ASTER is the sovereign currency engine: a non-custodial central-bank digital currency where the issuing authority holds the root of monetary control and every holder holds their own keys. It runs money as infrastructure — issuance, circulation, and settlement — without ever taking custody of a citizen's balance.
ASTER models the real structure of a monetary system rather than a single flat balance table.
The issuing authority controls creation and retirement of currency at the root of the ledger. Monetary supply changes are signed operations, not database edits, and are traceable to the authorized policy key that produced them.
Commercial banks and licensed institutions operate as intermediaries that hold accounts, originate transfers, and enforce local obligations. They act on delegated authority without ever holding the central bank's issuance keys.
End holders control funds through keys they alone possess, so a balance cannot be moved without a signature from its owner. Wallets can operate against institutions while remaining self-custodial at the cryptographic layer.
Authority flows downward through explicit, revocable delegation rather than transfer of control. An institution can service a wallet, freeze under lawful order, or reconcile positions without ever being able to unilaterally spend a holder's balance.
Supply is a governed lifecycle, not a mutable number.
New currency is created only by an operation signed with a central-bank issuance key. The mint event records the authority, quantity, and reason and becomes a permanent, verifiable entry in the ledger's history.
Removing currency from circulation is a first-class, signed operation with the same provenance as issuance. Contraction of supply is auditable against the exact keys and mandates that authorized it.
Total outstanding currency is derivable from the hash-chained sequence of mint and burn events rather than trusted from a stored figure. Any observer with the ledger can independently reconstruct the money supply.
Issuance actions can be constrained by encoded monetary policy — quorums, ceilings, or time windows — enforced at the engine rather than by convention. An out-of-policy mint is rejected, not merely flagged after the fact.
State and history are the same object, cryptographically bound.
Each block of transactions commits to the one before it, so altering any prior entry breaks every hash that follows. Tampering is not prevented by permission alone — it is made mathematically evident.
Account balances are the replayable result of the ordered transaction log, not an independently editable store. Two parties replaying the same history arrive at exactly the same state.
An auditor or regulator can be given the chain and verify integrity without trusting the operator. Correctness is demonstrable rather than asserted.
Every state-changing operation is authenticated with ML-DSA-65 (FIPS 204), so the authorization record resists forgery by future quantum adversaries. The ledger's provenance is designed to remain sound over a currency's multi-decade lifespan.
Money changes hands as a single indivisible event.
A debit and its corresponding credit are applied together within one committed operation. There is no window in which value exists in both places or in neither.
A transfer out of a wallet requires a valid signature from that wallet's key. The engine will not construct a spend on a holder's behalf without their cryptographic consent.
Freeze, hold, and compliance stops are enforceable at the institution role under proper authority. Controls are explicit ledger actions with their own provenance, not opaque side effects.
Once a transfer is committed to the chain it is settled and irreversible by design. Reversals are new, separately authorized transactions rather than edits to what already happened.