ARC-20 and Atomicals

Atomicals' fungible ARC-20 tickers, whose units ride sats, and its NFTs (containers and dmitems). One definitional indexer, one quarantine, one named gap: realms.

ARC-20 and Atomicals 0.64 % of the chain's bytes in Book A, as of block 972,299, 2026-10-20 09:30:48 UTC

Atomicals defines two kinds of token that BTI measures. ARC-20 tickers are fungible, and the books keep them under the key arc20. Atomicals NFTs, containers and dmitems, are a second family, atomicals-nft. Both are catalogued by one adapter, as BTI's rule of one adapter per indexer requires: "atomicals catalogues ARC-20 AND the NFTs".

How Atomicals puts data on Bitcoin #

Atomicals writes to the witness. The data-types reference lists it among the envelope protocols and gives its marker, atom, among those a reader scans for inside an OP_FALSE OP_IF … OP_ENDIF block. The Atomicals observation says every atom witness envelope ever revealed "remains consensus-valid data".

An Atomical's identity comes from its commit. Ruleset v1's fact table gives it as atomical_id = commit_txid ‖ LE32(commit_vout): the commit transaction's id followed by the commit output's number. A ticker or a container name is an alias.

ARC-20 is coloured sats. The token table says "one unit = one sat by protocol design — the units RIDE sats, the ticker is the claimant". The Atomicals observation adds the consequence: spent through a wallet that does not know the protocol, the units scramble or burn under the protocol's own rules. BTI's token table writes it as "decays by scrambling"; the observation calls it decay-by-amnesia.

How BTI attributes the bytes #

The atomicals adapter reads atomicals-go, an indexer with its own database. Its trust is "definitional" in the trust triad: the indexer's ruleset is the protocol. It has two modules, arc20 and atomicals-nft. The ruleset's facts and the adapters table record four quirks:

NFT binding is outpoint-positional, and the rule forks at block 819,181 (raw input index before, first-in-first-out after). BTI does not re-derive it and adopts the source's verdicts.
A quarantine. From block 848,521 atomicals-go writes negative amounts into its own ledger, a bug measured at 131,329 lines in 65,036 transactions. Rows that touch one are quarantined: they get no supply change and are counted, and their claims stand. The owner ruled on 2026-08-11 that "the source ledger is corrupt state, not protocol state".
Some measured scramble is the implementation's. Before the fork, part of what measures as scramble is atomicals-go burning where the reference would colour an exact-remainder output. BTI adopts it under the writer rule and records it.
Realms are a named gap. The source holds zero realms against about 28 % of the footprint (verified 2026-08-10). The adapter fails closed, the gap is counted per window and claimed by nobody, and a test turns red the day realm rows appear.

Two more rulings narrow the family. Dmint is a mint rule, a state field, not an object. A container's membership is a group: it has aggregated books but claims nothing.

ARC-20 carries no file in the books. Its Book C is 0, and its weight is structure and overhead.

Live figures #

ARC-20 tickers (as of block 972,299, 2026-10-20 09:30:48 UTC):

measure	value
Book A	4.95 GB
share of the chain's bytes (Book A)	0.64 %
share of all Book A bytes	3.70 %
tickers	657
operations	8,284,671
first height	808081

Atomicals NFTs (as of block 972,299, 2026-10-20 09:30:48 UTC):

measure	value
Book A	0.07 GB
share of the chain's bytes (Book A)	0.01 %
tokens	32,230
operations	32,517
first height	808579
last height	929700

The token table counted 1,766 containers and 30,464 dmitems on 2026-08-10, 32,230 in all.

Holders: read on 2026-10-20, the leaderboard's coverage table placed 99.96 % of ARC-20's Book A on 105,769 addresses, with 302 of the 657 tickers having a holder. It placed 98.24 % of the NFTs' Book A on 8,249 addresses.

The natural experiment #

The Atomicals observation, a companion to Blockspace Value Theory, proposes that Atomicals is "the control group BVT has been missing": its consumption is permanent, its interpretation layer died but can be rebuilt from chain data and published rules, and its live supply shrinks with every spend by a wallet that does not know the protocol. It lists what can be measured, among them total kB consumed and live against destroyed supply over time. That is a proposal, not a measured result; see Atomicals as a natural experiment.

Not covered by a source #

Blockspace Holdings' documents give no bytes:vbytes ratio for Atomicals, and no measured decay-by-amnesia curve. They do not describe the atom envelope's fields beyond its marker.

Sources #

Live figures: protocols as of block 972,299, 2026-10-20 09:30:48 UTC. Refreshed hourly.