BYTES, a fungible blockspace token

BYTES is a draft (0.2, 2026-07-29) of a token minted one per byte of consumed blockspace. It does not exist; its economics are analysed in a companion document.

BYTES is a draft design for a fungible blockspace token. Blockspace Holdings' records hold draft 0.2, dated 2026-07-29; it was called BITS in draft 0.1 earlier the same day. The token does not exist. Nothing has been minted and its carrier encoding is unwritten. This page reports what the draft describes and what a companion analysis, BYTES economics (2026-07-29), concludes about it.

The draft's notation: "all-caps BYTES = the token; lowercase bytes = the unit."

The idea #

BYTES is a fungible token minted by attributing a transaction's consumed blockspace to it — one token per byte — making consumed blockspace itself tradeable, and making price-per-KB directly observable for the first time.

"1 BYTES = 1 byte of consumed blockspace", so the kilobyte price is the BYTES price × 1,000.

Why it matters to the theory #

The draft ties BYTES to Blockspace Value Theory:

It strips the packaging from BVT's "one giant collection" thesis: consumed blockspace "with no artifact attached".
It would be "A live ticker for Part VII". BVT's convergence test needs a regression; if BYTES traded, "The convergence test becomes a quote."
Its ceiling tracks replacement cost block by block, since BYTES can always be minted at the current fee cost of its own bytes.
"Vintage erasure, deliberately." A byte minted in a cheap era and one minted today are the same. "It is the index fund of blockspace".

Minting #

A transaction carrying the BYTES marker mints BYTES. A declared amount is "valid iff x ≤ tx size in bytes"; over-declaration "mints nothing". Omitting the amount mints the full measured size. Minting less is legal, and the whole transaction still backs the smaller supply. The draft gives a wallet algorithm for the case where writing the number changes the size it measures. "Anyone can mint; the cost is the fee on the minting transaction", so issuance is "a perpetual fair mint priced by the fee market."

The clean-mint rule (proposed) #

The clean-mint rule would forbid a mint transaction from carrying any data structure other than the BYTES marker. Its purpose is to close the concealed co-claim: because BYTES is fungible, buyers cannot inspect each mint, so a mint that hid another protocol's token could later dilute the whole pool. The cost: BYTES "cannot be minted in the same transaction as an inscription or other token op."

The public draft marks one question OPEN: whether a mint is provably claimed by BYTES alone (n = 1). Spending ordinary sats does not break it. Spending an already-inscribed sat might, if passive carriage applies to sats as it does to runes. "Decide it on its own merits, not to save BYTES." See carriage and sats and ordinals.

Ledger, price and supply #

Balances would ride UTXOs, runes-style, with explicit transfer records. The draft holds that BYTES' price "IS the Blockspace Floor Price, by construction", because it carries no vintage, provenance or content premium. Trough conditions put its ceiling near "0.035 sat per BYTES ≈ $0.035/kB at $100k BTC", the same figure as BVT's worked example.

Supply would act like a thermostat. Above parity, minting pays and issuance resumes; below it, minting stops and demand alone sets the price. The draft's caveat: "the ceiling is computable and empirically confirmed (UNCOMMON•GOODS); the floor is asserted but unevidenced."

Supply would be unbounded in count but limited in rate to the bytes consumed, up to about 4,000,000 per block. Supply and backing are kept apart: the one-per-byte peg "is not enforced; it is measured" through each population's backing ratio.

Decisions and open questions #

Decided in the draft: raw bytes as the denomination (a vbyte-denominated sibling, VBYTES, "remains possible"), and explicit mint amounts that are hard-invalid on over-declaration.

OPEN: the redemption sink, "a launch requirement". As specified, BYTES is "a one-sided peg (minting = hard ceiling; nothing enforces a floor)". The lever the draft names is "BYTES-for-inclusion at a mining pool". The carrier protocol is also OPEN.

Burn-to-mint and retroactive claims moved to BTP as SUCCEED and CLAIM. "A BYTES mint is ATTRIBUTE-to-BYTES plus issuance."

BYTES economics #

The companion analysis (written as "BITS Economics", same date, renamed in its header) runs five investigations. Its market figures are snapshots from public sources in late July 2026. Its verdicts, as the document states them:

The floor claim. UNCOMMON•GOODS is BVT's own primary indicator. The document finds that it "trades almost exactly at its trough-window replacement cost". Its conclusion: "replacement cost is a ceiling that works and a floor that does not exist."
Terminology. It proposes one term per concept: consumed, content and attempted KB; backing and backing ratio; price per kilobyte (PPK); a replacement ceiling; trough parity; and a split of price into blockspace value plus vintage, provenance and content premiums. It flags "Blockspace Floor Price" and "mint cost anchor" for replacement.
Fee payment. Paying for inclusion with blockspace tokens is "coherent, not viciously circular". Its precedents are Ethereum's gas tokens and out-of-band pool accelerators. The gate is "adoption reflexivity, not economics."
Not a stablecoin. "It is not one and must not be sold as one". It calls BYTES a "ceiling-pegged commodity token", one redemption channel away from a two-sided peg.
Supply increases. The unit survives any consensus change and supply cannot grow faster than the chain, but the price is "maximally exposed to supply expansion".

Its one load-bearing conclusion: "a proven, arbitrage-enforced ceiling with no floor", so every path to BYTES being "more than a fee-trough tracker" runs through the redemption sink.

Risks the draft states #

Its value proposition "is precisely BVT's untested claim". If the floor is cultural (Reading C), "BYTES trades to zero". The draft calls it "the cleanest possible falsification instrument for the theory, in both directions."
With flat fees it never appreciates above replacement cost.
Even minting needs a canonical indexer; BTI is "the obvious candidate".
The name and the unit can be confused, which the notation manages.