One ankh,
one person,
one lifetime.
Weighed once, a life comes to ☥2,800,000. Its entirety is struck the hour you are seen, then given back a month at a time across forty-five years — when you are too old to want it while there is still life to spend it on. Not a wage, nor loan or alms: a currency minted the day you are counted, and yours to build on.
☥2.8M
for each person
540
months in a life
☥5,185
each month
8,246
names on the sheet
604,601
blocks laid
What is written here
Building on the original 2006 ANKH concept, ANKH Cash turns universal basic wealth into something a blockchain can actually enforce: one verified person, one predetermined allocation, released on a fixed schedule that no one can jump and no one can be jumped in.
ANKH is a currency. What the chain does is quantify a lifetime of human economic capacity as a single standard figure — ☥2,800,000 — mint that figure the moment it is satisfied you are a person who does not already hold one, and pay it out to your wallet month by month for forty-five years. From there it is money and behaves like money: spend it, send it, stake it, price your work in it, write contracts against it, issue tokens denominated in it, bridge it. The rails are built and open.
One ankh is denominated against one US dollar of reference purchasing power — a yardstick, the way an index picks a base year, so that a lifetime can be written as a figure a person can reason about. It is not a claim on a reserve, and nobody sells you your allocation; verification is what issues it. What an ankh will actually buy is not decided on this page. It is decided by every person, co-op, business and institution that accepts one, and that is the part still to be built. Where the value comes from.
One name, one place
Face matching against every prior registration, so the same person cannot claim twice. Verification runs on nodes derived from the kingtree.net project.
Paid by the month
A monthly release over 45 years, minted by the chain to every verified person. You never buy your allocation and nobody can sell you a bigger one — being a person is the whole of the qualification.
A floor, not a ceiling
The same ☥2.8M for every verified person — no tiers, no ranking, no earlier round on better terms. Equal at the starting line. What anyone builds above it is their own.
The face is the record
Face templates are replicated chain state, not a private database. The uniqueness check runs during block execution, so a duplicate registration is rejected by every node independently rather than trusted from a server.
Sheets of your own
A co-op, union, village, school or city can run its own chain, with its own validators and its own currency, anchored into ANKH mainnet. Its members already carry a verified identity, so it never has to build one.
Money that moves
Transfers, staking, token issuance, institutional sidechains and an Ethereum bridge contract all exist today. An economy is not a feature anyone can ship — it is what people do once the rails are there.
The order of things
You are seen
Connect to a kingtree.net node for secure biometric verification
Your share is set
☥2,800,000 is minted to your address on the chain — the same figure as everyone else, fixed at verification
You are paid
~☥5,185 unlocks each month, yours to spend, send, stake or save — no contribution, no queue, nobody ahead of you
For as long as you are here
540 monthly claims, ☥2.8M in total — the same for every verified person
What makes an ankh worth something
The protocol sets the figure. It cannot set the purchasing power and does not pretend to. That is settled by everyone who takes an ankh for something real — which is the work this page is asking for, and the only work that matters now.
i. The unit
One ankh is denominated against one US dollar of reference purchasing power — a yardstick, the way an index picks a base year, so a lifetime can be written as a figure a person can reason about. A measurement convention, not a redemption claim against a reserve.
ii. The allocation
☥2,800,000 is the standard lifetime figure, minted at verification and released across 540 months. It is not a valuation of you or a debt you owe anybody. It is one rule applied identically to every person, which is precisely what makes the starting line the same.
iii. The purchasing power
What an ankh buys is whatever a grower, a mechanic, a landlord, a school or a business will part with for one. Every real obligation priced and settled in ankh makes the unit worth more of something real. Nothing else does — not this page, and not the code.
A floor, not a ceiling
Everyone begins from the same figure. What happens above it — work, trade, invention, saving, risk, preference, luck — is not something this protocol tries to flatten, and unequal outcomes are not a failure of it. ANKH takes one thing out of the starting line: the accident of where and to whom you were born. After that, markets do what markets do.
What actually circulates
An allocation is not a lump sum dropped into the world. Release is deliberately slow — about ☥5,185 per person per month, across forty-five years — and issuance is demographic rather than discretionary: one verified person, one allocation, and no committee anywhere that can vote to print faster. The flow is what an economy has to absorb, and it is knowable years ahead.
Built to be used
Ankh sends between wallets, stakes to secure the chain, denominates tokens for real obligations, anchors whole institutional chains, and has a fixed Ethereum contract for bridges to target. None of that is coming later. It is running, it is MIT-licensed, and it is open to anyone who wants to build on it.
Ways to make it real
In ascending order of effort, and every one of them worth more than an argument about whether this can work.
