Free banking on Bitcoin rails — discount houses, bills of exchange, redeemable notes. In the lineage of Scotland, 1716–1845.
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The interactive competing-banks demo that ran here on our own signet has been retired. It's being rebuilt to run on eCash alpha, where anyone can join in — follow the repository for it.
FreeBank is a credit-creation layer: independent discount houses post reserves on-chain, issue redeemable notes against them, and discount bills of exchange — short-dated, self-liquidating commercial credit. Solvency is enforced by consensus: reserve attestation on a cadence, redemption at par while a house stands, seniority for note-holders when it doesn't. The monetary aim is old and simple — money and credit priced by competition and backed by visible reserves, not by decree.
The unit of account is the gECX (☉) — one gram of gold (shorthand simply g, e.g. 5g). That is the anti-Cantillon idea at the heart of free banking: money measured in a fixed weight of gold, not managed by decree.
Be precise about what's built, though: a gECX is gold-denominated and ECX-settled — not gold-backed. It is the value of one gram of gold, redeemable in ECX at the current gold rate, not a claim on metal in a vault. A live gold peg (a trustworthy price oracle into consensus) is on the roadmap, not yet built.
It runs as a Bitcoin drivechain (BIP 300/301): pegged funds come from the mainchain, security comes from blind merged mining, and exit is always by withdrawal to L1.
FreeBank was proposed and activated on eCash alphanet with these values — checkable against the blocks and against the release artifacts:
| network | eCash alphanet (a Bitcoin-family forknet under proof-of-work) |
| slot | 130 |
| title | FreeBank |
| activated | block 996,485 · 30 / 30 acks |
| latest release | v0.2.9 · linux tarball sha256 69ac41b74351d8374d3c7383faf69e0c27f5839459f4890ab25c204a8b452370 |
« verify the release » curl -LO https://github.com/mbdrivechains/freebank/releases/download/v0.2.9/freebank-0.2.9-x86_64-linux-gnu.tar.gz sha256sum freebank-0.2.9-x86_64-linux-gnu.tar.gz # = the hash above
Binaries for Linux x86-64 and macOS arm64, plus source, are on the release page. The node is a Bitcoin-Core-lineage daemon; the wallet UI lives at freebank-gui. Bringing up the full stack from zero — every dependency, which network is which, verification order, and the recipe for following eCash alpha — is the complete guide.
Experimental, pre-audit software. It runs on eCash alphanet — a disposable test network that will be reset — on test coins only. Deposit nothing you care about. Reserve and solvency parameters are provisional pending simulation. This page, the code, and the chain are the work of one determined operator and a tireless AI co-builder.
Problems → issues · ideas → discussions · vulnerabilities → SECURITY.md
FreeBank ☉ — MIT licensed. Unit of account: the gECX — one gram of gold (☉), settling in chain coin at a provisional rate. Names on the door: bills, notes, houses. Everything else is subject to the ledger.