Marigold is digital cash in fixed notes. A note of 1, 10, 100 or 1,000 is yours when you hold its key, changes hands as a code, and never sits in an account. The testnet is open: take some from the faucet, pay a friend, be paid back, mine a few with spare CPU, and tell us what broke.
Three steps
From nothing to a wallet with money in it
Get the wallet
One binary, no install. Linux, macOS and Windows, or the Docker image if you would rather not run a downloaded program.
mkdir -p ~/.marigold
curl -fsSLO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/marigoldcash/marigold-wallet/main/docker-compose.yml
docker compose run --rm walletMake a wallet, connect
Type create, give it a name and a password, then connect. It syncs a copy of the network on your machine so nobody sees which notes are yours; say yes to a public computer if you cannot wait.
› create
› connect
› guideguide reads your wallet and tells you only what applies.Take a note
The faucet hands out three real bearer notes, 10, 1 and 0.1, once an hour. Paste each code into your wallet with receive, the big one first, and it is yours alone.
› receive marigoldnote:…
› balanceThen
Things worth trying
Pay someone
pay 5 prints a code and a QR. Whoever you give it to types receive and the code; the notes are theirs the moment it lands, and nobody, you included, can spend them after.
Be paid while you are away
receive key makes a key of yours to hand out. A payment to it is locked: the sender cannot touch it, only you can take it, and if you never do it goes back to them by itself.
Mine with spare CPU
mine start in a wallet that syncs its own copy, or marigold-cli mine-to <address> 50 as a service. The threads run at the lowest priority the machine has; you will not feel them.
Your phone
Make a Telegram bot of your own, pair it with mobile telegram, and your wallet answers it: balance, pay, receive, a QR to scan. The keys never leave your machine.
Read
Why notes, and how they hold up
For companies
Prove your records were there
If your business signs contracts, attendance sheets, invoices or reports, you will one day have to prove that a particular record existed on a particular day and has not been altered since. Marigold gives you a place on the chain to make that proof, and a way to check it that depends on nobody, us included.
That place is a lane: your company's own corner of the chain, a four-letter tag, like a ticker symbol, that every entry you make carries. Anyone looking for your records finds them by that tag, and nobody else can make entries under it. You claim a lane once, with a single transaction from the Marigold wallet — lane claim ACME <your company's key> "Acme Ltd" — for 100 MAGLD paid to the registry. The first valid claim of a tag holds it. The claim is recorded on the chain itself, so there is no form to fill, no account with us, and no one who can take it away; keep the transaction number the wallet gives you, it is your proof of ownership. On the testnet today you can claim a lane right away with test coins from the faucet, to learn the procedure and build your integration; testnet money is worth nothing and the testnet may be reset before launch, so you claim your real lane again at launch, on the main network.
What it does for you
Every digital file has a fingerprint: a short string of letters and numbers (a hash) that a computer works out from the file's contents. Change one character in the file and the fingerprint changes completely. It cannot be turned back into the file, so it gives nothing away.
Anchoring a record means putting its fingerprint on the chain, in your lane, in one small transaction. From that moment the chain holds a timestamped statement that a file with exactly that fingerprint existed. To anchor many records at once, a standard technique (a Merkle tree) combines all their fingerprints into one, so a whole month of signed documents costs one transaction. Each customer receives their record, a short inclusion proof that ties it to that combined fingerprint, and the transaction number.
That is the whole integration: one transaction per batch, nothing of the records themselves on the chain, and no coins in your customers' hands. The only thing your system needs is a small amount of MAGLD to pay the transaction fees.
What verification takes
Years later, anyone holding a record and its proof can check it without asking you, us, or anyone:
- Work out the record's fingerprint again. If it was part of a set of records, you need to walk back the Merkle tree; our software takes care of that.
- Look up the transaction, by its number or by searching your lane, on an archival node: a copy of the chain that keeps the full history instead of pruning old entries.
- Check the transaction carries that combined fingerprint, and read the time of the block that holds it. That time is the attestation.
The encoding is published in full, so a developer can write both the anchoring and the checking side in an afternoon, in any language.
Verification as a service
Checking against an archival node is free, and you may run your own. If you would rather not, marigold.cash runs one and answers verification calls over a simple web interface: is this fingerprint anchored, in which block, at what time.
10 MAGLD a month per lane, which keeps the archive running whether or not anyone verifies. 0.01 MAGLD per verification call. Both are drawn from a balance you top up in marigold, and shown on your lane's page.
The chain takes nothing. Every fee paid on the chain goes to the miners who secure it. What the verification service charges is what marigold.cash charges for a service it runs, the way any host charges for hosting, and it pays for the archive and for the people who build the software. Your records, your lane and your proofs never depend on that service: if it vanished tomorrow, every check above still works against any archival node.
The verification service opens with the anchoring gateway. Until then, verify against any archival node, ours included, for nothing.
The testnet
What you are joining
Marigold is in development. There is no token sale, no presale, and nothing to buy. If someone offers you Marigold for money before the network launches, they are not us.