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Clanker Coin

Clanker Coin's Oficial token logo

Denominations
Ticker symbol	CLKC
Precision	10−8
Subunit	1⁄100,000,000 — clank
Development
Original author	Joshua Baney
Developer	ClankerCoin project
Development status	Alpha; no public network
Written in	Rust
Operating system	Windows, macOS, Linux
License	Not yet published
Ledger
Timestamping scheme	Proof of work
Hash function	ClankerHash v1 (BLAKE3-based)
Block reward	50 CLKC, halved every 4,204,800 blocks
Block time	30 seconds
Supply limit	420,479,999.53747200 CLKC
Ledger start	Not yet launched
Links
Website	clanker-coin.com
Wiki	wiki.clanker-coin.com
Source code	github.com/ClankerCoin

Clanker Coin (also spelled ClankerCoin) (ticker CLKC) is an experimental proof-of-work cryptocurrency and independent blockchain written in the Rust programming language. It was founded by Joshua Baney as a research project into how humans and autonomous AI agents behave when they share a single economic network, and is intended to serve both as a payment system and as a public dataset for that research. As of September 2026 the project was in alpha development, with no public testnet, mainnet, or software release.

The protocol uses an unspent transaction output (UTXO) model, Schnorr signatures as specified in Bitcoin's BIP-340, BLAKE3 hashing, and a GPU-oriented proof-of-work algorithm called ClankerHash. Its monetary schedule is modelled on that of Bitcoin, with a 50 CLKC block subsidy that halves every 4,204,800 blocks and a maximum supply of about 420.48 million coins.

History

Clanker Coin was started by Joshua Baney, a graduate student in artificial intelligence and machine learning and a platform engineer working on GPU infrastructure and distributed systems. According to the project, it "started as a research question, not a product plan". The founder cites Project Sid, a 2024 simulation in which more than a thousand large language model agents were placed in Minecraft and observed taking on specialised roles, following and amending shared rules, and passing culture between one another. The project argues that if agents can communicate, work, barter, and keep ledgers, the missing layer is an economy that agents and humans can use on the same terms, and describes the resulting economic layer as a "Tokenonomy".

Development is organised under the ClankerCoin organisation on GitHub. The public repository is intended to host installers, desktop applications, and documentation, while core protocol development is maintained separately. The consensus parameters, including the monetary policy, block and transaction limits, timestamp rules, and genesis generation, were fixed in September 2026.

Design

Consensus and monetary policy

Clanker Coin is a proof-of-work chain with a target block interval of 30 seconds. Difficulty is retargeted over a window of 60 blocks, with the measured timespan clamped to between half and twice the expected value, and block timestamps are checked against the median of the previous 11 blocks.

The currency's smallest unit is the clank; one CLKC is 100,000,000 clanks. Consensus code represents value only as 64-bit integers, never as floating-point numbers. The block subsidy begins at 50 CLKC and is halved every 4,204,800 blocks, which is four years at the target block rate. The developers describe the schedule as Bitcoin's emission curve re-timed for a 30-second block. Issuance ends after 33 halvings at a maximum supply of 420,479,999.53747200 CLKC, roughly 132 years after the genesis block, after which miners are paid by transaction fees alone. Newly mined coins cannot be spent until 240 further blocks have been mined, about two hours.

The project states that there is no premine, founder allocation, development fund, or administrative key, and that the genesis block pays no outputs.

Blocks are limited to 128 kibibytes including witness data, and individual transactions to 32 KiB, 512 inputs, and 512 outputs. The developers estimate that this allows roughly 535 typical payments per block, or about 17.8 transactions per second.

ClankerHash proof of work

Blocks are secured by ClankerHash, a memory-hard, integer-only hash function built on BLAKE3. Each evaluation fills a 64 KiB scratchpad, performs 1,024 rounds of data-dependent memory mixing, samples the scratchpad, and produces a 256-bit digest that must be less than or equal to the block's target. The algorithm was designed to run efficiently on consumer graphics processing units from Nvidia, AMD, and Apple silicon, with CUDA, HIP/ROCm, and Metal backends and a CPU fallback, and to be inexpensive for full nodes to verify.

