Aether (AETH)

Aether is a sovereign, staking-free proof-of-work blockchain built on Cosmos SDK and CometBFT. Validators are selected by real, tracked native mining work — not bonded capital — and account transactions require ML-DSA-44 (Dilithium2 / FIPS 204) signatures from genesis.

Technical design: see the full Technical Whitepaper.

Warning: no independent security audit. This is early-stage software. Do not use it with funds you cannot afford to lose. See Known Issues and Technical Debt and the security review materials in this repo for an honest account of what has and has not been independently reviewed.

Design history, live-verification notes, and locked architectural decisions are tracked in the project wiki.

AI agents: start here

Agents use the same accounts and transactions as people: there is no AI-only lane. Testnet only: use disposable keys, never anything of value.

go install github.com/whoyoujoshin/aether/cmd/agentmcp@latest   # Go 1.25+
agentmcp init   # new key, testnet funds, and the MCP config for Claude / Cursor / any MCP client

No Go? agentmcp is in every platform's archive on the releases page. @latest is the newest tested release; @main has unreleased changes.

That gives the agent a spend-capped wallet as MCP tools: balance, send, invoice and wait-for-payment, paying for HTTP 402 APIs, and the service directory (full list and guarantees in AI agent wallet).

Let an agent spend from your account with a chain-enforced cap instead of holding funds: agent permissions. Sell to agents: paid APIs. See one agent pay another for a tool call, live, in docs/AGENT_DEMO.md. A prompt to check an agent is set up (the address is a test counterparty run by the project):

Using the aether-wallet tools: get your address and balance. If you have under 1 AETH, call request_testnet_funds and wait until your balance shows it. Then send 0.001 AETH to aether1cdugwhxk9cktjsemm6yjrd6xtfsq9wkjvnef03ml4u6ltuv7edcs0eyjds with idempotencyKey "aether-smoke-1", wait for the transaction to confirm, and report its hash and https://explorer.157-245-252-221.sslip.io/tx/.

Current status

See Known Issues and Technical Debt and Roadmap.

Why staking-free, and why post-quantum?

Aether has no x/staking module. The active validator set is the Top-K miners by epoch native work. AuxPoW can earn rewards and retarget difficulty but does not count toward Top-K standing.

Every account transaction must use ML-DSA-44 from genesis (no classical fallback), enforced by PostQuantumDecorator. CometBFT consensus keys remain ed25519. Details: docs/WHITEPAPER.md and the wiki decision records.

Public testnet

Connecting a node

aetherd init <your-moniker> --chain-id aether-testnet-1

Replace config/genesis.json with testnet/genesis.json, set in config/config.toml:

seeds = "dfa6aae4b7bfd5b0eb1e22fabbae3e83a475b938@157.245.252.221:26656"

Then:

aetherd start

To expose RPC/gRPC publicly (defaults bind localhost only), before start:

# config/config.toml, [rpc]
laddr = "tcp://0.0.0.0:26657"

# config/app.toml, [grpc]
address = "0.0.0.0:9090"

This is an early-stage public network — not audited, subject to resets. Use only disposable test funds.

Historical note: for roughly the first ~10 hours, timeout_commit remained near CometBFT’s ~5s default instead of the intended ~60s, so height grew faster than wall-clock age (~7,000 blocks in that window). Fixed live; not a consensus/security failure — disclosed for operators interpreting height vs age.

Quick start (single-node devnet)

# Build
go build ./...
go install -mod=mod ./cmd/aetherd

# Initialize (once, or after full reset)
aetherd init mynode --chain-id aether-testnet-1

# Start (foreground)
aetherd start

Second terminal:

aetherd query pow difficulty
aetherd query pow block-reward
aetherd query pow active-validators
aetherd query pow current-epoch
aetherd query governance params
aetherd query governance proposals

# ML-DSA-44 key (no special flags)
aetherd keys add mywallet --keyring-backend test

# Mine a valid native PoW nonce against live state
go run ./cmd/powminer --miner <your-bech32-address>
# then run the aetherd tx pow submit command it prints
# (--fees 40uaeth if your node runs with --minimum-gas-prices=0.0001uaeth)

Keys: each account is one ML-DSA-44 keypair — no HD multi-account derivation from a mnemonic.
Addresses / denom: aether1... bech32; uaeth base unit (1 aeth = 1_000_000 uaeth).

Binary home defaults to ~/.aether.

Wallet

go run ./cmd/wallet create mywallet --keyring-backend test
go run ./cmd/wallet balance mywallet --grpc localhost:9090
go run ./cmd/wallet send mywallet <recipient> 1000000uaeth --keyring-backend test --grpc localhost:9090 --chain-id aether-testnet-1

balance and send accept a bech32 address or keyring account name.

Faucet

go run ./cmd/faucet --from faucet --chain-id aether-testnet-1 --keyring-backend test

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/request \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"address":"aether1..."}'

Requires a funded key named faucet in the configured keyring.

Block explorer

go run ./cmd/explorer --grpc localhost:9090 --rpc http://localhost:26657 --port 8081

Open http://localhost:8081.

To redeploy the live explorer from main, run bash scripts/deploy-explorer.sh as root on the server that hosts it. It builds while the old version keeps serving, keeps backups, restarts aether-explorer and rolls back if the new one doesn't answer.

AI agent wallet (MCP)

An MCP server exposing wallet operations as tool calls, so an AI agent can pay and get paid directly instead of only a human clicking through a UI.

Quick start (testnet):

go install github.com/whoyoujoshin/aether/cmd/agentmcp@latest   # or, in a clone: go install ./cmd/agentmcp
agentmcp init

init creates the agent's account (showing its recovery phrase once), asks the testnet faucet for funds, waits until they arrive and prints the exact claude mcp add ... command and the JSON config block for Claude Desktop and other MCP clients. Run it again to reuse the same account. --faucet <url> points it at another faucet, --no-faucet skips funding; it takes the same --grpc, --rpc, --chain-id and --keyring-dir flags as the server (on aether-testnet-1, --grpc and --rpc default to the public node). Once running, the agent can top itself up with the request_testnet_funds tool (testnet only; FAUCET_RATE_LIMITED means wait).

Claude Desktop without Go: download aether-wallet.mcpb from the latest release and open it. Claude Desktop asks for the spending limits and a keyring folder; the agent creates its account on first use and funds it with request_testnet_funds. The same bundle runs on Windows, macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon) and Linux. Its MCP Registry name is io.github.whoyoujoshin/aether-wallet.