Protocol

These pages describe what the code does today. Each section names the function or constant that enforces it, so you can check the claim against the source. For the reasoning behind the design, read the whitepaper. Where the two disagree, these pages follow the code.

#The sequencer

One sequencer orders transactions and seals them into hash-linked blocks, each signed with the sequencer's Ed25519 key (lib/chain/ledger.ts). A cron job runs every minute and seals whatever arrived since the last block. The sequencer's public key and the chain id are in /api/stats.

The sequencer also sends its own system transactions: compute_reward once an hour, plus one-off transactions such as relock and seat_reward_return. They go through the same blocks as everyone else's.

Every block goes into an append-only transparency log (RFC 9162), with signed checkpoints, state commitments and anchors on Solana and Bitcoin. Macs can co-sign the checkpoints as witnesses. See Integrity.

#Wallets

A wallet is a name like luca.mlx with an Ed25519 key. The key comes from a 32-byte seed, which the owner keeps as a passkey or as a 24-word recovery phrase. No server holds the seed. Every transaction is canonical JSON signed by that key. See Keys and signing.

#MLX and USDC

MLX has a fixed supply of 10,000,000,000, with 6 decimals. All of it was created at genesis in five protocol accounts:

USDC is the network dollar. Any coin deposited is credited as USDC, and withdrawals pay out USDC. USDT balances from before are legacy: they can still pay for a seat or a spot buy.

#Dedicated and free seats

A dedicated seat is what people buy. It has a size in units and sets how much the wallet's Macs can mine: up to 8 MLX per unit a day. A seat pays nothing up front. See Dedicated seats.

A Mac linked to a wallet with no dedicated seat runs on a free seat. It gets short jobs now and then, mines at a weight of 0.125, and all free seats together take at most 10% of each hour's release. See Free seats.

#Macs and device keys

Only Macs do the work. MLX Node, the menu bar app, makes a P-256 key in the Mac's Secure Enclave. The Mac signs a link request, and the wallet records it with a bind_device transaction. A wallet can link up to 32 devices. From then on, the Mac signs every request it sends to the worker API. See MLX Node and The worker protocol.

#Jobs

The server hands out work. A Mac never picks its own job. Each job is a short prompt run with greedy decoding on a small model. Its prompt is drawn from a seed only the server holds. Each job goes to several Macs from different wallets, and their answers are compared. A result counts only for the job that Mac was handed, only once, and only if it comes back no faster than a real Mac could run it. See Jobs and checks.

#Hourly compute rewards

Every hour, each Mac that worked gets a score s = A · T · q: how much of the hour it was available, how many jobs it delivered against a target, and how often its answers agreed with other Macs. The hour's release is a fixed fraction of what compute.mlx holds (4-year half-life). It is shared by weight × score and capped at 8/24 MLX per unit an hour. One compute_reward transaction pays the hour. Payouts are locked for the wallet's lock-in. See Compute rewards and Lock-ins.

#The price curve and the spot market

The network's position is counted in units: one for every $100 that enters through a spot buy, and 50% of that for a seat. MLX per unit starts at 10,000 and halves at every doubling: $20M, then $30M, then $40M, then every $50M. So the network price starts at $0.01 and doubles each time. The protocol itself buys and sells MLX along this curve, with a buy premium and a sell discount. See The price curve.

#Planned

• Paid AI jobs from clients, paid in USDC: a pilot, see Compute API.
• Commit-then-open in MLX Node 0.10, which checks a Mac against the server itself, not only against other Macs.
• Audits and slashing, as the whitepaper describes. None of them run today.

#On these pages