The claim
Two transactions, and a day of doing nothing between them.
The gap is not a queue and not a delay anyone imposed on you. It is what makes the claim impossible to snipe, and it is the only thing you have to plan around.
This page cannot tell you whether the founding window is open, because it could not read a PATINA indexer. The opening height has not been announced here, and this page will not invent one.
Nothing on this website mints anything. The transactions are built and signed in the app, with your keys, on your machine.
Window state
LiveChecking for a connected indexer.
- State
- Tip height
- Opens at
- Closes at
- Grace ends
- Blocks until open
- Blocks remaining
- Founding so far
01 Step by step
What you do, what Bitcoin does, and what to check before moving on.
Six steps. Each one names the thing that can go wrong, because a claim that fails halfway is a claim that cost fees and produced nothing.
Get a wallet that can do the unusual part
Almost any wallet can send to a taproot address. Far fewer can spend one along a script path, which is exactly what the reveal has to do. Check that before anything else.
You also need to hold on to a 16 byte salt between the two transactions, and you need to control which output index becomes the carrier.
Verify before continuing
That your wallet can build a taproot script path spend, and that you have somewhere safe to keep the salt.
What it costs
Nothing yet. No transaction has been broadcast.
What can go wrong
Discovering at the reveal that your wallet cannot spend the script path. The commit fee is already spent by then.
Have ready
At least 100 000 sats you are willing to leave alone, plus fees for two transactions.
Publish one output that says nothing
You build a commitment: a single SHA-256 over the tag PTNA/commit, the public key you will use, and a random 16 byte salt. That digest goes inside a taproot leaf that only your key can satisfy, and the leaf goes into one output of an ordinary transaction.
On chain this looks like any other taproot payment. It reveals no claim, no salt and no intent while it sits there.
What Bitcoin sees
A version 1 taproot output. Nothing marks it as a PATINA commit until it is spent.
What it costs
One miner fee, about 154 virtual bytes at the fee rate you choose.
Verify before continuing
Write down the commit txid, the output index, the salt and the public key. All four are needed at the reveal.
What can go wrong
Losing the salt. Without it the commitment cannot be reproduced, the reveal fails, and the coins in that output are still yours but the claim is gone.
Let it age at least 144 blocks
The reveal is only valid when the reveal height minus the commit output height is at least 144. A commit confirmed at height 1000 is first revealable at height 1144. A reveal at 1143 is rejected with SEED_COMMIT_TOO_YOUNG and creates nothing.
Roughly a day at ten minutes a block, though the real number of blocks is what counts and not the clock.
Why the wait exists
It is what makes a snipe pointless. An attacker who copies your reveal would need their own commit, spendable by their own key, already 144 blocks old.
What it costs
Nothing. Waiting is free and there is no fee for time.
Verify before continuing
That the commit output has at least 144 confirmations. A mempool transaction has not started ageing at all.
What can go wrong
Revealing too early wastes the reveal fee. During the founding window, waiting too long can push the reveal past the grace end, which costs the founding flag.
Spend the commit and name the carrier
The reveal transaction spends the commit output along the script path, which exposes the leaf, and in the same transaction publishes the marker: an OP_RETURN carrying PTNA, a version byte, the SEED opcode, the salt, a zero flags byte, and the index of the output that becomes the carrier.
An indexer checks the commitment against your key and the salt, checks the age, checks that the named output is not an OP_RETURN and holds enough, and either creates the artifact or records exactly why it did not.
What Bitcoin sees
An ordinary spend with an extra OP_RETURN output of 26 bytes. Consensus has already bound the revealed leaf to the output being spent, so no signature checking is left for PATINA to do.
What it costs
One miner fee, about 173 virtual bytes, plus the endowment moving into the carrier output. The endowment is not a payment.
Verify before continuing
That the carrier index in the marker points at the output you meant, and that the output holds at least 100 000 sats for a founding claim.
What can go wrong
Naming an OP_RETURN output, naming an index the transaction does not have, or funding the carrier below the minimum. Each is a distinct reason code and each creates nothing.
The artifact exists, and its id is already fixed
The artifact id is one SHA-256 over the tag PTNA/artifact, the reveal transaction id in wire order, and the carrier index as four little endian bytes. Every indexer derives the same id from the same chain, so there is nothing to register and nobody to register with.
You now hold an ordinary Bitcoin output paying an address of yours. Your keys, your coins, no shared custody.
What you have
An artifact record with a permanent id, a founding flag if the commit landed inside the window, an endowment fixed at the carrier value, and an empty ring list.
Verify before continuing
Recompute the artifact id yourself from the reveal txid and the carrier index. It takes one SHA-256 and no trust in anyone.
What you do not get
No certificate, no receipt, no account and nothing to log into. The artifact is a fact about the chain, readable by anyone running the index.
