I
Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, which made him most of his wealth.
Legend has it that in 1888, a French newspaper mistakenly published his obituary under the headline, "The merchant of death is dead." Nobel read his own obituary and, a few years later, drafted his will.
Today, no one calls him a merchant of death.
"Nobel" has become a neutral term, much like "volt" or "watt"—stripped of sentiment, simply a unit of measurement. He left his wealth to those who "have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind." His wealth returned to humanity, and his name reclaimed its neutrality—not through self-justification, but through a century-long list of laureates.
I share this story because I understand him. I know where wealth comes from and where it can go.
II
My wealth was built on mathematics.
The entire blockchain industry rests on a few well-studied cryptographic building blocks and mathematical assumptions: the difficulty of solving discrete logarithms on elliptic curves, the irreversibility of hash functions, and the intractability of factoring large numbers. In 1985, two mathematicians independently conceived the idea of using elliptic curves for cryptography—one at a university, the other at IBM, completely unaware of each other. At the time, no one saw any practical use. What they sketched on chalkboards later evolved into a trillion-dollar market, granting individuals something unprecedented: true, permissionless financial sovereignty. Yet, those two mathematicians never made a cent from the revolution they enabled.
This freedom is one of mathematics' most profoundly underestimated gifts to humanity. I have taken a great deal from this gift. Establishing this prize is, above all, my way of giving back to that very foundation.
III
There is no Nobel Prize in Mathematics. This omission dates back over a century—perhaps born of personal reasons, or perhaps a mere oversight.
Later came the Fields Medal, awarded every four years to mathematicians under forty, and the Abel Prize, awarded annually in recognition of lifetime achievement. They are both exceptional, but their cadence belongs to a bygone era.
The mathematical community, however, had its own tradition. Paul Erdős spent his life placing bounties on unsolved math problems, offering anywhere from $25 to $10,000. Anyone who solved one received a check from him. Many framed these checks on their walls, never cashing them in their lifetimes. Erdős passed away in 1996, and since then, such bounties have become a rarity.
Mathematics is now entering an entirely new era. Artificial intelligence cannot run physical experiments, but it excels at logical reasoning. It might struggle to build a particle collider for physicists, but it can explore ten thousand pathways for a mathematician. Today, the time between proposing a conjecture and proving it can be a matter of months, or even days. In the face of such unprecedented speed, a prize awarded every four years is like a slow bell tolling in a world that shifts by the day.
IV
Because of this, the design of the Justin Sun Prize is extraordinarily simple.
The prize rewards the solution, not the person. No annual galas, no bureaucratic nominations, no age limits.
Every challenge recognizes two distinct contributors: the prover and the formalizer—the person who translates the proof into a machine-verifiable format. These roles can be claimed by the same person, or by strangers half a world apart. Human, AI, or a hybrid of both—I care only about the result, not whether the contributor is human or a machine. The same name can appear time and time again, in whichever slot it is earned.
The payout has a single trigger: the machine must verify the proof from the first line to the last, without a single error. Once it passes verification, those listed in the two columns are the owners of the prize for that problem.
I did not invent this standard—Peter Scholze posted his landmark theorem online, calling on the community to formalize it for machine verification; Fermat's Last Theorem is currently being translated into code, line by line, as we speak.
But human achievement is recognized long before the machine completes its work. Once the mathematical community accepts a proof, the prover's name is officially recognized. The funds remain locked, and the status updates to: "Proved, pending formalization."
The problem-solving bounty applies only to challenges solved after they are added to the official registry. If a problem is already solved when it is included, the prover's name is still recorded, but the prize goes entirely to whoever formalizes it for the machine. This prize documents history as it unfolds; it does not issue retroactive prizes for work already done.
The boundaries are cleanly drawn: the credit goes to the mathematical community, the prize belongs to the machine, and the funder maintains strict independence from both. Human judgment is reserved for one thing only: confirming that the problem coded into the machine is indeed the correct problem.
My authority begins and ends with one thing: the list. Which challenges are added, and what bounties they carry—that is at my sole discretion. Erdős wrote the amounts on his checks himself, and I see no reason to break from that tradition. But once a bounty is listed, it is locked in: problems can be added only, never removed; funds can only be paid out, never withdrawn by the funder.
No one, myself included, can tamper with this. If a challenge is framed incorrectly, the bounty is paid out regardless, and the corrected version will be relisted.
My personal focus is entirely concentrated on this single task. Beyond pricing the bounties, I have no vote in the verification, payout, or the attribution of names.
The results speak for themselves.
V
The most compelling aspect of these rules is the “wait.”
After a problem is solved and accepted by the mathematical community, the prize is not awarded immediately. The prover’s name goes up first, the formalization column remains blank, and the status reads: “Proved, pending formalization.” Once someone formalizes that proof and the machine verifies it, their name is entered in the blank column, and the process of establishing ownership of the prize begins at that moment.
