Concepts

#Wallets

A wallet is a name ending in .mlx (for example luca.mlx) with an Ed25519 key. The key comes from the wallet's 24-word recovery phrase, which a passkey can also hold. Every change to a wallet is a transaction signed by that key.

System accounts such as compute.mlx, treasury.mlx and rewards.mlx have no key. Only the sequencer moves them, with system transactions anyone can read.

#Tokens

• MLX is the network's token. Total supply is 10,000,000,000 MLX, with 6 decimals, split at genesis into the accounts in the allocation.
• USDC is the network's dollar. Any coin deposited through the checkout is credited as USDC, and withdrawals pay USDC on Solana.

On the API every amount is a string of base units: "1500000" is 1.5 USDC or 1.5 MLX.

#Seats

A Mac that does work for the network sits in a seat.

• Free seat: any linked Mac. It gets short jobs on a throttled, random rhythm and mines up to 1 MLX a day. All free seats together take at most 10% of an hour's release.
• Dedicated seat: bought once in dollars. It gets full jobs back to back and mines 8 MLX a day per unit, carried by a Mac of its class. See Seats.

API ids, transaction types and URLs still say node (buy_node, /api/nodes); the word in the apps is "seat".

#Macs and device keys

MLX Node keeps a P-256 key in the Mac's Secure Enclave. The wallet links a Mac with a bind_device transaction that carries the Mac's signed link request. Afterwards every request the Mac makes to the network is signed by that key (worker protocol).

#Jobs

The sequencer hands each Mac one job at a time: a prompt for a small model, run with greedy decoding. Up to 5 Macs of different wallets get the same job, and their answers are compared. Prompts come from a seed only the sequencer holds, so no answer can be worked out in advance. See Jobs and checks.

#Rewards

Every hour each linked Mac gets a score from its availability, delivery and quality. The compute.mlx account releases a fixed share of what it holds (a 4-year half-life), split by score and seat units and capped per unit. Mined MLX is locked for a few days, then unlocks. See Rewards.

#Blocks and the log

When a transaction arrives the sequencer seals it into a block at once, and a job each minute picks up anything left waiting. Each block names the previous block's hash and is signed with the sequencer's Ed25519 key. Every block also goes into an RFC 9162 transparency log, whose signed checkpoints Macs cosign and the network anchors on Solana and Bitcoin. See Integrity.