Atto¢ash whitepaper v0.6

An internet-scale layer-2 micropayment system for Web2 and Web3

As physicist Richard Feynman said about nanotech, “There’s plenty of room at the bottom.” Blockchain technology has created distributed financial applications of many sorts, but the internet still runs on advertisements. One reason for this is because there is not an available micropayment system suitable for replacing ad-supported content at scale. Paying a penny to read a news article or to post a tweet is not practical because the minimum effective credit-card charge is around $1.00. Transaction fees for popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are even higher, and payments may take minutes to finalize.

Instead we are designing Atto¢ash as a cryptocurrency system which is specifically optimized for the micropayment scenario. It has two key advantages:

• Digital cash: Instead of needing to interact directly with the blockchain for each transaction, the user’s browser extension can generate a small, anonymous payment ticket which can be embedded right into an HTTP request to a website. The site can validate and redeem it immediately while the reply page is being generated, or if more convenient can just store it offline to redeem in bulk later.
• Internet scale: The system is architected to be able to handle a very large transaction volume, suitable for competing with ad-supported infrastructure even for sites like Google and Facebook. In addition to such Web2 uses, it can transition easily into the Web3 world, where the mechanisms for supporting Metaverse creators and service providers are still being established.

However, the tradeoff we are explicitly making to achieve this requires abandoning some of the guarantees of immutability, reliability, and auditability provided by most blockchains. Instead, we tolerate a small level of inconsistency and even fraud, under the assumption that most transactions will be tiny and not worth the effort to rigorously police. This is similar to how internet advertising already works: click fraud and ad blockers are ubiquitous, but the system still provides enough benefit to both users and providers to be worth using.

The Atto¢ash system is purposefully simple compared to many DeFi projects. There’s no volatile currencies, no staking rewards, no tokens to HODL, no leveraged flash loans. There’s just the high-velocity movement of money with minimal overhead, to promote efficient commerce on the internet for everyone to benefit from.

Sound interesting? Download the full whitepaper.

Bonus: Download the litepaper on ticket encryption.