whitepaperConsensus2017
Nano: A Feeless Distributed Cryptocurrency Network
Nano. Colin LeMahieu.
LeMahieu's design, first published as RaiBlocks: each account has its own chain, and the account holder is the only one who can append to it. Value moves by a send block on one chain and a receive block on another.
The problem the paper names
A single global chain makes every payment wait behind unrelated payments, and it forces a fee market for block space. The paper asks whether the unit of consensus can be the account instead of the world.
What the design proposes
- A block lattice: one chain per account, linked when value moves.
- The sender's block is already settled from their side before the recipient publishes a receive.
- Representatives and a vote on conflicting transactions replace a global fee auction, in the paper's account.
How the mechanism is specified
- Double-spends are a fork of one account chain. Voting weight follows delegated representatives.
- No fee is a protocol choice. It pushes spam control into other mechanisms, which the paper has to own.
- The live network's later spam episodes are not results in this paper. They are evidence that the control has to be real.
What this page does not treat as proven
- Feeless does not mean costless. Storage and bandwidth still land on nodes.
- Representative concentration is a governance fact the paper does not abolish.
- The design is for value transfer. It is not a general smart-contract platform.
Why a venture studio still reads it
A payments product that promises no fees should be forced to point at its spam control and its representative set. Nano is the clean example of that trade, not a template to copy into an unrelated application chain.
This is Blockchain Lab's reading of a public design paper. It is not the paper, not a copy of it, and not an offer of tokens, equity, custody or a partnership. Later network behaviour can diverge from the text. Nothing here is investment, legal or technical advice.