Free banking on Bitcoin rails — discount houses, bills of exchange, redeemable notes. In the lineage of Scotland, 1716–1845.
◆ Source on GitHub Releases → Run your own node →
The interactive competing-banks demo that ran here on our own signet has been retired. Follow the repository for what comes next.
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 is ECX, the chain's own coin, which moves one-for-one with ECX on the eCash mainchain through the drivechain peg. Notes, bills and reserves are all counted and redeemed in ECX.
Later: a gold unit (☉). Notes in grams of gold, backed by wrapped gold and kept apart from ECX notes, are planned for a later release. They open only once ECX markets are deep enough.
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's slot on the eCash beta network, and the current release — each checkable against the blocks and against the release artifacts:
| network | eCash beta (a Bitcoin-family network under proof-of-work; forked from Bitcoin at block 967,680) |
| slot | 130 · title FreeBank |
| activated | block 969,029 · 1,009 acks (more than the 1,008 needed within 2,016 blocks) |
| latest release | v0.2.16 · linux tarball sha256 b19da93fcf2ea3195e90ea441acbdd16f669f43fdecc225721ddc48d152ee253 |
| release key | SHA256:1d0zm9Qb9ZtzDnQHH593fgjAkk7nPqMDG79XyWlyeeY |
« verify the release » curl -LO https://github.com/mbdrivechains/freebank/releases/download/v0.2.16/freebank-0.2.16-x86_64-linux-gnu.tar.gz sha256sum freebank-0.2.16-x86_64-linux-gnu.tar.gz # = the hash above
Each release's SHA256SUMS is signed with the FreeBank release key, and the macOS build carries a
GitHub build attestation — the commands are in the README's
Verify your download.
Binaries for Linux x86-64 and macOS arm64, plus source, are on the release page. The node is a Bitcoin-Core-lineage daemon that runs beside an eCash node and the drivechain enforcer. Bringing up the full stack from zero — every dependency, which network is which, verification order, and the recipe for following the eCash beta — is the complete guide.
Experimental, pre-audit software. It runs on the eCash beta — a test network — 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: ECX. Names on the door: bills, notes, houses. Everything else is subject to the ledger.