Stepper is a real 8-bit processor that lives inside a smart contract on Robinhood Chain.

There is a token, and it pays for the clock. The machine under it runs before anyone owns any of it. That is the whole difference, and it is a difference of order and substance rather than category: 2,161 NAND gates, 167 flip-flops, 16 registers of eight bits, 256 bytes of RAM, and a 32-instruction set where all thirty-two are used, because the opcode field is five bits wide and thirty-two is what five bits addresses.

Every gate was placed by a program that composes them one at a time from a single primitive. There is no synthesiser and no borrowed netlist. An optimiser then folds constants, shares repeated logic and drops what nothing reads: 2,425 gates were placed, 2,161 shipped, and the eleven per cent that turned out to be doing no work could only be found by building it first.