- Put one price in ankh. An hour of your work, a repair, a room, a crate of tomatoes. A single honest price does more for the unit than any amount of explanation.
- Accept it for something you already sell. Alongside whatever you take today — nothing has to be given up to try it, and you can stop whenever you like.
- Issue against what you will produce. Name what you owe — labour hours, a harvest, transit credits, childcare, a share of a co-op's output — and a promise becomes something people can hold, transfer and count on.
- Bring an institution. A co-op, union, village, school or city can run its own chain and anchor it here, with a verified membership it never had to build itself.
- Hold the sheet up. Run a node, stake, vote. A census nobody maintains is just a file, and every independent node makes the count harder to forge for everyone already in it.
- Read the arithmetic and argue with it. The economics, side by side with the original 2006 paper — what it got right, what it got wrong, and what was changed.
- Build something we have not thought of. The chain is open source. Wallets, payment rails, point-of-sale, lending, accounting, exchanges — none of it needs anyone's permission, and none of it is ours to grant.
Be seen
Connect to ANKH node for biometric verification
New here? Start verification to create your ANKH wallet and receive UBI.
RETURNING USER
Finds the address your face is registered to. Signing still needs your password or key on this device.
Restore spending access with a key or phrase
Recovery phrase — moving to a new device?
Before you type a recovery phrase anywhere: check the address bar reads ankh.cash. No legitimate service will ever ask for this phrase by email, chat or support ticket. This page derives your wallet entirely in your browser — you can read the code in the open source repo or disconnect from the network before pasting it and it will still work.
Your hand
The outer ledger
An ANKH ERC-20 contract is deployed on Ethereum at a fixed, permanent address, so that liquidity and bridges — ours or anyone else's — have something known to build against, and so nobody can pass off a counterfeit ankh as the real one. It is a route to the wider market, not a prerequisite: it is not needed to verify, not needed to claim, and holding it does not enlarge your allocation or move you ahead of anyone.
The sheet itself
The sheet every name is written on, and the only thing that has to be trusted.
☥ Native Ankh Chain
- Purpose: Minting and distributing lifetime allocations
- Currency: Native ANKH — spendable, transferable, stakeable
- Denomination: 1 ankh ≡ $1 reference purchasing power
- Cost to receive: Nothing — minted by verification, never sold
- Issuance: Biometric verification only
- Lifetime: ☥2.8M per person
- Monthly UBI: ~☥5,185
Ξ Ethereum (ERC-20)
- Purpose: Liquidity & bridging
- Token: ANKH (ERC-20)
- Required for UBI: No — verification alone grants UBI
- Max Supply: 9 billion
- Contract: 0x288F…0871 — verify on Etherscan
- Role: Reference contract — a fixed, known address for bridges to target
- Supply: Held by the contract pending a bridge
- Bridge: ↔ Native Chain (coming soon)
8,246
Verified Users
☥21.36M
Total UBI Distributed
604,601
Block Height
1
Active Validators
3
Active Nodes
Hold up the sheet
Help decentralize the network by running an Ankh Chain node. Validators earn rewards for securing the network.
Requirements
- Node.js 18+ or Docker
- 2GB RAM minimum
- 10GB disk space
- Stable internet connection
Begin a sheet of your own
A village, a co-op, a union, a city, a school. Your own chain with your own currency and your own validators, anchored into ANKH so its history cannot be quietly rewritten. No code, no permission, no waiting for approval.
What is asked
- To be verified. Your chain inherits ANKH's proof that you are a real, singular person.
- 100 ANKH staked. Two percent of one month's allocation.
- Three validators. Yourself and two others you trust to keep it honest.
What is given
- A chain producing its own blocks, immediately.
- Your own currency — name it, symbol it, issue it as you decide.
- Anchoring into ANKH mainnet, so your history is checkable by anyone.
- Every member already carries a verified identity. You never build one.
Begin it
Connect a verified ANKH wallet to launch a chain. Get verified first — it is free and takes about a minute.
Name what you owe
A hundred hours of labour, redeemable next year. A season's harvest before it is grown. Transit credits, childcare hours, a share of a co-op's output. Issue it as a token denominated against ANKH, and it becomes something people can hold, transfer and count on.
Name it
Connect a verified ANKH wallet to issue a token. Get verified first — free, about a minute.
Hold it up
A census nobody maintains is just a file. Stake to validate, and decide together what the protocol becomes.
Become a validator
Stake 10,000 ANKH — two months of one allocation — and your node produces and validates blocks. Unstake any time; the bond releases after the unbonding period.
Connect a wallet to stake.
Propose a change
Anything about how the protocol works is decided by the people in it. Proposals need 100,000 ANKH to file, 10% turnout and 66% approval.
