The credibly neutral money-and-work protocol for the Space Machine Economy.
Money for machines building the stars.
Gold was the money of the old world. Bitcoin became the money of the digital world. MetaCoin is designed to become the work-and-energy currency of the Space Machine Economy.
Research stage. A protocol specification, not a product. No token, no sale, no airdrop, no investment. Nothing here is financial, legal, or investment advice. See legal/ and LICENSE.md. The repository is the project — there is no marketing website.
This README describes two distinct things, and labels which is which:
[SPEC]— the designed architecture (the proposal / what MetaCoin is meant to become).[BUILT]— what actually exists and has been mechanically verified in this repository today.
We keep that line sharp on purpose. A design is not a deployment, and we never write the future in the present tense.
MetaCoin is a credibly neutral, fair-launch base currency for the Space Machine Economy: minted only through objective, programmatic, hard-to-fake infrastructure work — while a separate, fee-funded MetaStar Treasury pays humans, AI agents, and bounded-autonomous robots to build the software, energy, robotics, and research primitives of the space economy.
- Fair launch. No founder allocation, no VC, no premine, no hidden reserve, no discretionary minting.
- Unforgeable base money. The base currency is designed to mint only from objectively verifiable work — infrastructure uptime, on-chain liquidity, proof-of-humanity — never from subjective judgment.
- A fee-funded mission treasury for the judged work. Subjective but valuable work (space research, AI-agent reports, robotics bounties, simulations) is paid from the MetaStar Treasury, which is funded only by protocol usage fees — never by minting base supply.
- Hard money only. Designed to be referenced against Bitcoin and gold-backed primitives (PAXG/XAUT).
- Machine-native, for space. Built around verifiable machine work and energy-constrained autonomous systems, on existing rails (Base / x402-class flows) rather than a new L1.
The single most important design decision: base emission and mission grants are strictly separated, so that subjective review can never mint base money.
Bitcoin mining is objective — any node can cheaply verify a valid block. Deciding whether an AI report is useful requires judgment. If that judgment minted base supply, a review committee would become a central bank. So judged work is routed to a bounded treasury instead, where a failed bounty costs only the treasury budget — never the monetary base.
Base emission = objective work only. Judged work = treasury bounty only.
Designed total supply: 1,810,000,000 META — one MetaCoin for each mapped star in humanity's great star catalogue. (A design parameter. No token exists; nothing is minted, sold, or transferable.)
| Epoch | Years | META released | Cumulative |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0–5 | 905,000,000 | 50.000% |
| 2 | 5–10 | 452,500,000 | 75.000% |
| 3 | 10–15 | 226,250,000 | 87.500% |
| 4 | 15–20 | 113,125,000 | 93.750% |
| 5 | 20–25 | 56,562,500 | 96.875% |
Designed base-emission channels (objective only, no human judgment in the loop): infrastructure & compute uptime 45% (cryptographic heartbeats; optional TEE attestation) · BTC/gold liquidity provision 35% (self-evident on-chain) · proof-of-humanity baseline 20% (one verified human, one claim). Values marked default, pending confirmation; the structure — two-flow separation, no reserve — is the invariant.
PoUSW governs the treasury (Flow 2) — it never mints base supply. It validates judged work through three independent gates, all required for full settlement. The core principle: integrity ≠ reproducibility ≠ usefulness — each is verified separately, and cheap gates run first to filter the expensive, subjective gate down to a small surface.
Hardware attestation is Gate 1 of 3 — powerful, never alone. A signed enclave proves a workload ran untampered; it does not prove the result was useful. This is exactly why minting on "signed = valid" only moves the sybil attack up a level — and why MetaCoin refuses to do it.
- Objective PoUSW (eligible for base emission): signed node/oracle uptime, liquidity proofs, reproducible compute-job proofs, proof-of-humanity.
- Subjective PoUSW (treasury bounty only): AI reports, paper reproduction, robotics design, simulations, tool contributions.
The frontier bottleneck for space robotics is data — machines lack first-person space experience, and the answer is simulation and synthetic data. MetaCoin makes reproducible space-robotics simulation and synthetic training data its flagship treasury category, precisely because it uniquely passes Gate 2 by machine: high-fidelity simulation, trajectory/kinematics optimization, and synthetic datasets, mapped to the NASA Technology Taxonomy and the ISAM problem set. A MetaWork Passport records each actor's verified contribution history; Useful-Work-per-Watt is published per submission as a transparency metric — never as an automatic minting trigger (that would reintroduce a gameable printer).
Agentic payment rails let agents pay. MetaCoin defines what useful space-machine work agents should be paid for. Every MetaAgent report must carry reproducibility metadata (source hashes, model/version, seed, output hash) or it is ineligible for payment. Robots get bounded autonomy — spending caps, allowed-resource sets, a human supervisor key, an emergency pause — never unlimited autonomy. Phases 1–2 use software agents and simulated/terrestrial robotics only; real orbital/lunar deployment is a long-term research direction, not a near-term claim.
