What is Dassie?
Dassie is a payment network that its users run themselves. You run a node, your node peers with a few neighbors, and together you are the network. Nobody sits on top.
On this page
A node of your own
A Dassie node is one program, dassie, running on a server
or on your own computer. You are its owner. You set it up with a
recovery phrase of 20 words, and every key the node uses comes from
that phrase: the key that names your node on the network, and the
keys to your accounts on each ledger. Write the phrase down and you
can bring the same node back anywhere.
Your recovery phrase says more.
The node serves you a wallet in your browser. There you send and receive money, see what your node holds, and decide which apps may pay through it. Apps reach your node with Open Payments or with ILP clients over BTP, so they need no code of Dassie's.
Neighbors, not a center
Your node finds the others through a few bootstrap nodes, which keep a list of who is on the network. Then it picks a few peers of its own. Packets of a payment travel from peer to peer until they reach the receiver, the way packets travel across the internet. Each node on the way can charge a small fee for carrying them.
A node with a domain name forwards payments for others. A node without one, such as the desktop app, connects out to a few of those nodes and is reached through them. Core and periphery explains the two kinds.
Each node keeps its own books
Every node records what each peer owes it and what it owes each peer, and enforces its own limits from those books. It never needs to agree with its peers about them. Whatever a peer does, what it can cost your node is bounded by the limits your node set for it: the credit it gives that peer, and how much it lets be in flight.
Hubs, and the ledgers under them
Peers settle what they owe each other through settlement hubs. A hub is a small ledger that a few validators keep together, backed by an escrow on an underlying ledger. Today that ledger is the XRP Ledger's test network, and the hubs hold test XRP or DSUSD, Dassie's test dollar. The testnet's XRP hub and DSUSD hub are built into every node, and four of the bootstrap nodes keep them.
In a hub, your node sets money aside for each peer it pays. That money is all the credit the peer gets from you, and the hub pays the peer from it whether your node is around or not. So two nodes can trade without trusting each other, only the hub's validators. Settlement hubs explains how.
Why peers settle only over hubs
Any currency
Dassie speaks Interledger, so a payment can start in one currency and arrive in another. Nodes convert along the way at rates they fetch themselves, and swap assets with their peers to keep what they hold in balance. You hold what you like, and still pay people who hold something else. How a payment travels follows one from start to finish.
Not a blockchain
Dassie has no blockchain, and no coin to buy or mine. DSUSD is a test-only dollar token on the XRP Ledger testnet, standing in for RLUSD while Dassie takes test money only. Payments pass through the network and are not stored by it. Nodes share only what they need to route payments, and settle on ledgers that already exist.
Test money only, for now
Dassie is early. Few people run nodes so far, and there is one ledger to settle on. Everything runs on the XRP Ledger's test network, where money costs nothing, so a bug costs nobody anything real. Real money comes once a list of conditions holds, and Early days shows how far along each one is.
Where to go next
- Pick your setup: a server, NixOS or the desktop app.
- Quick Start: a node on a server in a few commands.
- Glossary: the words Dassie uses.
- Architecture: how Dassie is built.
