Tunnels Protocol

What Tunnels Protocol is

A purpose-built blockchain for recording contributions and distributing revenue. Not a token. Not an L2. Not an EVM chain. Tunnels is infrastructure: it tracks who did what work on a project, verifies contributions through an open challenge window, and splits revenue deterministically based on attested contribution weight.

What it does

Contributors record their work as cryptographic attestations, each backed by an economic bond. Every attestation enters a mandatory challenge window where anyone with standing can dispute it. If it survives, the contribution is finalized and the contributor earns weight in the project's revenue distribution. When revenue arrives, a deterministic waterfall splits it: predecessor projects, reserve, fees, genesis allocation, then pro-rata to all contributors by their attested units. The same inputs always produce the same outputs. No middlemen, no negotiation, no discretion.

Protocol primitives

Identity — a persistent, non-transferable Ed25519 key pair (Human or Agent type); agents link to a parent human and revenue routes automatically.

Project — an immutable container with distribution parameters (reserve rate, fee rate, predecessor link) set at creation and locked forever.

Attestation — a cryptographic record that work happened, signed by the contributor's own key, backed by an economic bond that is forfeit if challenged successfully.

Verification — a time-windowed challenge period (minimum 24 hours) with a binary outcome: finalized or rejected, no partial credit.

Revenue Router — a deterministic waterfall that cascades through predecessor allocation, reserve, fee, genesis, then labor pool split pro-rata by attested units.

Architecture

10 Rust crates. ~33,000 lines of code. 489 tests passing. The implementation is a complete system, not a prototype:

tunnels-node runs a full node — RocksDB state persistence, libp2p/gossipsub networking, JSON-RPC API with 20+ endpoints, block production and validation.

tunnels-wallet is a command-line wallet for identity management, attestations, and revenue claims.

tunnels-sdk compiles to WASM for browser and non-Rust environments, enabling key generation and transaction signing without a local toolchain.

Public testnet node running at node1.tunnelsprotocol.org with live status dashboard.

State commitments use a Merkle Patricia Trie. Revenue distribution uses fixed-point U256 arithmetic with an O(1) accumulator. The five protocol invariants (non-transferability, immutable attestations, deterministic distribution, transparent parameters, auditable ledger) are each enforced by the implementation and verified by dedicated test suites.

Use cases

Startup without paperwork — a team creates a project, sets split parameters, and starts building. Every contribution is attested, revenue distributes automatically. No cap table, no vesting cliffs, no lawyers.

Artist-owned labels — songwriters, producers, engineers attest their contributions to each release. Streaming revenue distributes to everyone who made the record, weighted by what they did, for the life of the project.

Open source funding — a commercial product declares an open source library as its predecessor. Revenue flows back to the library's contributors automatically. Maintainers get paid by every product built on their work.

AI training compensation — a model trained on creative works declares those works as predecessors. When the model generates revenue, a percentage cascades back through the chain to the original human creators.

github.com/tunnelsprotocol/tunnels

Read the whitepaper