Digital money should work for everyone, but today’s payment systems often fall short. Whether we’re buying a coffee, reading an article or a machine is paying another machine to call an API, fees and delays can quietly exclude entire groups of users and use‑cases. This article explains why instant and feeless payment networks are crucial for real financial inclusion, how they unlock tiny micropayments and machine‑to‑machine interactions, and why projects like Atto and Nano show what a truly accessible payment network looks like.

ATTO is officially listed on XT with the ATTO/USDT pair and trading is open.

Atto’s protocol has a fixed supply of 18 billion coins (all pre-minted), so no new Atto can be created by consensus and there is “no inflation” built into the system. In practice, however, coins enter circulation through our various distribution programs (mining, faucet, contributions, etc.), so circulating supply rises over time. For example, Atto currently releases 5,000 coins per minute via Folding@Home rewards, which equates to roughly 1.2% of total supply per month. At around 6% circulating today, the planned release pace (≈1.2% of total supply per month ≈ 15% annualized) implies a much larger increase relative to today’s circulating base —on the order of ~250–300% over a year—until circulation grows. In other words, distributing ~15% of total supply in year one is roughly 3× the current circulating supply. This practical “inflation” helps bootstrap use, but it also means many newly-rewarded users may immediately sell, creating downward price pressure.

ATTO is officially listed on CoinGecko.

ATTO is officially listed on LCX with the ATTO/EUR pair and trading is open.

Just a few weeks ago, we launched Atto’s integration with Folding@home – a way for our community to use their idle computers to help scientific research and earn Atto in return. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Atto’s Folding@home team has reached the #1 spot on the entire Folding@home network, less than a month after launch. This achievement is nothing short of incredible: our team has amassed a staggering 10,022,348,905 points and completed 37,941 work units (individual research tasks) to date. It’s an astonishing milestone that showcases what a passionate community can accomplish when united by a common goal.

I recently wrote a Python wrapper for the Atto Node API (GitHub), and I wanted to share my journey—from figuring out how to convert Atto addresses, to designing around Python’s async model, to publishing a usable API wrapper. Hopefully, this helps someone else who's either interested in Atto or wants to see what writing an API wrapper looks like from a beginner's perspective.

🚀 Why I Started​

At the time, there were no Python API wrappers available for Atto. The only libraries available targeted JS/WASM, used only by the wallet, and Kotlin.

I wanted to play around with the API, but to do that, I needed to convert an Atto public key (a base32-encoded string) into a hex string, which the API expects. I wrote some code for this in Python, the journey of which I'll expand on below.

Using curl and copying and pasting addresses to make requests was getting tedious, so I switched to using Python for that too. At some point, I realized: “I’m already halfway to an API wrapper. Why not finish it?”. There weren’t that many endpoints, so it seemed like a manageable project.

As a student, this felt like a fun way to procrastinate from real work™.

Ever feel like waiting for a Bitcoin transaction is like standing in a long checkout line at the grocery store? In traditional blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum, every transaction from everyone lines up to be processed on one shared chain – essentially one checkout lane for the entire network. This one-lane design can get congested, limiting how fast transactions go through. But what if everyone could have their own checkout lane? In the blockchain world, that’s the idea behind account-chains and parallel ledgers. Instead of one single chain for all transactions, each user maintains their own mini-blockchain. This approach (pioneered by projects like Nano’s block-lattice and used in newer projects like Atto) promises to turbocharge speed and scalability by letting many transactions happen at once.

In this post, we’ll break down what account-chains are, how they differ from the classic blockchain model, and why having parallel personal ledgers can make a blockchain much faster and more scalable. We’ll use simple language and analogies – so grab a virtual shopping cart, and let’s explore this multi-lane approach to blockchains!

Most of us have been there: you want to read a single article or use an app for a day, but you’re confronted with a monthly subscription. It’s all-or-nothing — either pay a full month (or more), or miss out. Over time, these subscriptions pile up, draining your wallet for services you might only occasionally use. In this article, we’ll explore why the rigid monthly subscription model frustrates users, and how a new wave of feeless, instant cryptocurrencies could offer a solution.

We all have them. Those moments when our computer sits there, fans whirring softly, screen perhaps dark, doing... well, nothing useful. That powerful machine, capable of complex calculations and rendering stunning visuals, is just waiting. But what if that idle power could be harnessed for something truly meaningful? And what if you could get rewarded for it?

Enter Atto. You might already be familiar with cryptocurrencies that boast feeless transactions, near-instant speeds, and a focus on environmental friendliness – call them a certain flavor of digital cash. Atto is another iteration on the block lattice introduced by the brainiac Colin LeMahieu, building on those principles but with a fresh start.