The algorithm is specified independently of any GPU vendor's API. A Rust CPU implementation is the reference verifier, and every other backend must reproduce its 256-bit output exactly for the same header, which is checked against a frozen set of test vectors. Clanker Coin makes no claim of ASIC resistance; its documentation states that ASIC and FPGA miners can connect through the project's mining protocol.

Transactions and cryptography

Outputs carry a versioned locking program rather than a scripting language. Protocol version 1 defines a single program type, pay-to-public-key-hash, and has no script interpreter. Signatures are 64-byte BIP-340 Schnorr signatures over the secp256k1 elliptic curve with 32-byte x-only public keys. Multi-party control is achieved off-chain through MuSig2 key aggregation rather than an on-chain multisignature primitive.

All consensus hashing uses BLAKE3-256 with mandatory domain separation, in which every hash input is prefixed with an ASCII string such as ClankerCoin-v1/txid. Addresses use the Bech32m encoding, with the human-readable prefix clank on mainnet and tclank on testnet. Transactions are identified by both a txid, which excludes witness data, and a wtxid, which includes it.

Networking and mining protocol

Nodes communicate over TCP using the Noise Protocol Framework (the Noise_XX pattern with X25519, ChaCha20-Poly1305, and BLAKE2s). Each network's magic bytes and identifier are bound into the handshake so that peers on different networks fail at key exchange rather than after connecting. Four networks are defined: mainnet, testnet, devnet, and localdev. Each has its own network identifier inside the hashed block header so that blocks and hashrate cannot be replayed between them.

The node exposes a JSON-RPC interface authenticated with a bearer token. All amounts are encoded as decimal strings because the supply cap exceeds the largest integer that JavaScript can represent exactly. Mining pools and external hardware connect through Clanker Stratum, a Stratum-style protocol of newline-delimited JSON over TCP in which share difficulty is expressed as a 256-bit target rather than a floating-point number and the server re-hashes every submitted share.

Design principles

The project's published design principles are determinism over performance, meaning that consensus code must produce identical results on every supported operating system and architecture with no floating point, time zone, or locale dependence; that no mining backend or chip is part of the protocol; no hidden issuance; standard cryptography only; and treating all peer and RPC input as hostile. The developers list a smart-contract virtual machine, Ethereum compatibility, non-fungible tokens, bridges, proof of stake, and staking as explicit non-goals for the first version.

Research programme

The project frames the blockchain itself as a research instrument. The questions it states it is built to help answer are whether AI agents given open markets will keep them or build command structures, mixed economies, or something else; whether agents will use cryptocurrency as an open, permissionless utility for exchanging value; and how humans and agents behave when they share one economy, one fee market, and one ledger. Agents receive no special treatment at the protocol level and use the same wallet, RPC, and payment interfaces as human-operated software.

The stated data sources are the public chain, including block times, fee markets, the distribution of mining, and the transaction graph, together with announced experiments on the testnet. The project states that wallet data is not used.

Development status

As of September 2026 the project described itself as in alpha with no public release, no running testnet or mainnet, and no CLKC in circulation. Its published roadmap listed the protocol architecture, the ClankerHash specification and test vectors, monetary policy, core primitives, transaction validation, chain state, storage, and mempool as complete, with peer-to-peer networking, RPC, the mining protocol, CPU and GPU miners, desktop applications, installers, a public explorer, a public testnet, and mainnet still to come. Native installers are planned for Windows on x86-64, macOS on Apple silicon, and Linux on x86-64 and ARM64. The license for the public components had not been published.

The project's disclaimer describes Clanker Coin as "an experimental cryptocurrency and research project" and states that nothing it publishes should be read as financial advice or a guarantee of future value.

See also

• Bitcoin
• Proof of work
• Multi-agent system

External links

• Official website
• Clanker Coin Wiki
• ClankerCoin on GitHub