stake is no longer burned for misbehaviour, and the chainlets that provide the extra capacity are separate chains whose safety is not currently tied to the security chain's stake in the way the documentation describes.Saga's documentation presents shared security for every chainlet as a core feature. On-chain settings read on 2026-09-27 showed cross-chain validation switched off, no chainlet registered as a consumer, and SagaEVM running with 4 validators rather than the security chain's 16. The chain registry's description of unlimited horizontal scaling is a design claim, not a measurement.
- Full node at home
- Practical at home 930Saga's node docs list 4 CPU cores, 16 GB RAM and 500 GB of storage on Linux for a validator, and give no separate full-node figure. Validators were also expected to host chainlets; Saga's 2025 recap says a slimmer validator stack reduced operating costs, but the current chainlet hosting load was not reviewed.
- Throughput claims
- No classified figure recorded
Scaling layers
- Saga chainlets (including SagaEVM) · Sidechain, mainnet 361920212526
Each chainlet is its own CometBFT chain, registered and billed on the security chain. The docs say chainlets inherit the security chain's validators, with misbehaviour evidence relayed back for slashing. On 2026-09-27 cross-chain validation was disabled, none of 21 registered chainlets was marked as a consumer, only 2 were online, and SagaEVM showed 4 validators. The security chain holds an IBC light client for the hub chainlet but none for SagaEVM. Chainlet users rely on that chain's own validators and bridges. Not a rollup.
Capabilities
| Capability | How it is provided | Notes and sources |
|---|---|---|
| Account abstraction | Structured assessment pending | Not yet assessed for any chain. |
| Atomic swaps | Unknown | No hash-locked or equivalent trust-minimized swap mechanism was found on the security chain. IBC transfers and routed cross-chain swaps are not atomic swaps between two parties. |
| Authenticated data publication | Unknown | Not yet assessed under this row's current definition. |
| Light clients | Built into the protocolLimited scope | CometBFT consensus produces the validator-signed commits that IBC light clients check, and the security chain verifies counterparty chains with on-chain Tendermint light clients; relayers carry proofs but do not replace verification. Limit: of 32 such clients listed on 2026-09-27, none was frozen but 25 had expired because no update arrived within their trusting period, and an expired client cannot verify anything until a governance vote restores it. Only 7 were active. 21223435 |
| Native staking or delegation | Structured assessment pending | Not yet assessed for any chain. |
| On-chain governance | Structured assessment pending | Not yet assessed for any chain. |
| Parallel execution | Structured assessment pending | Not yet assessed for any chain. |
| Payment or state channels | Unknown | No payment or state channel layer anchored to Saga was found. IBC channels are messaging paths, not payment channels. 34 |
| Programmable spending | Partial (layer not stated) Earlier definition | The security chain has no general contract engine (the chain registry lists CosmWasm as disabled), so spending logic there is limited to standard Cosmos account features. User contracts run on chainlets such as SagaEVM, which are separate chains with their own validators. 1510 |
| Protocol-verified messaging | Structured assessment pending | Not yet assessed for any chain. |
| Reversible transfers or recovery | Unknown | Not yet assessed under this row's current definition. |
| Rollups | Unknown | The review did not verify absence, so the rule that absence needs a source makes this unknown rather than not present. Earlier finding: no rollup settles to Saga in reviewed sources. Chainlets run their own consensus and are recorded as separate chains, not rollups. 520 |
| Shielded transfers | Structured assessment pending | Not yet assessed for any chain. |
| Signed partial offers | Unknown | Not yet assessed under this row's current definition. |
Reading these values
- How this feature is provided
- Built into the protocol, core-team software or independent software says where a feature lives and who can change it. These are implementation layers, not quality: core-team software is not closer to the protocol than independent software.
- Structured assessment pending
- The shared review has not assessed this feature for any chain yet (Account abstraction, Native staking or delegation, On-chain governance, Parallel execution, Protocol-verified messaging and Shielded transfers). That does not mean it is absent, and a chain’s profile may already describe it.
