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Satsuma Engineering

What is happening, as it happens.

Every session of work on Satsuma becomes an update here within minutes of ending: what landed, what was explored, what was decided. Filtered by the same rules as everything on this site.

Latest writingSatsuma owns what it builds, and fixes it without touching the money32 min read

Today 2 updates

Wednesday, 28 October 2026 2 updates

This site

An alert about 513 unread chat messages turns out to be expected

A spam filter for chat groups uses an AI model to read incoming messages and raises an alert when many messages in a day go unread. An alert about 513 unread messages from one day turned out to be expected: they all came from one group without a paid plan, where AI reading is switched off, and nothing is broken.

Tuesday, 27 October 2026 2 updates

This site

Cloudflare upgrade notice checked: Satsuma servers do not run cloudflared

Cloudflare's cloudflared is a small program that links a server to Cloudflare's network so a website can be reached without opening the server to the internet directly. Claude checked a Cloudflare email asking for version 2026.10.2 or later, found that the versions it named match Cloudflare's own GitHub releases, and found that Satsuma's servers do not run the program.

The system

Chain alert waits for three failed minutes; Composition app back up

Satsuma runs a checker that keeps watch on its blockchain and raises an alert when the chain stops answering requests or stops making new blocks. The alert for a chain that stops answering now fires only after three failed minutes in a row, so one slow request no longer sets it off; the alert for a chain that stops making blocks is unchanged.

Monday, 26 October 2026 1 update

The lab

False RPC-down alerts traced to a checker that gave up after one timeout

Satsuma runs a small automatic checker that keeps asking its blockchain's public entry point whether it is answering, and sends an alert when it is not. A burst of alerts turned out to be false alarms, and a fix was merged so the checker retries and only alerts after three failed minutes in a row. The fix takes effect once the checker is redeployed.

Writing

Deep-dives, experiments, research

Research · Experiments · Tokenomics

Satsuma owns what it builds, and fixes it without touching the money

Eleven runs. Every contract Satsuma deployed became a product it owns: a record on its chain, a repository, a list of things that must stay true, and a review of its own code by a model told to attack it. Those reviews found real defects, twenty of them, and Satsuma fixed nine by vote, three different ways: a redeploy for a contract holding nothing, a migration that moved ten thousand tokens to a successor, and in the last run an upgrade in place of the contract holding the position. In five of the last seven runs nobody touched anything.

Satsuma coordinates its work, runs what it builds, and judges the result

The same objective as the first experiment, given seven more times to a loop that changed between runs. Satsuma learned to refuse duplicate work, to run its trading as a governed operation under a policy it wrote, and to review that operation every five minutes: measure, recommend, vote, act. In the last run it amended its own policy twice, under a market rigged against it, with nobody stepping in.

Satsuma gets a goal, builds what it needs, and trades on another chain

Satsuma was given an objective and nothing else. Its own process proposed an exchange, a mandate account and a keyless executor, voted on them on chain, built them, reviewed them and deployed them across two chains. Then it used them: ten swaps on another chain, each bounded by limits it had set for itself. Nobody approved a proposal or a trade.

The Same Bridge, the Parity Way — and the Bill

We rebuilt our trustless bridge with the stack that runs Polkadot↔Kusama: pallet-bridge-grandpa plus ordered message lanes. Same trust model, different machinery — and this time every proof lands as a signed transaction with a fee on the record. The head-to-head, measured.

Video

Watch

YouTube
1:05

ISMP Bridging with Satsuma

0:55

The Limit of Sub-Second Blocks Is Geography, Not Speed

0:52

Introduction to Satsuma