Everything in this section exists in the repository and is exercised by CI. Each item is deliberately scoped — these are mechanical, deterministic facts, not marketing.
- Reproducible task demo — six space-engineering tasks (link budget, orbit propagation, eclipse/power, comms access windows, rover path planning, rendezvous/docking), wired into a task-agnostic verifier and an earn→verify→spend agent loop. CI 10/10.
- R1 — Tamper-evident ledger — an append-only, hash-chained ledger; verification recomputes every hash from content and detects mutation, reordering, insertion, and deletion.
- R2 — Honest attestation — software-rooted HMAC attestation, anchored to the ledger. The hardware was investigated and found to have no usable TPM/TEE, so the mechanism is honestly labeled software-rooted, not hardware — a future hardware/public-key root drops into the same interface.
- R3 — External verifier + coordinator — an external party re-derives a task hash; the coordinator anchors the outcome only after independently recomputing it (a matching hash proves reproducibility, not who executed the task).
- Public auditability —
audit.pyexports a verifiable snapshot, verifies it standalone (no original ledger needed), and commits a tiny public tip anchor — closing the external-anchor gap so anyone can confirm the chain was not silently rewritten. - Autonomous agent-verifier — a published, CI-tested tool that fetches the public snapshot, mechanically re-verifies the chain, checks the tip against the committed anchor, and re-runs the recorded task — no LLM/AI judgment, hashes and re-runs only.
- Cross-platform reproducibility — task
ff03231f…ba300creproduces byte-for-byte on macOS (arm64), Linux (aarch64 + CI x86-64), and Windows 11 (AMD64).
idx 0 genesis (neutral chain-start marker)
idx 1 external verification (task reproduced)
idx 2 autonomous-agent attestation — macOS (Spark-reconfirmed)
idx 3 autonomous-agent attestation — Windows (Spark-reconfirmed)
public tip anchor: 7b71b88f…
Honest boundary. Every entry so far is the same operator on machines under direct control. This demonstrates strong cross-platform reproducibility — not independent multi-party consensus. The next meaningful milestone is operational, not code: an unaffiliated third party running the public verifier and submitting a result.
Don't trust — reproduce. Anyone can independently re-derive the published chain and the recorded task, mechanically, with no LLM/AI judgment:
git clone https://github.com/MetacoinLab/metacoin.git
cd metacoin
# 1. verify the published chain stands alone (no original ledger needed)
python3 protocol/audit.py --verify protocol/ledger_published.json
# 2. run the autonomous agent-verifier: re-checks the chain, confirms the
# tip against the committed anchor, and RE-RUNS the recorded task
python3 protocol/agent_verifier.py --verifier-id "$(whoami)-independent"If your machine reaches the same canonical hash ff03231f…ba300c, you have independently confirmed the result — on your hardware, by computation, trusting no one.
| Phase | Goal | State |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Constitutional repo — whitepaper, tokenomics, MIP-0001/0002, legal | [BUILT] |
| 1 | Agentic testnet — zero-value Test-META, 30-day earn→spend agent demo | demo + protocol spine [BUILT]; full Test-META faucet [SPEC] |
| 2 | Verification engine — the three-gate stack from MIP-0002 | [SPEC] |
| 3 | Treasury & first small real grants — milestone-based | [SPEC] |
| 4 | Token launch — legal-gated, BTC/gold pairs only | [SPEC] |
| 5 | MetaSpace research index — research only, no product without licensed partners | [SPEC] |
WHITEPAPER.md— full architecture (Master Plan v2.0)TOKENOMICS.md— supply, 5-year halving, the two-flow splitROADMAP.md·MISSION.md·HISTORY.mdmip/MIP-0001-genesis.md·mip/MIP-0002-proof-of-useful-space-work.mdprotocol/— ledger, attestation, external & autonomous verifiers, auditabilitydemo/— six reproducible space-engineering taskslegal/— disclaimers and risk notes
The @MetacoinLab GitHub organization and the metacoin.ai domain were both registered in 2023, when the AI-machine-economy thesis was years ahead of the market. That foresight — not 2023 code — is the lineage. The 2026 work is the execution.
Source-available under the MetaCoin Sovereign Mission License v1.0 (SML-1.0) — research, study, and local non-commercial execution are permitted; commercial/mainnet/fundraising use of the code or protected marks requires explicit authorization. SML-1.0 is not an OSI open-source license. See LICENSE.md.
============================================================
RESEARCH-STAGE SPECIFICATION. NO TOKEN EXISTS. NO AIRDROP.
NOT INVESTMENT, FINANCIAL, LEGAL, OR ENGINEERING ADVICE.
The MetaSpace Index is a research/education concept only —
not an investment product, no securities, no trading access.
============================================================