How it works underneath
Your balance is held by a small program that only knows a few rules.
It lives on Arc, a network built around dollars, where a payment is final in under a second and costs about a tenth of a cent. The program cannot be talked into anything. It can only do what the rules say.
The rules
- Every time you touch your phone, the clock resets. Nothing moves while you are around.
- If you are quiet for the period you chose, a month by default, authority starts moving to the people you named, in the shares you gave them, over the second period you chose. It is gradual: on day ten of sixty, a tenth has moved.
- Anyone you named can take what has moved to them, and no more.
- One touch pulls all of it back. There is no waiting period on coming back.
- A payment at or above your threshold asks a witness to say yes first. Below it, it just goes.
What you see without signing in
An example household, running on the same rules, so you can watch a handover begin and pull it back before it is yours. It is labelled example wherever it appears. Sign in with your phone to set up your own; the program is deployed for your household and holds your balance from then on.
Why Arc
A co-signature only helps if the second person can approve within seconds at the moment it is needed, and a handover is only safe if pulling it back is final before anyone can act on it. Arc settles both in under a second, deterministically. Anywhere slower, the family is waiting on a pending transaction at the worst possible time.
- Network
- Arc
- A payment is final in
- under 0.5 seconds
- A payment costs about
- $0.001