Connect a wallet to propose or vote. See open proposals.
Where it stands
Every number on this page is read from the chain, and every claim on it can be checked against the public API without asking anyone's permission. That is the standard we hold ourselves to: nothing here requires believing us.
Running
- A live chain producing blocks continuously. The height and verified counts above are read from it, not typed in.
- One person, one allocation — every registration matched against every face that came before it.
- Faces are read on the node, never taken on trust from a browser. Each node derives the result itself and rejects anything that disagrees, so an approval means that node checked, not that it believed someone.
- Funded infrastructure: nodes, verification and the public API run continuously.
- Sovereign sidechains anchoring into the mainnet, with their own validators and currencies.
- Open source under MIT — every line of it.
Coming
- Scale. The chain runs and the census works. What it needs now is people — the figures above are a test population, and every real person who verifies makes the count harder to forge for everyone already in it.
- More nodes. One operator can be leaned on. Twenty in twenty jurisdictions cannot, and every registration has to satisfy all of them.
- Bridges. The Ethereum contract is deployed and permanent so any bridge — ours or anyone else's — has a fixed address to build against, and so nobody can pass off a counterfeit ANKH as the real one.
- Independent audit. No outside firm has reviewed this code yet. We would rather say that plainly than let anyone assume otherwise, and it is near the top of the list.
- Descriptors in the state root. Face templates already replicate to every node and are checked when blocks execute. Committing them to the state root is written and waits only on every node running the same build.
ANKH is a currency, minted by verification rather than sold. One ankh is denominated against one dollar of reference purchasing power — the yardstick a lifetime allocation is written in, not a redemption claim against a reserve. What it will actually buy is decided by the people and institutions who accept it, and building that is the open work. If this page ever contradicts the API, trust the API.
This is built by the people who use it
A currency is worth exactly what the network honouring it decides, which makes spreading it construction rather than promotion — there is no version where the code gets finished and the money then works. The chain is public at github.com/ankhcash/ankh-chain under the MIT licence — the verification pipeline, the consensus rules, the economics and the sidechain framework are all there to read, run and disagree with.
- Run a node. Every additional independent node makes duplicate detection harder to subvert, because a registration has to satisfy all of them rather than one operator's server.
- Launch a sidechain. An institution running its own chain and anchoring it here is what turns a ledger into infrastructure other people actually depend on.
- Take ankh for something. Price one thing you make or do in it. Purchasing power is not a property the protocol can grant — it accrues one accepted price at a time, and the first ones count for the most.
- Build on it. Wallets, payment rails, point-of-sale, credit, accounting, exchanges, bridges. MIT-licensed, no permission required, and nothing about it reserved to us.
- Read the code and file what is wrong. Issues and pull requests are the fastest route from the right-hand column to the left one. The gaps listed above are stated plainly so they can be worked on, not to be excused.
- Audit it. The absence of a third-party review is on this list precisely because it should not stay there.
- Argue with us. The economics and the limitations get debated in the community server — including by people who think the whole thing is wrong. Disagreement is more useful to this than agreement.
A currency is worth what a network of people and institutions actually does with it. Nothing here becomes real because it is asserted on this page — it becomes real the first time somebody who has never met us prices their work in ankh and somebody else pays it.
What the words mean
This page names a few things the way the sheet does. Here is the same list in plain terms.
- The sheet
- The ANKH chain itself. Every verification and every payment is written on it, and it is the only thing that has to be trusted.
- Your hand
- Your wallet. What is in your hand is what you can spend — the ankh you have already claimed.
- Be seen
- Verification. A liveness check against your face, done once and never repeated.
- Your place
- Your position on the ledger. One living person, one place, and no way to hold two.
- Names on the sheet
- How many people have been verified so far.
- The floor
- The ☥2.8M everyone starts from. It is a floor and not a ceiling — what anyone does above it is their own, and differences above it are not a fault in the protocol.
- A lifetime
- 540 months — forty-five years — the period the full allocation is paid across.
- ☥ · the ankh
- The unit, and the currency. One ankh is denominated against one US dollar of reference purchasing power — a yardstick for writing the allocation down, not a claim on a reserve. What it buys is what people will give for it.
- Begin a sheet
- Launch your own sidechain, anchored to the main chain.
- Name what you owe
- Issue a token denominated in ankh — a promise given a number.
- Hold it up
- Run a node and help validate. The sheet is held up by whoever is willing to hold it.
- The outer ledger
- The ANKH ERC-20 token on Ethereum. Optional, and separate from UBI.
- Blocks laid
- Blocks produced by the chain since the first one.
- The working
- The source code, in the open.