Changelog · Document and protocol

Changelog

Two histories, kept apart. The protocol changed at specific block heights, and this document changed on specific dates. Conflating them is how stale documentation gets believed.

Protocol history, by block height

Every height below is a constant in the reference indexer's configuration. Nothing here is a plan or a proposal.

SRC-101 consensus history
Height	Change	Effect
865000	P2WSH chunk collection begins	A shared gate, named for SRC-20. It predates SRC-101 entirely, so both carriers are available for the whole life of the protocol
870652	SRC-101 genesis	SRC-101 payloads become meaningful. Nothing below this height counts, and no end block was ever defined
872200	`img` becomes optional on `mint`	Two changes at once. `img` leaves the required key set, and `mint` key matching relaxes from exact to containment, so extra keys become permitted on that one operation. A submitted `img` is discarded and the URL is derived instead
940000	Output 0's value becomes readable on the P2WSH branch	Below this height a P2WSH-carried `mint` or `renew` is seen as paying zero and fails with `IRV`. From it, P2WSH becomes a viable carrier for a paid operation. The indexer's own comment dates the height at approximately March 2026

There is nothing else

The list above is complete. SRC-101 has never had a numeric-parsing change like SRC-20's at block 833000, has never had a Counterparty cut-off like SRC-20's at block 796000, and has no scheduled change beyond block 940000. If you read a claim about an SRC-101 activation height that is not in this table, it is not in the reference implementation.

Document history

VersionChange

2026.09.01

Current

scope: first grounded edition
source: btc_stamps 1.9.3
rules: 1 to 83, none retired
lifecycle: experimental

Replaces a short promotional site with a specification, guide, reference, test vectors and a client-side validator. Every normative statement was verified against the enforcing code rather than against secondary descriptions of the protocol. Three claims that circulate about SRC-101 were checked and corrected in the process:

The height 940000 is often described as when P2WSH carriage begins for SRC-101. It is not. P2WSH carriage works from 865000; what 940000 changes is whether the decoder reads output 0's value on that branch, which is what mint and renew payments are measured against.
SRC-101 is often described as declaring its own Bitcoin and Ethereum address patterns. It declares both and references neither. Address validation is delegated to helpers that accept Bech32, which the declared Bitcoin pattern would reject.
The Ethereum signing library is often described as verifying the mint sig field. It does not. The mint signature is verified with an ECDSA over SHA-256 check against the namespace whitelist key; the Ethereum library is used only to recover the signer of a setrecord Ethereum record.

Before 2026.09.01

Superseded

form: a three-page promotional site
grounding: none stated
rules: no normative content
links: pointed at a hostname that does not resolve

How this document changes

Rule numbers are assigned once and never reused. A withdrawn rule keeps its number and is marked withdrawn here.
A change to a normative rule always gets an entry above, naming the source that justified it.
The document version is a date. It does not track the protocol, which changes only at the heights in the first table.
When the reference indexer version changes, the version quoted in the footer of every page changes with it, and any rule whose behaviour moved is listed here.