In other awards, the wait is dead time—a bureaucratic process, a necessary evil. Here, the wait itself is an open inventory of tasks to be done.
Many framed Erdős's checks on their walls and never cashed them. An uncashed check is a monument to the past, while the prize locked onchain is a catalyst for the future. That blank slot effectively announces to the world: a historic task awaits, and it carries a bounty.
Out of this problem list grows something far larger: a public map, charting everything that humanity has accepted but machines have yet to verify. Such a map does not exist today. It exists only in fragments, scattered across disparate platforms—never unified, and certainly without price tags.
Those who work on formalization have never lacked passion; what they lack is a blueprint with clear bounties attached. The bounty goes to whoever completes the task. From this day forward, the passion for feeding lengthy proofs into machines remains theirs, but the financial backing is my responsibility.
VI
I also want to speak about the guiding philosophy. This is where the prize truly diverges from the Nobel.
Nobel was an inventor. He believed, all his life, that a thing should be useful—that it should take root in reality, be built, sold, and change how people live. That was his guiding philosophy, and it is etched into the prizes that bear his name: physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, peace. Each one rewards work that has tangible, real-world impact. For over a century, the Nobel has honored those who build on solid ground.
My guiding philosophy is different, and I see no reason to conceal its origins. I have read Dario Amodei’s essay Machines of Loving Grace and share the vision he paints: a nation of geniuses living inside a data center.
I share that vision because I am working toward that same ultimate goal. From the start, blockchain has been a realm built entirely in the abstract—no factories, no mines, no territory, only consensus and mathematics. My work in AI is simply another way of expanding that realm. I believe that in this century a large share of humanity’s most important structures will exist in the digital realms, and pure reasoning is the sole foundation upon which such a realm can be built. In 1940, G. H. Hardy wrote in A Mathematician’s Apology that he was glad number theory would never have any practical use. Eighty years later, number theory is the foundation of my industry.
Nobel and I have chosen different directions. He rewarded tangible, real-world applications; I am rewarding the purely theoretical—abstract structures built with flawless logical precision. Neither approach is superior to the other; they reflect two eras and two distinct paradigms. I want to pass this vision of an abstract, logic-driven kingdom down, year after year, through a prize.
VII
In the autumn of 2007, three students enrolled at Peking University the same year. One arrived from Shenzhen, an Olympiad gold medalist, and entered the School of Mathematical Sciences. Another came from Guilin, began in Earth and Space Sciences, then transferred to mathematics. The third was from Huizhou and studied history.
Nineteen years later, two of them shared the stage in Philadelphia. Wang Hong and Deng Yu received the 2026 Fields Medals.
The third read the news recently while browsing online from a private jet cabin. He put the phone down. His first thought was not pride. It was this: our generation has come of age. It is time we make our own contribution.
Their contribution is proving theorems. Mine is ensuring they are rewarded for it.
VIII
Over the years, my philanthropic efforts have been dispersed across various initiatives. Going forward, I am concentrating all my focus on this prize—because it represents my most significant potential contribution to humanity.
For now, it's a mathematics prize.
IX
A final point regarding why this prize bears my name: there are two primary reasons.
First, a prize named after a person is one of the few things that transcends institutional politics. Nobel, Fields, Abel, Turing, Wolf—the most enduring prizes in mathematics and the sciences are almost all named for individuals. Nations change, institutions rebrand, companies disappear. Once a name is on a prize, it stays. No one rewrites it.
Second, I owe it to myself. I am thirty-six. The wealth I have already accumulated exceeds what I need. Wealth without purpose breeds inheritance disputes and devolves into mere auction house records. While I am of sound mind and capable, I want to steer this wealth myself: it came from mathematics, and it returns to mathematics.
Regarding any public scrutiny surrounding me, let the list of laureates speak for itself. I do not expect anyone to take my word for it today.
The Justin Sun Prize is built to stand the test of time.
X
In closing, this prize requires no trust between people. Verification is mathematical. The machine answers only to logic. The initial prize pool has already been transferred to the blockchain. The address is public, and anyone can see the balance. I retain only the right to add more funds.
Every winning proof will be made public, so anyone can examine it for themselves. No trust required—neither in me nor in any committee. Every payment will remain on the chain—public, immutable, verifiable a hundred years from now. Once a proof is established, it stands forever. I hope the reward given to the prover reflects that same enduring permanence.
I am not a mathematician. I am merely an observer and a benefactor. The rest is left to the proofs.
Justin Sun
For more information about the Justin Sun Prize, please visit the following official channels:
Official Website: hejustinsun.com/prize
GitHub: github.com/TheJustinSunPrize
