Unicity is a multi-layered developer platform for building, deploying and orchestrating off-chain crypto agents. Alpha is the trust anchor and native currency of Unicity, a platform for building decentralized applications using Verifiable Autonomous Agents. The Alpha coins replicate the self-verifiability property of physical cash, i.e. the coins are compact, authenticated data structures which can be passed through any medium peer-to-peer, chain-to-chain and verified without bridges or trusted third parties.
Alpha is released under the terms of the MIT license.
- Latest Whitepaper
- Binary Releases
- Block Explorer
- Mining Instructions
- Build Instructions
- Batch UTXO Transaction Guide
If you would like to support the development, then you can add the community address to the list of mining addresses (see mining instructions here: https://github.com/unicitynetwork/alpha-miner). Current community address is:
alpha1qmmqcy66tyjfq5rgngxk4p2r34y9ny7cnnfq3wmfw8fyx03yahxkq0ck3kh
Unicity has a layered architecture:
-
Proof of Work Trust Anchor
- Provides the foundation for security
- Issues new coins through mining
- Anchors the proof aggregation layer
-
Proof Aggregation Layer
- Bridges between trust anchor and agent layer
- Handles proof verification and aggregation
-
Agent Layer
- Executes transactions
- Provides anonymous, frictionless operations
- Enables untraceable transfers
The top layer provides a Proof of Work trust anchor - anchoring the second layer and providing new coins through mining which can then be extracted and used off-chain in the Agent layer.
This codebase implements the top layer and uses a fork of Bitcoin (Scash). It is not designed to be a transaction system and 99% of the codebase is redundant - transactions are executed at the Agent layer not in the Consensus Layer. Transactions are still needed (coinbase, mining pool shares) but they are discouraged - consensus layer transactions are expensive and cumbersome - each utxo has to be transferred individually. Transactions at the agent layer are anonymous, frictionless and untraceable.
See batch UTXO transaction instructions here.
To ensure local verifiability, each transaction must have exactly one input. This enables coin sub-ledgers to be extracted and used off-chain in the agent layer.
if (tx.vin.size() != 1)
return state.Invalid(TxValidationResult::TX_CONSENSUS, "bad-txns-too-many-inputs",
"Alpha Transactions must have exactly one input");- Hash Function: RandomX (ASIC-resistant, as used in Monero)
- Block Time: 2 minutes
- Block Reward: 10 ALPHA
- Halving Period: Equivalent to Bitcoin's timeframe (210,000 * 5 blocks)
- Difficulty Adjustment: ASERT (Absolutely Scheduled Exponentially Rising Targets)
- Half-life: 12 hours
- Automatically adjusts to target 2-minute block times
- Script: "Financial Times 25/May/2024 What went wrong with capitalism"
- Timestamp: Sun Jun 16 07:54:52 UTC 2024
- nBits: 0x1d0fffff
The network undergoes programmatic hard forks every 50,000 blocks until on-chain governance is implemented.
- Block 70228: Switched from SHA256D to RandomX
- Block 70232: ASERT difficulty adjustment implementation
Single input transactions only
if (tx.vin.size() != 1)
return state.Invalid(TxValidationResult::TX_CONSENSUS, "bad-txns-too-many-inputs", "Alpha Transactions must have exactly one input");
This ensures local verifability i.e. each coin sub-ledger can be extracted from the ledger and used off-chain in the agent layer.
RandomX Hash Function
To democratize mining we use the RandomX ASIC resistance hash function as used in Monero https://github.com/tevador/RandomX
The hashing algorithm switched from SHA25D to RandomX on block 70228 Difficulty was automatically reduced by a factor of 100,000 on this block to account for the hash rate difference between SHA256 and RandomX.
10 ALPHA subsidy and 2 minute block time
The subsidy is 10 ALPHA with a target block time of 2 minutes. Halving period measured in time is the same as Bitcoin or 210000*5 blocks.
ASERT
The Bitcoin Cash implementation of an exponential moving average approach to difficulty adjustments is implemented to theoretically always target a correction toward a 2 minute block time.
ASERT was initiated on block 70232 half-life 12 hours
GENESIS BLOCK
Script: "Financial Times 25/May/2024 What went wrong with capitalism" Time Sun Jun 16 07:54:52 UTC 2024 nBits: 0x1d0fffff
PROGRAMMATIC HARD FORKS
Until on-chain governance is implemented the chain will be upgraded with a hard fork every 50,000 blocks
For an immediately usable, binary version of the Bitcoin Core software, see https://bitcoincore.org/en/download/.
Bitcoin Core connects to the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network to download and fully validate blocks and transactions. It also includes a wallet and graphical user interface, which can be optionally built.
Further information about Bitcoin Core is available in the doc folder.
Bitcoin Core is released under the terms of the MIT license. See COPYING for more information or see https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT.
The master branch is regularly built (see doc/build-*.md for instructions) and tested, but it is not guaranteed to be
completely stable. Tags are created
regularly from release branches to indicate new official, stable release versions of Bitcoin Core.
The https://github.com/bitcoin-core/gui repository is used exclusively for the development of the GUI. Its master branch is identical in all monotree repositories. Release branches and tags do not exist, so please do not fork that repository unless it is for development reasons.
The contribution workflow is described in CONTRIBUTING.md and useful hints for developers can be found in doc/developer-notes.md.
Testing and code review is the bottleneck for development; we get more pull requests than we can review and test on short notice. Please be patient and help out by testing other people's pull requests, and remember this is a security-critical project where any mistake might cost people lots of money.
Developers are strongly encouraged to write unit tests for new code, and to
submit new unit tests for old code. Unit tests can be compiled and run
(assuming they weren't disabled in configure) with: make check. Further details on running
and extending unit tests can be found in /src/test/README.md.
There are also regression and integration tests, written
in Python.
These tests can be run (if the test dependencies are installed) with: test/functional/test_runner.py
The CI (Continuous Integration) systems make sure that every pull request is built for Windows, Linux, and macOS, and that unit/sanity tests are run automatically.
Changes should be tested by somebody other than the developer who wrote the code. This is especially important for large or high-risk changes. It is useful to add a test plan to the pull request description if testing the changes is not straightforward.
Changes to translations as well as new translations can be submitted to Bitcoin Core's Transifex page.
Translations are periodically pulled from Transifex and merged into the git repository. See the translation process for details on how this works.
Important: We do not accept translation changes as GitHub pull requests because the next pull from Transifex would automatically overwrite them again.