Coordinator, backing, hacking — the recurring questions · content/faq.md
FAQ — the questions that keep coming back
Date: 2026-09-08
"Didn't IOTA need a centralised node for security?"
Yes — until 2025. You're remembering the Coordinator. The original Tangle (2016–2025) couldn't finalise transactions safely on its own, so the IOTA Foundation ran a Coordinator: a central node issuing "milestones" that determined the canonical ledger. It was honest training-wheels, but it was centralisation — and together with the 2019 MIT-DCI hash break (Curl-P collisions) and the 2020 Trinity-hack network shutdown, it's a large part of why the IOTA token lost the market's trust (−99% from ATH; see the IOTA vs QALS page).
The Rebased upgrade (mainnet 5 May 2025) deleted the Coordinator entirely. Modern IOTA is a Delegated-Proof-of-Stake BFT chain with Starfish consensus (live April 2026, IACR eprint 2025/567) — the same family of provably-live DAG-BFT that Sui uses, hardened for lagging validators.
Qalnet forks the post-Coordinator code. Our chain has no central signer: 4 validators (growing to 7), 3f+1 Byzantine fault tolerance, sub-second finality. The "centralised tangle" critique is exactly why we didn't fork the old node — we forked the one that fixed it. (Our devnet currently runs a single validator for convenience — that's a devnet choice, not an architecture limit; Phase 1 is the 4-validator Fleet.)
"Is QALS backed by anything?"
Two classes: B-QALS are born only when AU$1 lands in a segregated reserve, are redeemable for any qalarc service (no cash-out in Phase 1–2 — deliberate legal positioning), transferable inside the ecosystem, mint-on-deposit, burn-on-use, provable monthly (the chain is the liability ledger). G-QALS (team/growth allocation) carry no redemption claim; they sit under a revenue-funded FloorVault whose coverage is published monthly, however small it honestly is. See the AU$1 Backing page.
"How is this different from just running a database?"
Caps that bytecode enforces (a compromised AI agent physically cannot overspend), receipts that third parties can verify without trusting us (chain + anchoring), escrow whose accounting the compiler checks (Move linear types), and an upgrade path to public verifiability (checkpoint anchoring to public IOTA) that no database has. See the Security page.
"Could someone hack it?"
Read the Security & Threat Model page — scored by attack, with mitigations. Short version: agents are bounded by the VM, money can't be printed, and the realistic risks are operational (keys, ports, supply chain) with a 10-item hardening backlog already written.
"Why a quoll?"
Australian, Q-alliterative (qalarc · QALS · Quoll), and its white spots are the system: every spot is a backed coin. "Spotted. Backed."
"When can people outside qalarc use it?"
Phase gates: closed-loop prepaid now → AUSTRAC VASP registration (A$150–400k path) for external transferability + qAUD → licensed credit later. Nothing public until the legal path says so. Not legal advice.
"Why is the smallest unit called a doof — and what's the not-for-profit?"
1 Qals = 1,000,000 doofs (the IOTA-style million-multiple homage; humans read Qals, machines count doofs). And the doof earns its keep: doof.ing is being set up as a not-for-profit that receives "doof rounding" — the invisible dust from metered payments, donated by default with an opt-out. At scale that's tens of thousands of dollars of frictionless micro-giving, fully auditable on-chain. The Qoll guards the coins; the doofs go to good causes.
"So legally, QALS is just our own platform's token system?"
Yes — that is precisely the posture. Phase 1 QALS is closed-loop prepaid platform credit: spendable only on qalarc services, no external transferability, no cash-out, no yield, no public sale. That's what keeps it inside the prepaid carve-out (see the AU Token Law Playbook). Practical to-do list that follows from it: Terms of Use describing QALS as prepaid credit for qalarc services (non-refundable except as required by law, no secondary market), marketing that never frames it as an investment, and the lawyer memo on the closed-loop boundaries (internal transfers included) before anything broadens.