What can go wrong
Nothing at this point can undo the creation, but a reorg deeper than the reveal would remove it along with the transaction. Wait for six confirmations before treating it as final.
Depth starts at zero and counts from here
Every block that arrives while the carrier stays unspent adds one. The first threshold, Sheen, is 1 008 blocks away, about a week. Nothing needs claiming and nothing needs renewing.
The only thing that ends the stretch is spending the carrier, and that is entirely in your hands.
What happens next
Nothing, on purpose. Depth is what accumulates when nothing happens.
Worth checking
Which of your wallets can see the carrier output, and whether any of them might spend it during a routine consolidation.
What can go wrong
Your own wallet spending the carrier by accident. This is the commonest way a stretch ends, and no protocol rule can prevent it.
Ongoing cost
None. There is no renewal, no rent and no expiry.
02 The shape of it
Depth starts at the reveal, not at the commit.
Why this cannot be sniped
A snipe needs two things: seeing what someone is about to claim, and being able to act on it first. Here the commit reveals nothing while it waits, and when the reveal appears the commitment it satisfies is already 144 blocks old and spendable only by its owner. Copying the reveal gets an attacker nothing, because their own commit would have to have existed a day earlier and be spendable by them.
There is no queue, no fee auction, and no advantage in refreshing a page at the right second.
03 What it costs
Network fees, and nothing to us.
There is no mint price. The only bitcoin that leaves your control is the miner fee on two transactions.
Fees depend on transaction size in virtual bytes and on the fee rate you choose. The sizes below are computed from the transaction shapes this protocol requires, under the assumptions listed underneath. Your wallet may produce slightly different sizes if it uses more inputs or a different output type.
Estimate at your own fee rate
Arithmetic, not a forecast| Transaction | Part | Virtual bytes |
|---|---|---|
| Commit | Fixed overhead, including the segwit marker | 10.5 |
| One taproot key path input | 57.5 | |
| The commit taproot output | 43 | |
| One taproot change output | 43 | |
| Total | 154 | |
| Reveal | Fixed overhead, including the segwit marker | 10.5 |
| One taproot script path input revealing the 68 byte reduced-data leaf | 83.25 | |
| The carrier taproot output | 43 | |
| The marker output, a 26 byte OP_RETURN script | 35 | |
| Total, rounded up | 173 | |
| Both | Commit plus reveal | 327 |
Assumptions behind those sizes
- Taproot throughout, a single key path input on the commit, a single script path input on the reveal.
- 64 byte Schnorr signatures with the default sighash, so no extra sighash byte.
- A single leaf script tree, so the control block is 33 bytes.
- The reveal has no change output. Add 43 virtual bytes for each extra taproot output.
- Fee rates are examples, not forecasts. Check the live mempool before you sign anything.
The 100 000 sats is not a fee
A founding carrier must hold at least 100 000 sats. That bitcoin is yours before the mint and yours after it. It is not paid to anyone. Budget for it as bitcoin you are choosing not to spend, plus the fees above.
04 The result
What the minter walks away with.
- An artifact record
- Created by the reveal, with a deterministic id: a single SHA-256 over the tag
PTNA/artifact, the reveal txid in internal byte order, and the carrier vout as four little endian bytes. Every indexer derives the same id from the same chain. - A carrier output you control
- An ordinary Bitcoin output paying an address of yours, holding at least 100 000 sats. Your keys, your coins, no shared custody and no multisig with us.
- Founding status, permanently
- The record is marked founding because the commit landed inside the window. Nothing later can add that mark to an artifact that did not earn it, and nothing can remove it from one that did.
- Depth starting at zero
- Counted from the reveal height. Every block after that adds one. The ladder starts at Raw and the first threshold, Sheen, is 1 008 blocks away.
- An empty ring list
- No stretch has finished yet. Rings only appear when a carrier is spent.
- No certificate, no receipt, no account
- There is nothing to log into. The artifact is a fact about the Bitcoin chain, readable by anyone running the index.
05 The endowment
Your bitcoin, sealed in, still yours.
The endowment is the value sitting in the carrier output. A founding artifact needs at least 100 000 sats there. Outside the founding window the floor is 10 000 sats.
It is not locked, not staked, not deposited, and not held by anyone else. There is no timelock in the carrier output. You can spend it in the next block if you want to.
What spending it does is end the stretch. The chain gains a ring recording where the stretch started, where it ended, how deep it went, and what value it carried. The artifact then continues on the successor output at depth zero, or becomes a relic if no output qualifies.
So the cost of depth is not money. It is the option you gave up to move those coins.
Before you claim
Buying an artifact later resets it. A transfer spends the carrier, so whatever depth it had closes as a ring and the new stretch starts at zero. If depth is what you want, claiming it yourself and leaving it alone is the only way to get it. Read the risks before you decide.