PROTOCOL

MeshChain Protocol v1

Mesh-native ledger for hold + spend over Meshtastic (or any low-bandwidth transport).
Source of truth for MESH balances is the mesh chain — internet is not required to spend.

Units

• MESH base unit integer, 6 decimals
• 1_000_000 base units = 1.0 MESH

Cryptography

• Identities: ed25519 32-byte public keys
• Short id: first 8 bytes of SHA-256(pubkey)
• Tx/block signatures: ed25519
• Hashes: SHA-256 (air headers may use 16-byte truncations)

Transaction types

Type	Signer	Effect
Transfer	Sender	Debit from, credit to, bump sender nonce
Register	New user	Bind short id ↔ pubkey
Mint	Authorized minter	Credit to, increase supply (bridge on-ramp)
Burn	Holder	Debit from, decrease supply (bridge off-ramp)

Transfer (canonical fields)

• nonce, from short id, to short id, amount
• Signer pubkey must hash to from

Mint (bridge on-ramp hook)

• nonce (minter account), to, amount, external_ref [16]
• optional to_pubkey — if recipient unknown, creates the account (must hash to to)
• external_ref = truncated hash of Solana deposit tx (or vault event); unique on-chain
• Only keys in genesis minters ∪ validators

Burn (bridge off-ramp hook)

• nonce, from, amount, redeem_hint [32]
• redeem_hint carries destination info for the bridge (e.g. Solana pubkey hash)
• Mesh does not verify Solana; bridge watches final burns

Blocks (v1.1)

• At most 16 txs per block (MAX_TXS_PER_BLOCK)
• tx_root = SHA-256-trunc16 of concatenated 32-byte txids (empty → zeros)
• Header: height, prev_hash, slot_time, producer_index, producer, tx_count, tx_root
• Producer signs header
• Round-robin leader: height % N_validators
• Finality: ≥ ceil(2N/3) signed validator BlockAcks
• Producer header signature counts as that validator’s ACK
• Catch-up: finalized blocks archived and served via BlocksRequest / BlocksResponse
• Genesis field protocol_version (currently 1) advertised in gossip Hello

Block rewards

• Each block with height > 0 mints block_reward to producer (inflation)

Transport

• TCP gossip — multi-tx blocks, catch-up, public seed finality
• Meshtastic air — MC frames: Tx (1), Tip (7), BlockHint (8), ≤1-tx Block (2); see MESHTASTIC.md
• Max air payload 200B; FRAG for PQ / large envelopes
• Sim transport = in-process memory (lab)