No native coin or accounts

Decision#

The protocol has no native currency, external user accounts, signature scheme, fee asset, account nonce or application address format. Authentication, replay protection and assets are ordinary program behavior.

Why#

• No application policy in consensus. An account format, a fee market or a currency encodes choices that applications will want to make differently, and revisit over time. Once frozen, a built-in version could never change.
• No privileged program. Every asset and every identity scheme is a deployment like any other. The chain does not favor one.
• Generality. A transaction is just a call or a deployment with a budget. What it means is up to the program that receives it.

Consequences#

• No protocol fee. Which transactions a miner includes is local policy. Fee arrangements, where wanted, are application-defined.
• No issuance. The protocol mints nothing and pays no mining reward. Producer data lets applications compensate miners on their own terms.
• Applications define identity. A wallet works with the applications it supports, not with a base-layer account type.

Trade-offs#

The protocol does not answer how miners are paid; programs do. A coin can pay block rewards and fees to the account a block's producer data names, as the reference coin does with producer payments, and each miner values those assets by its own policy. What mining earns therefore depends on programs and on what their assets are worth, not on a protocol currency.