The Risk Protocol · MMXXVIMore than two thousand years ago, a hand-cranked bronze machine made the sky predictable. It is the oldest known analogue computer, and it is the inspiration for the new mark of The Risk Protocol.
More than 2,100 years apart
Its gears showed where the Sun and the Moon stood in the zodiac, how full the Moon was and even how its speed changed across the month. They kept a nineteen-year calendar, marked the four-year cycle of games that included the Olympics and predicted eclipses years ahead, and the inscriptions on its case suggest it showed the five planets known at the time as well.
Around Easter 1900, sponge divers from Symi sheltering at Antikythera found a wreck of the first century BC, its statues mistaken at first for bodies. The salvage, which cost a diver's life, also raised a few lumps of corroded bronze.
The politician Spyridon Stais, who as education minister had overseen the salvage, noticed gearwork on two of those lumps, the first sign of a machine.
Derek de Solla Price took up the puzzle in 1951. Gamma-ray and X-ray images made by Charalampos Karakalos led to his 1974 account of its gears.
The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, led by Mike Edmunds of Cardiff University, imaged the 82 surviving fragments and read inscriptions hidden inside them.
A University College London team, with Tony Freeth as lead author, published a model of the whole machine. The fragments are in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens.
The machine took a sky too tangled to follow by eye and made it readable, measurable and predictable. The Risk Protocol is building the same kind of machine for risk in crypto.
A single crank drove every dial on the machine. The Risk Protocol works the same way, with one Risk Engine powering SMART Tokens, Risk Prediction Markets and Risk Intelligence.
The machine turned cycles too long to track into positions, phases and eclipse warnings that anyone could read. We turn crypto risk into something people can hold, trade and forecast.
The gears sat inside the case, and what people saw were the dials. A layer is exactly that: machinery underneath that makes the surface make sense. It is why we call what we are building the Risk Layer of Crypto.
A single continuous ring carries every tooth and anchors every spoke. It stands for the layer itself: one piece of infrastructure that everything we build runs through.
On the original, a ball half white and half black turned to show the phase of the Moon. Ours shows risk split into two halves that always add back up to the whole, each held by whoever wants that side: stable or amplified, up or down, yes or no.
All three spokes meet at a single hub, the Risk Engine. Nothing on the wheel turns on its own; every product draws its motion from the same centre.
The original's front dial carried a ring of day marks and the signs of the zodiac. Ours carries 365 day marks, one for every day of the year in a market that never closes, engraved on a black face.
The wheel is anodised in the brand gradient, from cyan to violet, with a machined highlight along its edges. Special editions come in platinum, and in bronze, the metal of the original.
The rim carries 223 teeth, the best estimate for the great wheel that drove the original and the number of lunar months in the Saros eclipse cycle. Each tooth is a triangle, the profile of the original's hand-cut teeth.
A hairline seam divides the halves. It is the split itself, the Split Mechanism for Asset Risk-Tokenisation that gives SMART Tokens their name. A collar holds both halves in one frame, because together they always add back up to the whole.
The original wheel has four straight spokes. Ours has three, one for each product on the Risk Engine: SMART Tokens, Risk Prediction Markets and Risk Intelligence. They are swept like turbine blades, so the wheel seems to turn even at rest.
From about 200 pixels up, the mark appears in full metal, with its engraved zodiac ring, the bronze gear behind the wheel and the split moon.
Below about 200 pixels, the flat mark takes over. It keeps the same wheel, spokes and split moon, drawn as a vector that stays sharp at any size.
Horizontal
Stacked
Wordmark
The Risk Protocol
Launch appSMART Tokens, Risk Prediction Markets and Risk Intelligence on one Risk Engine.
The favicon uses a small-size master with 96 teeth, sturdier spokes and a flat moon, so the mark holds its shape down to a 16-pixel browser tab. It is shown here at actual size.
With a partner, the horizontal lockup sits beside theirs at a matching size, joined by a simple ×. This example shows The Risk Protocol with Arbitrum.
We are building on @arbitrum. SMART Tokens, Risk Prediction Markets and Risk Intelligence on one Risk Engine.
Every flat colour in the mark comes from the brand palette. The metal finishes add lighter and darker tints of the same hues to give the metal its sheen.
The wordmark is set in Marcellus, a flared serif drawn from classic Roman inscription letters. The ship that carried the mechanism sank in the Roman era, and the machine itself was engraved with Greek capitals, so the name is cut the same way: in capitals, spaced wide, made to last. Roboto and Roboto Mono carry everything else.
Front coverFront plateBack plateBack cover01Planet cycles02Star calendar03Star calendar04Month names05Eclipse notes06Eclipse glyphs07The cosmos08The calendar09Moon and Sun01 Planet cycles. It lists how long each of the five planets then known takes to return to the same place relative to the Sun.
02, 03 Star calendar. Above and below the dial, a star calendar called a parapegma lists the risings and settings of stars through the year.
04 Month names. The upper spiral is a calendar of 235 months over nineteen years, with each month's name in its cell.
05 Eclipse notes. Inscriptions around the two dials describe the character of each eclipse the lower spiral predicts.
06 Eclipse glyphs. The lower spiral counts the 223 months of the Saros cycle, and glyphs mark the months with an eclipse.
07 to 09 The user's manual. The back cover explained the machine: the display on the front, the calendar, and the cycles of the Moon and the Sun.
Pointers for the Sun and the Moon moved around the Greek zodiac and a ring of day marks. A ball, half white and half black, turned to show the Moon's phase, and a pin-and-slot pair of gears made the Moon speed up and slow down, as the astronomer Hipparchus described.
A small hand crank, now lost, turned the largest gear: a four-spoked wheel about thirteen centimetres across with an estimated 223 teeth, which drove every other gear. Its triangular teeth, just under two millimetres apart, were probably cut by hand.
One spiral kept a nineteen-year calendar, with a small dial for the four-year cycle of games that included the Olympics. The other counted the 223 months of the Saros cycle, with glyphs in about fifty cells marking eclipses.
Nothing of comparable complexity is known for more than a thousand years afterwards, until the astronomical clocks of fourteenth-century Europe.
The photograph of Fragment A at the top of the page, which also opens the film, is by Logg Tandy, CC BY 4.0.
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