- Unknown
- The review has not established this for this chain under the current definition; the note beside it says why. Unknown is not absent and not a low score. A feature reads “Not present” only when a source shows it is absent.
- Earlier definition
- Payment or state channels, Programmable spending and Rollups keep the earlier definition until the next fact-check. There, “Native” does not separate the protocol from core-team software, “Ecosystem software” does not say who publishes it, and “Partial” does not say which layer.
- Reading across rows
- The list of capabilities is incomplete. Do not read these rows as a chain leading or lagging overall.
Ecosystem & custody
| Product type | Status | Notes and sources |
|---|---|---|
| Automated market makers | UnknownUniswap v3 with the Oku front end (on SagaEVM) | The security chain has no exchange of its own. Saga's 2025 recap describes a Uniswap v3 deployment with the Oku front end on its EVM chainlet, but Uniswap's own deployment list does not include Saga. SagaEVM produced no blocks from 2026-01-21 to 2026-02-18 after the exploit, and in April 2026 Saga said it was still under repair; it was producing blocks on 2026-09-27, but whether the exchange and its liquidity recovered was not verified. 25283037 |
| Issuer-native stablecoins | Unknown$D, also called Saga Dollar (on SagaEVM), Colt (on SagaEVM) | Circle's USDC list does not include Saga or SagaEVM, so USDC there comes from another chain; both Noble IBC channels ran over expired light clients on 2026-09-27. Saga's posts call $D its canonical stablecoin but give no issuer or backing; a security firm reports it fell to about $0.75 after the January 2026 exploit. Colt, a yield-seeking stablecoin in Saga's 2025 recap, also runs on SagaEVM. The current state of both was not verified. 22303236 |
| Algorithmic stablecoins | Unknown | No algorithmic stablecoin was verified. The collateral and peg design of $D and Colt were not documented in the sources reviewed, so neither is classified here. 30 |
| Bridges | Native to the protocolIBC (ibc-go) | The security chain runs IBC; a live node reports ibc-go v10, while the chain registry still lists v8. Of 16 open transfer channels on 2026-09-27, 7 ran over active light clients (including Osmosis, Stride, Neutron, Secret, Axelar and the hub chainlet) and 9, including both Noble channels, sat on expired ones. Saga's 2025 recap also describes Squid, built on Axelar, routing assets into SagaEVM; that route was not confirmed on Squid's own pages. Circle's USDC list does not include Saga. Risk: IBC safety depends on each counterparty chain's validators and on light clients being kept up to date; an expired client stops transfers on its path until governance restores it. On 2026-01-21 an attacker moved about 7 million US dollars of USDC, yUSD, ETH and tBTC from SagaEVM to Ethereum, and SagaEVM was halted. A security firm's analysis traces this to a validation flaw in SagaEVM's precompile bridge code that let the attacker mint the $D stablecoin without collateral. A bridged token is only as sound as its origin chain and route. 112222430323536 |
| Block explorers | Established in the ecosystemMintscan, Staking Explorer, ezStaking, NodeStake explorer | The chain registry lists these explorers for the security chain. Mintscan's page is a script-rendered app, but its public status endpoint for Saga returned the current block height and 16 active validators on 2026-09-27. The other three were not checked. Listing is not a quality or completeness check. 129 |
| Hardware wallets | Unknown | See custody rows: Saga is not among the Cosmos chains in Ledger Wallet's source code, and Trezor's Saga page lists only a MetaMask and Rabby route, which reaches the SagaEVM chainlet rather than this chain. Keplr lists Saga in its own chain registry and supports Ledger's Cosmos app for Cosmos app chains, and Saga uses the standard Cosmos key type (coin type 118), but no page confirming Ledger signing for SAGA was found. 12383940 |
Hardware-wallet custody
| Device maker | Status | What users can and cannot do |
|---|---|---|
| Ledger | UnknownSame as native: Unknown | Cannot: Add a Saga account in Ledger Wallet itself; Saga is not among the Cosmos chains in Ledger Wallet's source codeNo Ledger coin page for Saga was found (the address tried returned 404). Saga's staking guide uses Keplr, whose own chain registry lists Saga with coin type 118, and Keplr supports Ledger's Cosmos app for Cosmos app chains, but signing SAGA this way was not confirmed on a page naming Saga. 1273839 |
| Trezor | None foundSame as native: No | Cannot: Manage accounts on the Saga security chain (ssc-1) with a Trezor: Trezor's Saga page lists only a network used through MetaMask and Rabby, and Trezor firmware has no Cosmos SDK signing Cannot: Treat assets reached through MetaMask or Rabby on the SagaEVM chainlet as custody on this chain; SagaEVM is a separate chainTrezor's Saga page lists one Saga network and only MetaMask and Rabby, which are EVM wallets. The security chain uses Cosmos keys and has no EVM, per the chain registry, so that route reaches the SagaEVM chainlet rather than this chain. 1440 |
Public data
iKnow Blockchain has no public-data lookups for Saga yet. This is a limit of the service, not a statement about the network.
