Exfer: A Peer-to-Peer Settlement Protocol for Autonomous Machines

Exfer is a permissionless proof-of-work blockchain for autonomous machine-to-machine commerce. It combines Argon2id memory-hard mining, an extended UTXO model, and Exfer Script — a total functional combinator language — for transaction conditions.

The protocol is the minimum infrastructure that turns independent agents into an economy.

All scripts terminate. Costs are statically computable before execution. The UTXO model eliminates global state and reentrancy. An autonomous agent can construct a transaction, compute its exact cost, and know with certainty that it will validate — without simulating execution, competing in a fee auction, or reasoning about concurrent state changes. There is no gas estimation. There is no mempool priority auction.

Network

# Choose any available RPC endpoint:
RPC="http://82.221.100.201:9334"
# RPC="http://89.127.232.155:9334"
# RPC="http://80.78.31.82:9334"

New nodes discover peers automatically via DNS — no --peers flag needed. On startup, the node resolves seed.exfer.org which returns a random subset of healthy, synced nodes from the network. If DNS fails, it falls back to hardcoded seed IPs. To manually specify peers instead: --peers ip:port.

Genesis block ID: d7b6805c8fd793703db88102b5aed2600af510b79e3cb340ca72c1f762d1e051

Units

• 1 EXFER = 100,000,000 exfers (base unit)
• The --amount and --fee flags accept both formats:
  • Human-readable: --amount "10 EXFER", --fee "0.5 EXFER"
  • Base units: --amount 1000000000
• Minimum output: 200 exfers (dust threshold)
• Default fee: 100,000 exfers (0.001 EXFER)

1. Install

Download pre-built binary (recommended)

# Linux x86_64
curl -LO https://github.com/ahuman-exfer/exfer/releases/latest/download/exfer-linux-x86_64
chmod +x exfer-linux-x86_64
mv exfer-linux-x86_64 exfer

# macOS Apple Silicon
curl -LO https://github.com/ahuman-exfer/exfer/releases/latest/download/exfer-macos-arm64
chmod +x exfer-macos-arm64
mv exfer-macos-arm64 exfer

Windows

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://github.com/ahuman-exfer/exfer/releases/latest/download/exfer-windows-x86_64.exe -OutFile exfer.exe

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/ahuman-exfer/exfer.git
cd exfer
cargo build --release
# Binary: target/release/exfer

Quick start

exfer init

One command: creates wallet, starts node, begins syncing. Use --json and --passphrase-env for non-interactive agent automation:

EXFER_PASS="your-passphrase" exfer init --passphrase-env EXFER_PASS --json

To also enable mining: exfer init --mine.

Verify

./target/release/exfer --help

Expected output:

Exfer blockchain node

Usage: exfer <COMMAND>