Architecture
The root certifies issuers and can revoke them. Issuers onboard customers, issue credentials and notes, and redeem them. Merchants and users hold leaf credentials and verify each other locally.
Root authority → Issuers → Merchants & Users (e.g. a central bank) (banks, payment institutions) (point of sale, person-to-person)
The account key is never assembled. The shares are generated independently, in separate places, and the full key does not come together even when a signature is produced. It is not that the key is well guarded; it is that the key never existed as a whole.
Notes are issued against an account, spent slot by slot, and transferred offline within a bounded provenance chain.
The central bank acts as Root Authority; banks and payment institutions act as Issuers; citizens and merchants hold leaf credentials. Settlement runs over the existing domestic clearing rail. Nothing new has to be built at the clearing layer to start.
Because issuers form the network among themselves, a country's network operates independently of any other country's — its continuity does not depend on an outside operator. And because every network speaks the same protocol, acceptance and settlement can work across borders directly, with no central intermediary sitting in the path.
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Issuer-signed note proof | ~456 bytes |
| Transfer proof, depth 1 | ~524 bytes |
| Transfer proof, depth 10 (maximum) | ~956 bytes |
| Offline cryptographic verification | ~12 ms |
| Online payment, end to end | 35–65 ms |
| Maximum offline transfer depth | 10 hops |
Issuance and redemption interfaces on the issuer side; a spent-note registry; settlement mapped onto the rails you already run. The client has no hardware dependency. One verification primitive, not a zoo.