NHBCoin
NHBCoin

Introduction: Why Build on NHBCoin?

NHBCoin is a purpose-built L1 payment rail, not a general-purpose blockchain. This singular focus allows us to provide a suite of powerful, natively-integrated features that offer an unparalleled developer experience, combining the security of a custom protocol with the flexibility of the EVM.

Read the Introduction on GitHub

Low-Fee, Instant Transactions

Build applications where value transfer is nearly free and instantaneous, enabling new business models for micropayments, tipping, and global commerce.

Full EVM Compatibility

You already know how to build on NHBCoin. Deploy your existing Solidity smart contracts and use familiar tools like Hardhat, Foundry, Remix, and ethers.js with zero code changes.

Native L1 Superpowers

Go beyond standard smart contracts. Leverage powerful features like P2P Escrow, User Identity, and our Paymaster (for gasless transactions) directly at the protocol level for maximum security and efficiency.

Core concepts

The ideas the rest of the developer docs build on, each with a pointer to the page that covers it in depth.

Accounts and assets: NHB and ZNHB

An account is identified by an address that begins with nhb and can also have a human-readable username. It holds two native assets: NHB, the network's stable, dollar-pegged currency for payments and settlement, and ZNHB (written ZapNHB on many of these pages), which is earned through network usage and staking. The nhb_getBalance method returns both balances along with the staked amount, the nonce and the Engagement Score. Learn more: JSON-RPC API Reference

POTSO

Proof of Time Spent Online decides which validator produces the next block by weighing staked ZNHB together with an on-chain Engagement Score. Validators raise that score by staying online and sending heartbeat transactions, and a validator that cheats can have its stake slashed and its score reset. Learn more: POTSO Explained

The loyalty engine

The loyalty engine lets a business run its own rewards program natively on-chain. A business registers itself, points a paymaster wallet at itself to fund rewards, registers the merchant addresses customers pay and creates reward programs, with every step a directly signed transaction and no separate gateway. Learn more: Guide: The Loyalty Rewards Engine

Escrow

Escrow locks NHB or ZNHB in a protocol-level vault until both sides of a trade agree it is done, with no smart contract and no third-party custodian. You can use the hosted Escrow Gateway REST API, or submit your own signed transactions. Learn more: Guide: Building with On-Chain Escrow

Subscriptions

A subscription plan is a single object made of a name, a price, an asset and a billing interval, and the price, asset and interval are fixed once the plan is created. A customer's one signature on the hosted subscribe page is their standing mandate, and the chain then charges them automatically each cycle. Learn more: Guide: Recurring Billing with NHBCoin Subscriptions

Webhooks and signatures

A webhook tells your server that something happened, such as a completed payment. Checkout and subscription deliveries carry an HMAC-SHA256 signature made with your webhook secret. The signature covers more than the body: it is computed from the request method, your webhook path, the exact raw request body and the request timestamp, and the Accepting Payments guide gives the exact formula to recompute. Compare the result in constant time and reject stale timestamps. Never fulfill an order just because a customer's browser was redirected back to you. Calls to the Escrow Gateway are signed too, with an API key, a timestamp, a nonce and an HMAC signature on every request. Learn more: Guide: Accepting Payments with NHBCoin

Where to go next

Pick the page that matches what you are building.