| Lookup | Status | What it covers and its limits |
|---|---|---|
| Address or account | Not available yet | Public-data lookups for this chain are not built yet. |
| Tokens and assets | Not available yet | Public-data lookups for this chain are not built yet. |
| NFTs | Not available yet | Public-data lookups for this chain are not built yet. |
| Transactions | Not available yet | Public-data lookups for this chain are not built yet. |
Sourced developments
Developments: Review overdue Reviewed Sep 27, 2026; next review was due Oct 7, 2026, 12:00 UTC.
Publication date · newest first
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Saga company hands long-term operation of the blockchain to Alapin Holdings
Saga announced it had sold its crypto arm and launched Saga AI Labs. The post says the agreement transfers long-term operational responsibility for the Saga blockchain protocol and its associated crypto ecosystem to Alapin Holdings, described as a protocol operator within the dao5 family, which will oversee the network's continued operation as independent infrastructure. The announcement does not say what changes, if any, validators or token holders should expect.
- Implementation:agreement announced by Saga
- Release:no software change
- Activation:chain still producing blocks on 2026-09-27; the operator change was not independently confirmed
Sources: Saga — Saga Sells Crypto Arm as Success in AI Business Grows, Launches Saga AI Labs (feed item) (external site) · Saga (via EIN Presswire) — Saga Sells Crypto Arm as Success in AI Business Grows, Launches Saga AI Labs (press release) (external site) · Saga — Saga home page (external site) · Saga — About Saga (external site) · Polkachu public REST endpoint — ssc-1 latest block (height 13,799,747) (external site) · Saga (GitHub) — sagaxyz/ssc tags (external site)
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Staking rewards again paid directly to SAGA stakers
Saga said rewards would flow directly to stakers on the security chain instead of being routed through the community pool toward SagaEVM, because rewards could not be distributed or claimed on SagaEVM while it was being repaired. Inflation stayed at 3%. On 2026-09-27 the chain's community tax was zero.
- Implementation:community tax of zero observed on chain
- Release:parameter change; no governance proposal was submitted after proposal 28 (March 2026), so how the change was made was not identified
- Activation:active on 2026-09-27
Sources: Saga — Staking Rewards Return to Saga Mainnet (feed item) (external site) · Polkachu public REST endpoint — ssc-1 distribution parameters (external site) · Polkachu public REST endpoint — ssc-1 mint parameters (external site) · Polkachu public REST endpoint — ssc-1 recent governance proposals (external site)
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Governance approved the v4 upgrade that switches on liquid-staking settings for every validator
Proposal 28 passed on 2026-03-17 with no recorded opposition and scheduled the upgrade named 3-to-4 at height 10,852,141, after an earlier attempt (proposal 26) failed. The v4.0.0 release sets up liquid-staking records for every validator with an 80% overall cap and a 100% per-validator cap. Public nodes reported version 4.0.0 on 2026-09-27.
