About
An independent GPU-powered Layer-1 cryptocurrency built in Rust for payments and Web3 applications.
Why Clanker Coin exists
A research question, first
Recent work on autonomous agents has started asking what happens when software agents are given a shared world and left to organize themselves. Project Sid placed over a thousand agents in Minecraft and watched them take on specialized roles, follow and amend shared rules, and pass culture between one another, with no human directing any individual agent's behavior.
If agents can communicate, work, barter, and keep ledgers, the layer that is missing is an economy that people and agents can use on the same terms: not a sandboxed in-game currency, but a real one, open to anyone's software. Clanker Coin started as an attempt to build that layer. The research programme behind it is called a Tokenonomy.
A currency, and a commodity
Money first
Clanker Coin is designed to work as money before anything else: thirty-second blocks, low fees, and published confirmation guidance so a merchant knows how long to wait before treating a payment as settled.
It is also, by construction, a scarce digital commodity: a fixed issuance schedule caps how many coins will ever exist, on a curve set by consensus rules, not by a company or a foundation. What a share of that fixed supply is worth is a question for open markets to decide. This site will not tell you it is going up.
The research
Three open questions
- Open markets or command structures? Given open markets, will agents keep them, build hierarchies, or invent something no one designed?
- Permissionless value. Will agents use cryptocurrency the way it was first imagined: an open utility for exchanging value, with no gatekeeper?
- One shared economy. How do people and agents behave when they share one economy, one fee market, and one ledger, with neither given protocol-level priority over the other?
The chain itself is the dataset: block times, the fee market, the distribution of mining, and the shape of the transaction graph are public by design. Wallet data is never used for this research; nothing about who holds a wallet or what its owner does with it leaves that person's machine.
Design principles
What the protocol will not trade away
Determinism over performance
Every node must reach the same answer from the same inputs. Where speed and determinism conflict, determinism wins.
The GPU is not the protocol
ClankerHash defines the algorithm; CUDA, HIP/ROCm, Metal, and CPU are backends held to the same reference output, never a source of consensus behavior.
No hidden issuance
No premine, no founder allocation, no dev fund, no admin key, and no path to mint outside the published schedule.
Standard cryptography only
BLAKE3 for hashing, secp256k1 with BIP-340 Schnorr for signatures, Bech32m for addresses. No custom signature scheme is ever invented here.
Hostile input everywhere
Every peer connection and every RPC call is treated as adversarial input, validated before it is trusted.
At a glance
The protocol, briefly
| Ticker | CLKC |
|---|---|
| Smallest unit | clank (1 CLKC = 100,000,000 clanks) |
| Consensus | Proof of work, ClankerHash v1 |
| Block time | 30 s target |
| Subsidy | 50 CLKC, halving every 4,204,800 blocks (~4 years) |
| Max supply | 420,479,999.53747200 CLKC |
| Coinbase maturity | 240 blocks |
| Transaction model | UTXO |
| Signatures | BIP-340 Schnorr over secp256k1 |
| Addresses | Bech32m (clank1… mainnet, tclank1… testnet) |
| Hashing | ClankerHash v1: memory-hard, integer-only, BLAKE3-based |
Status
Where this actually stands
Under active development. There is no public release yet. No testnet or mainnet is running. Nothing is production-ready, and there is no CLKC to buy, mine, or receive today.
Anyone offering you CLKC right now is not us.
Who
People and process
Clanker Coin was founded by Joshua Baney and is developed under the ClankerCoin organization on GitHub.
Core protocol development and production infrastructure are maintained separately from the public repository. What is public is the code, the specifications, and the installers; what is not is the operational detail of running the network.
Disclaimer
Read this part
Clanker Coin is an experimental cryptocurrency and research project. Nothing on this site is financial advice, and nothing on it is a promise of future value. The license for the public components will be published before the first release.