DarkFi - Anonymous, Uncensored, Sovereign

We aim to proliferate anonymous digital markets by means of strong cryptography and peer-to-peer networks. We are establishing an online zone of freedom that is resistant to the surveillance state.

Unfortunately, the law hasn’t kept pace with technology, and this disconnect has created a significant public safety problem. We call it "Going Dark".

James Comey, FBI director

So let there be dark.

About DarkFi

DarkFi is a new Layer 1 blockchain, designed with anonymity at the forefront. It offers flexible private primitives that can be wielded to create any kind of application. DarkFi aims to make anonymous engineering highly accessible to developers.

DarkFi uses advances in zero-knowledge cryptography and includes a contracting language and developer toolkits to create uncensorable code.

In the open air of a fully dark, anonymous system, cryptocurrency has the potential to birth new technological concepts centered around sovereignty. This can be a creative, regenerative space - the dawn of a Dark Renaissance.

Connect to DarkFi IRC

Follow the installation instructions for the P2P IRC daemon.

Build

This project requires the Rust compiler to be installed. Please visit Rustup for instructions.

You have to install a native toolchain, which is set up during Rust installation, nightly toolchain and wasm32 target. To install nightly toolchain, execute:

% rustup toolchain install nightly

To install wasm32 target, execute:

% rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown
% rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown --toolchain nightly

Minimum Rust version supported is 1.77.0 (nightly).

The following dependencies are also required:

Dependency	Debian-based
git	git
cmake	cmake
make	make
gcc	gcc
g++	g++
pkg-config	pkg-config
alsa-lib	libasound2-dev
clang	libclang-dev
openssl	libssl-dev
sqlcipher	libsqlcipher-dev
sqlite3	libsqlite3-dev
wabt	wabt

Users of Debian-based systems (e.g. Ubuntu) can simply run the following to install the required dependencies:

# apt-get update
# apt-get install -y git cmake make gcc g++ pkg-config libasound2-dev libclang-dev libssl-dev libsqlcipher-dev libsqlite3-dev wabt

Alternatively, users can try using the automated script under contrib folder by executing:

% sh contrib/dependency_setup.sh

The script will try to recognize which system you are running, and install dependencies accordingly. In case it does not find your package manager, please consider adding support for it into the script and sending a patch.

To build the necessary binaries, we can just clone the repo, and use the provided Makefile to build the project:

% git clone https://codeberg.org/darkrenaissance/darkfi
% cd darkfi
% make

Development

If you want to hack on the source code, make sure to read some introductory advice in the DarkFi book.

Living on the cutting edge

Since the project uses the nightly toolchain, breaking changes are bound to happen from time to time. As a workaround, we can configure an older nightly version, which was known to work:

% rustup toolchain install nightly-2024-12-05
% rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown --toolchain nightly-2024-12-05

Now we can use that toolchain in make directly:

% make CARGO="cargo +nightly-2024-12-05" {target}

Or, if we are lazy, we can modify the Makefile to always use that:

% sed -i Makefile -e "s|nightly|nightly-2024-12-05|g"

Under no circumstances commit or push the Makefile change.

When using cargo directly, you have to add the +nightly-2024-12-05 flag, in order for it to use the older nightly version.

Install

This will install the binaries on your system (/usr/local by default). The configuration files for the binaries are bundled with the binaries and contain sane defaults. You'll have to run each daemon once in order for them to spawn a config file, which you can then review.

# make install

Examples and usage

See the DarkFi book

Go Dark

Let's liberate people from the claws of big tech and create the democratic paradigm of technology.

Self-defense is integral to any organism's survival and growth.

Power to the minuteman.