- Proposal:passed (proposal 28)
- Implementation:released as v4.0.0
- Release:tagged 2026-03-06; release published 2026-03-12
- Activation:scheduled at height 10,852,141; nodes reported 4.0.0 on 2026-09-27
Sources: Polkachu public REST endpoint — ssc-1 governance proposal 28: Upgrade SSC to v4 (external site) · Polkachu public REST endpoint — ssc-1 recent governance proposals (external site) · Saga (GitHub) — ssc v4.0.0 release notes (external site) · Saga (GitHub) — sagaxyz/ssc tags (external site) · Polkachu public REST endpoint — ssc-1 node info (live query) (external site) · Saga (GitHub) — sagaxyz/ssc releases (Atom feed) (external site)
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SagaEVM halted after an exploit moved about 7 million US dollars of assets to Ethereum
Saga reported that on 2026-01-21 a coordinated series of contract deployments, cross-chain activity and withdrawals moved about 7 million US dollars of USDC, yUSD, ETH and tBTC from SagaEVM to Ethereum. Saga gave the pause height as block 6,593,800 and said the security chain, its consensus and other chainlets were unaffected, and that Colt and Mustang were affected. SagaEVM's own record shows no new blocks between 2026-01-21 and 2026-02-18.
- Implementation:chain halted for investigation from 2026-01-21 to 2026-02-18
- Release:no post-mortem found in reviewed sources
- Activation:SagaEVM producing blocks again from 2026-02-18; full reopening to users not confirmed
Sources: Saga — SagaEVM Security Incident: Investigation Update (feed item) (external site) · Saga RPC endpoint — SagaEVM block 6,593,800 (external site) · Saga RPC endpoint — SagaEVM block 6,593,802 (external site) · Saga RPC endpoint — SagaEVM block 6,593,803 header (external site) · Halborn — Explained: The SagaEVM Hack (January 2026) (external site)
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Node release v3.0.1 moved the security chain onto a Saga fork of CometBFT a day before a critical CometBFT flaw was disclosed
Saga published v3.0.1 of the security chain node software on 2026-01-22. Its release notes mention only build-configuration fixes, but the code change also swaps the CometBFT consensus engine for a Saga-held fork named cometbft-sec-tachyon, pinned to a build between CometBFT 0.38.20 and 0.38.21 dated 2026-01-13. On 2026-01-23 CometBFT disclosed a critical block-time flaw it calls Tachyon, fixed in 0.38.21, and says ecosystem partners were told on 2026-01-13. Inference: v3.0.1 carried that fix early; Saga's notes do not say so.
- Implementation:CometBFT replaced by the sagaxyz/cometbft-sec-tachyon fork in pull request 138, merged 2026-01-22
- Release:released as v3.0.1 on 2026-01-22; superseded by v4.0.0, published 2026-03-12
- Activation:which validators ran v3.0.1 was not verified; no governance proposal for it was identified
Sources: Saga (GitHub) — ssc v3.0.1 release (external site) · Saga (GitHub) — ssc go.mod at v3.0.1 (external site) · Saga (GitHub) — sagaxyz/ssc pull request 138: small bug fixes (files changed) (external site) · CometBFT (GitHub security advisory) — CSA-2026-001: Tachyon (external site) · Saga (GitHub) — ssc go.mod at v4.0.0 (external site) · Polkachu public REST endpoint — ssc-1 node info (live query) (external site)
Topics your AI can explain
Your AI can explain these topics for Saga through the connection, with sources.
Known gaps
What this profile's review did not establish:
- Saga's documentation still describes shared security, slashing and every validator running every chainlet, while on-chain settings show cross-chain validation off and zero slashing; which description the current operators intend was not resolved.
- Who operates SagaEVM's 4 validators, and whether they are security-chain validators, was not verified.
- No statement or website from Alapin Holdings itself was found; the change of stewardship rests on Saga's announcement, read through its Medium feed (article pages returned 403) and a press-release copy dated 2026-06-01.
