[ANN] Atto — Zero Fees, Instant Finality, and Fixed Supply

[glibg10b]

For years, people have voiced frustration with high transaction fees, slow confirmation times, and the environmental cost of proof-of-work mining. Several projects have attempted to address these issues, including one that came remarkably close with a feeless, instant settlement model. However, that project struggled with early spam attacks, infrastructure limitations, and reputational damage due to exchange collapses and poor communication. As a result, it never reached the adoption it might have, despite clear technical merit.

Atto is a clean-slate cryptocurrency designed with these lessons in mind. It is not a fork, and it carries no legacy baggage. The goal is simple: fast, feeless, decentralized value transfer, with a narrow focus on reliability and resilience.

Transactions in Atto finalize in approximately 300 milliseconds. There are no transaction fees. The network uses Open Representative Voting (ORV), a consensus mechanism that allows users to delegate voting weight while maintaining decentralization. Since Atto does not rely on mining, it is environmentally friendly, and its supply is fixed from the start.

Significant attention has been paid to spam resistance and scalability. Timestamps allow for dynamic proof-of-work, which adjusts difficulty based on network conditions. Timestamps also help prioritize valid transactions, pre-computed work can be detected and deprioritized, and blocks that reference unconfirmed predecessors are rejected outright. These are direct responses to known attack vectors observed in previous feeless currencies.

Atto deliberately avoids adding features like smart contracts, which often increase complexity and introduce additional risk. The focus is instead on maintaining a minimal, secure, and robust protocol. Only 1% of the total supply was reserved for the founder. There was no ICO and no pre-sale.

Currently, Atto is not listed on any exchanges. Coins are being distributed in a few different ways: through contributions to medical research (Folding@Home), participation in project development, and a public faucet. In the near future, users who help decentralize the network by running nodes will also be able to earn rewards.

I'm not the founder—just a community member who values well-engineered protocols. If you’re interested in a simple, purpose-driven cryptocurrency that avoids many of the pitfalls we’ve seen elsewhere, Atto may be worth your time.

More details and technical documentation, including the distribution details, are available here:  
→ atto.cash
→ Whitepaper
→ Discord server

Feedback is welcome.

[monrad]

DEVFUND: 40% of the supply

Stay away from this project if you're an investor or holder.

[glibg10b]

DEVFUND: 40% of the supply

Stay away from this project if you're an investor or holder.

The founder has personally expressed to me that he thinks lowering the dev fund may be a good idea. I've forwarded your message to him; hopefully we hear from him soon.

[rotilho]

DEVFUND: 40% of the supply

Stay away from this project if you're an investor or holder.

Hey monrad,

Thanks for speaking up.

The 40% dev fund was something I genuinely thought was fair—mainly to make sure the project can keep going long-term without running out of steam, especially since Atto didn’t have and won’t have an ICO. But I get how it might seem high, and I’m open to adjusting it if there’s a better approach.

Would something like 20% make more sense to you? I’m not set on any number—I just want to make sure we can keep building without relying on outside funding or losing momentum.

If you have examples from older projects that handled this well—or even ones that didn’t—I’d really appreciate it. Any help figuring out a fair and sustainable allocation would be super helpful.

Would you be up for a more detailed conversation on GitHub so we can keep track of the reasoning behind the decision? I'll create the PR with the 20% change and ping you if you are open for that.

EDIT: Just created a discussion. Would you feel like joining?