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What Yamale is

A blockchain for moving money between institutions that know who each other are.

That constraint is the design. Most chains are built for anonymous participants and treat permissioning as something applications bolt on afterwards. Yamale inverts it: who may validate, who may issue a currency, and who may route a payment are all decisions the chain itself enforces, decided by governance and visible to anyone.

The trade is deliberate. You give up permissionless participation at the infrastructure layer, and you get a network where a payment's counterparties are accountable entities rather than addresses.

The ideas the rest of the documentation assumes

Money is integers

Every amount on the chain is a whole number in a base unit. uyml is the base unit of YML at six decimal places, so 12500000uyml is 12.5 YML. There are no fractional base units and no floating point anywhere near a balance.

Interfaces convert only when displaying. If you are writing one, do the same: compute in base units, convert at the last moment, and truncate rather than round, so a number you show is never larger than the number that exists.

Permission is on-chain, and so is the decision

Four things on this chain require governance approval: becoming a validator, issuing a currency, routing payments as an institution, and receiving a share of transaction fees as a developer.

Each follows the same shape. Anyone may apply — that is a permissionless message that records a pending application. Approval is a separate message whose only valid signer is the governance account, which means it can only ever happen as the payload of a proposal that passed. There is no path where an applicant approves themselves, and every decision leaves a record of who voted for it.

The validator set is closed, but the ledger is not

Only approved validators produce blocks. Everything else — holding funds, sending payments, trading, opening a treasury — is open to any account. Reading is open to everyone: there are no private balances and no permissioned queries.

Supply is capped and decays toward it

Instead of open-ended inflation, new YML is issued on a fixed schedule that halves toward a ceiling. Every block mints slightly less than the last, and the total approaches a fixed number rather than growing forever.

Commitments are stronger than policies

The treasury module draws a line most systems do not. When funds are committed to somebody — a vesting grant, a scheduled disbursement — they leave the treasury's spendable balance entirely. No administrator, no governance proposal and no group of signers clearing their threshold can spend them.

This is enforced by where the money sits rather than by a rule that checks it, which is the difference between a commitment and an intention.

A value too old to trust is not a value

Every price the chain holds carries the moment it was observed, and every answer carries how old it is. Nothing is silently frozen at its last known number: a feed that stops reporting becomes explicitly unusable rather than quietly wrong, and the paths that act on a price immediately — lending, liquidation — refuse a stale one rather than guess.

The two kinds of value get there differently. A currency's rate is discovered: validators each report what they observe and the chain takes the median weighted by stake, so moving it costs the same as attacking consensus. A building's value is attested: an appointed, independent party inspects it and signs a number, and what the chain can guarantee is not that the number is right but that it is attributable — who signed it, what they were admitted to value, and against which report.

What the chain does
Payments ISO 20022-shaped credit transfers between approved institutions, each leaving a queryable statement entry with its reference and purpose.
Currencies Fiat-referenced tokens with a single governance-approved issuer each, who alone may mint and redeem.
Treasuries Shared funds with roles, spending limits, time locks and vesting.
Trading Constant-product liquidity pools; anyone may open one or provide liquidity.
Staking Standard proof-of-stake economics over the approved validator set.
Governance Proposals, deposits and voting, plus the four approval flows above.
Valuation Exchange rates agreed by stake-weighted validator vote, and real-world assets valued by governance-appointed independent parties.

Not built yet: lending against real-world assets. The valuation layer it needs is in place — see below — but the credit logic itself is a later phase.

Where to go next