Atomicals protocol

The Atomicals specification is defined in code. The official guide says so directly. Everything below describes what the pinned reference revision does, not what a standard document declares.

What that means for you

Concepts are stable. Exact validation is version sensitive. Pin a revision, record the network, and re-test on every upgrade. See networks and versions.

The Atomicals protocol family. Every Atomicals primitive starts from the same envelope written in a reveal transaction. The operation inside the envelope decides what is produced. The fungible branch produces direct FT issuance, fixed decentralised deployments, and their mint claims. The non-fungible branch produces plain NFTs, Containers with DMINT items, and the name primitives Realm, Subrealm, and Payname. The AVM is a separate beta layer that is not part of either branch today.

The Atomicals protocol family

Every Atomicals primitive starts from the same envelope written in a reveal transaction. The operation inside the envelope decides what is produced. The fungible branch produces direct FT issuance, fixed decentralised deployments, and their mint claims. The non-fungible branch produces plain NFTs, Containers with DMINT items, and the name primitives Realm, Subrealm, and Payname. The AVM is a separate beta layer that is not part of either branch today.

The pipeline every operation follows

1. A builder constructs a commit transaction paying to a Taproot output that commits to a script containing the envelope.
2. A reveal transaction spends that output and exposes the envelope in its witness.
3. A validator reads atom, the operation code, and the CBOR payload.
4. The validator checks the operation against the rules active at that block height on that network.
5. On success it assigns the result, usually to output zero for a mint.
6. Transfers of existing Atomicals are decided by allocation over the transaction’s inputs and outputs.

Where each rule lives

Question	Decided by	Read
Is this envelope well formed?	Mint parser	Envelope and operations
Is this ticker name legal?	Ticker rule at the active revision	Tickers and candidates
Does this claim satisfy Bitwork?	Bitwork check	Bitwork
Which output gets the value?	Blueprint builder allocation	Allocation
Did anything burn?	Allocation remainder handling	Burns
Can this create value from nothing?	No-inflation validation	Allocation
Is this rule active yet?	Per-network activation table	Activation boundaries

Read next

• ConceptsCore concepts

  Identity, ownership, state, references, and the trust boundaries.

• FungibleARC-20

  The fungible model, issuance, allocation, and safety.

• Non-fungibleAtomicals NFTs

  Non-fungible objects, media, transfers, and collections.

• NamesRealms and names

  Names, candidates, hierarchy, and confusable risk.

• CollectionsContainers and DMINT

  Collections, sealed manifests, and item verification.

• BetaAVM

  The beta script interpreter, carefully scoped.