What PATINA is

PATINA is a Bitcoin artifact whose state deepens for every block its carrier output stays unspent, resets to zero the moment that output moves, and permanently engraves each completed holding stretch as a ring.

Start where you actually are

These pages hold the whole protocol, the API, the operator procedures and the conformance material. Rather than reading them in order, pick the sentence you would have said out loud before you arrived.

• I want to understand PATINA What an artifact is, what you own, and where the honest edges are. Start here, four pages
• I want a Firstlight Seal The founding cohort, the window, and what the free mint actually costs. Start here, then Using it
• I already own an artifact Every field on the artifact page, what resets depth, and how to prove the key is alive. Using it, seven pages
• I want to verify an artifact Recompute the id, decode the marker, and check the bytes against the vectors. Protocol reference, ten pages
• I want to integrate PATINA Types, cursors, every endpoint with examples, and the error taxonomy. Indexer and API, four pages
• I want to build an indexer The steps in order, the golden vectors, and how to compare state roots. Build a compatible implementation, three pages
• I want to operate infrastructure Deploy, sync, verify, back up, and what an incident can and cannot reach. Operator guide, five pages
• I want to create deterministic artwork Same inputs, same picture, everywhere, and the rules that keep a render honest. Creator guide, three pages

Looking for the shorter version, with the pictures? The public site explains the same protocol at a different depth.

The longer explanation

Every PATINA artifact rides on one specific unspent transaction output. That output is called the carrier. The artifact has one number that matters, its depth, and the number is computed the same way by everyone:

depth = current_block_height - carrier_creation_height

Nothing accrues off chain. Nothing is minted per block. There is no staking contract, no lockup, and no counterparty. The chain already records when an output was created, so depth is a subtraction that any observer can redo from a block explorer.

Spending the carrier resets depth to zero. This rule is not enforced by code that could be patched or bribed. It is inherited from how Bitcoin works. Spending an output destroys it, and a destroyed output has no age. The artifact follows the money into a successor output, and the successor is brand new, so its depth starts at zero.

When a stretch ends, it is not erased. The indexer engraves it as a ring: a permanent record of the height the stretch started, the height it ended, how deep it got, and how many sats it carried. An artifact accumulates rings the way a cut tree shows growth. A long ring completed years ago stays legible today, even if the artifact is sitting at depth 40 right now.

Depth is bucketed into eight named tiers so that a number becomes a thing you can say out loud. Raw is where everything starts. Elder is 210000 blocks, roughly four years at ten minutes a block.

• Raw0
• Sheen1008
• Cast4032
• Verdigris12960
• Umber26280
• Bronze52560
• Oxide105120
• Elder210000

The full table, with elapsed time for each tier and the exact rule for choosing one, is on Depth and tiers.

The genesis asset

The first PATINA asset is the Firstlight Seals. It is the founding cohort, and it opens once.

• Minting is free. You pay Bitcoin network fees to the miners and nothing to anyone else.
• The commit window is 4032 blocks long, about 28 days. It opens once and does not reopen.
• Every Seal is sealed over at least 100000 sats of your own bitcoin. That is the endowment. It stays yours, inside the artifact, spendable by your key at any time.
• Zero team allocation. Zero reserve. Zero price. No supply cap. No race for a low number.

Minting is a two step aged commit and reveal. You publish a commit output, wait at least 144 blocks, then reveal. Because only the committer can spend the commit output, nobody can watch your reveal and jump in front of it. Details are on Firstlight Seals and the step by step is in the mint walkthrough.

What this is not

How to read these docs

Every page carries a badge at the top saying what kind of page it is. The kind decides how much weight a sentence carries, so it is worth a glance before you argue with one.

Constants

Every number in these pages comes from the frozen implementation baseline. If a page and the baseline disagree, the baseline wins and the page is a bug.

Byte examples

Every hex string was computed by docs/tools/vectors.mjs and pasted from that script's output. You can rerun it and diff.

Statistics

These pages contain no counts, no totals, and no charts. Numbers about the live network belong to the indexer, and you can point the endpoint reference at your own instance to read them.

Deviations

Anything an implementation does differently from the baseline is recorded in docs/deviations.md in this repo, not quietly in prose.

How this site is built

Hand written HTML, one stylesheet, and three small browser scripts. No framework, no bundler, no fonts or scripts loaded from anyone else's server. It works served from GitHub Pages and it works when you open index.html straight off a disk.

Search runs against assets/search-index.json, which is generated by docs/tools/build-search-index.mjs. The same data is written to assets/search-index.js as well, because a browser blocks a page opened from disk from fetching a local file, and search has to work from disk too.

The colour tokens in assets/style.css are the same names and the same values as the ones in site/assets/site.css. The public site and these pages are one product at two depths, and site/tools/check-site.mjs fails if the two files ever drift apart.

Run every check before publishing. It regenerates the search index and fails on a broken link, a bad byte example, a contrast regression, or a house style slip.

node docs/tools/verify.mjs