Nervos CKB mainnet Lina went live with a verifiable genesis block

Nervos Network’s Common Knowledge Base mainnet, code-named Lina, became operational at 05:11 China Standard Time on November 16, 2019. The project’s launch notice published a genesis hash and said CKB v0.25.1 was available, converting a long-tested design into a live proof-of-work blockchain on which miners, node operators and developers could coordinate.

The timestamp requires care. Nervos’s English notice recorded the same moment as 21:11 UTC on November 15, while its Chinese announcement dated the launch November 16 in China. This reconstruction uses November 16 because that was the project’s announced launch date and the civil date at the network team’s stated Beijing-time milestone; it does not imply the event fell on November 16 in every time zone.

What Lina put into production

CKB was designed as the base layer of a broader, layered network rather than as a claim that every application computation should happen on one chain. The project’s contemporaneous technical specification described five core pieces: proof-of-work consensus, a RISC-V-based virtual machine, a cell-based state model, a state-oriented economic model and a peer-to-peer network.

The “cell” model was the distinctive element. Nervos described cells as immutable state objects with capacity, data and scripts governing ownership and verification. A transaction consumes existing live cells and creates new ones, generalizing Bitcoin’s unspent-output approach so the ledger can carry programmable state. That design choice mattered in 2019 because new base-layer projects were competing on different answers to a common question: which work belongs in consensus, and which work should be pushed to higher layers?

A mainnet launch did not prove that Nervos had solved scalability, security or developer adoption. It established the narrower but essential fact that the protocol had moved from the Rylai test network to an independently operable production network with a fixed genesis reference.

A launch designed for independent verification

Nervos did not simply announce a preselected genesis file. Its pre-launch instructions said the final block hash from Rylai epoch 89 would feed an open-source Genesis Block Generator. Participants could use that tool to derive the same mainnet genesis block, then connect nodes around the resulting shared state. The official launch record identified the resulting Lina genesis hash as `0x92b197aa1fba0f63633922c61c92375c9c074a93e85963554f5499fe1450d0e5`.

That process was important institutionally. It gave operators a reproducible artifact against which to check their software and chain identity. It did not, by itself, measure how many independent parties actually generated the block, how concentrated launch-day hash power was, or whether governance and development control were broadly distributed. Those questions required separate evidence.

Capital had arrived before the chain

The launch followed an October 2019 token sale on CoinList. CoinList’s surviving sale page lists a price of $0.01 per CKB, an allocated supply of 7.224 billion CKB and a total token supply of 33.6 billion CKB. The allocation therefore represented 21.5% of the stated initial total supply, a direct calculation from those two figures. Nervos separately claimed the sale raised more than $72 million; that amount should be treated as issuer-reported rather than an independently audited total.

The combination of a funded token distribution and a live base layer moved Nervos from a development proposition into an operating network. It also shifted the standard of evidence. After November 16, 2019, assessments could increasingly turn from architecture papers and fundraising disclosures to chain continuity, client reliability, miner participation, application activity and the distribution of state capacity.

What the date establishes

November 16 establishes the project’s China-dated production launch, the published genesis identifier and the availability of mainnet software. It does not establish a fair market value for CKB, validate promotional forecasts, or demonstrate that later ecosystem milestones were inevitable. No launch-day price or trading-volume claim is included because the consulted records do not provide a single authoritative, venue-defined market window for that date.