- A market-data site's automated news summary says Saga AI Labs announced a 60-day SagaEVM sunset on 2026-09-24, with shutdown on 2026-11-23. The X post it cites could not be read and Saga's Medium feed has no such post, so this is not treated as fact; if confirmed, the SagaEVM parts of this profile become history.
- Whether SagaEVM's exchange, stablecoin (Colt) and bridge routes fully recovered after the January 2026 exploit was not verified; SagaEVM resumed block production on 2026-02-18, but no post-mortem or reopening notice was found.
- Whether anyone plans to restore the 25 expired IBC light clients, including both Noble paths, was not checked; transfers over those paths cannot be verified until they are restored.
- The Squid route into SagaEVM is described only in Saga's own posts and was not confirmed on Squid's pages.
- No trust-minimized swap, reversible or delayed transfer or recovery feature, channel layer or algorithmic stablecoin was found; these are marked unknown rather than absent.
- Ledger signing for SAGA through Keplr was not confirmed. Trezor's Saga page does not say which network its MetaMask and Rabby route uses; this profile reads it as the SagaEVM chainlet because the security chain has no EVM.
- The chain registry still recommends node version 0.2.1 while live nodes report 4.0.0; the registry record is out of date.
- Explorer pages are script-rendered and were not rendered; Mintscan's coverage was confirmed through its status endpoint, and the other explorers rest on the chain registry listing.
Sources
Oldest dated source check: Source checked Sep 27, 2026 Next check due Oct 27, 2026.
- Saga chain registry record (chain.json) (external site)
- Keplr chain registry entry for Saga (ssc-1) (external site)
- Saga Topology (external site)
- Trezor firmware coin support data (support.json) (external site)
- Saga Chainlets (external site)
- Validator Selection (external site)
- Staking your Saga on Keplr (external site)
- Saga node docs: Overview (external site)
- Saga node docs: Requirements (external site)
- Running a SagaEVM Full Node (external site)
- sagaxyz/ssc tags (external site)
- ssc-1 node info (live query) (external site)
- ssc-1 latest block (live query, height 13,799,747) (external site)
- ssc-1 block 13,700,000 (live query) (external site)
- ssc-1 staking parameters (live query) (external site)
- ssc-1 bonded validators (live query) (external site)
- ssc-1 slashing parameters (live query) (external site)
- ssc-1 governance proposal 22: Inflation v2 (external site)
- ssc-1 chainlet module parameters (live query) (external site)
- ssc-1 registered chainlets (live query) (external site)
- ssc-1 IBC light clients (live query) (external site)
- ssc-1 IBC client status, Noble client 07-tendermint-28 (all 32 clients were queried the same way: 7 active, 25 expired) (external site)
- ssc-1 IBC connections, mapping channels to clients (live query) (external site)
- ssc-1 IBC channels (live query) (external site)
- SagaEVM (sagaevm_5464-1) node status (live query) (external site)
- SagaEVM validator set (live query) (external site)
- SagaEVM block 6,593,800 (pause height) (external site)
- SagaEVM block 6,593,803 header (first block after the halt, 2026-02-18) (external site)
- Mintscan Saga status (public endpoint) (external site)
- Saga AI Labs Medium feed (incident update, 2025 recap, staking and divestment posts) (external site)
- About Saga (external site)
- Explained: The SagaEVM Hack (January 2026) (external site)
- Byzantine Consensus Algorithm (external site)
- IBC overview (external site)
- ADR 026: IBC client recovery mechanisms (external site)
- USDC contract addresses (external site)
- Uniswap v3 deployments (external site)
- Ledger Wallet coin-cosmos chain definitions (external site)
- Connect your Ledger with Keplr extension (external site)
- Saga wallet (external site)
Report an error
Found something wrong or out of date? Reporting is free, and every chain goes through the same process. Published corrections appear in the public log.
Funding disclosure
Funding disclosures appear here when an upkeep arrangement exists, in the form “Upkeep funded by [name]; verdicts unaffected.” The funder ledger has not been published yet. Neutrality & funding