# Pipe

A September-2023 OP_RETURN token protocol, the Runes precursor, with art in tapscript; no indexer has ever existed, so BTI's replay is the record.

URL: https://blockspace.wiki/protocols/pipe/

Pipe is a fungible token protocol. In [BTI](https://blockspace.wiki/glossary/bti/)'s token table its tokens are Pipe tokens, identified by the ticker under Pipe's rules. BTI is its indexer: it is a [native protocol](https://blockspace.wiki/glossary/native-protocol/), read by BTI's own pipe decoder, and the roster records that "no indexer has ever existed".

## How Pipe writes to Bitcoin

BTI's Pipe attribution study (2026-08-04) describes Pipe as the Runes precursor: a September-2023 [OP_RETURN](https://blockspace.wiki/glossary/op-return/) token protocol with a public specification, now dormant. Its carrier is an OP_RETURN whose first push is the single byte `0x50`, ASCII "P", the smallest protocol magic on the roster. The study names three record families:

- **PIPE**: fungible deploy, mint and transfer records, in the OP_RETURN;
- **PIPE|ART**: an `image/png` body revealed in tapscript, in the [witness](https://blockspace.wiki/glossary/witness/);
- **PIPE|DMT**: a mint-on-block variant, in the OP_RETURN.

Because the fungible layer is in base bytes and the art is in witness bytes, the study measured Pipe at 1.873 bytes per vbyte, "the roster's most witness-subsidised token protocol" of those it had studied in full. The art is where Pipe's Book C comes from: the study estimated about 41 MB of real PNG bodies, each claimed by one token.

## How BTI attributes its bytes

The decoder runs in replay mode. With no indexer anywhere, the roster says "conservation is the only oracle". Some points from the study:

- **Identity needs the id.** A token's ref is `pipe/<ticker>:<id>`. Pipe lets the same ticker be deployed more than once, and the `id` keeps them apart.
- **Byte order from the chain.** The ticker travels as an integer, rendered as letters in bijective base 26, packed big-endian. The specification does not say so; the order had to be measured on chain, and the study calls it the highest-risk fact in the design.
- **A one-byte marker.** Every Pipe record shares the marker `50`, so the marker finds the transactions and the decoder re-reads each one. For PIPE|ART, the census's ord-shaped parser reports a body of 2 bytes where the body is about 304, so Book C cannot be read from the census alone.
- **Residue from the start.** The study found that Pipe's first transfer is invalid, because it spends a pre-protocol output: a protocol whose opening move is a failed operation.

## Findings of the August review

The BTI protocol review of 2026-08-29 checked whether each family's end date was a real stop or an artefact of the books' horizon. Of the five families it audited, Pipe was the one genuinely dead: one carrier above block 950,155, correctly filed as not Pipe.

## Live figures

Pipe holds 0.08 GB in Book A, 0.01 % of the chain's bytes and 0.06 % of all Book A, with 0.04 GB in Book C. The books count 56,122 tokens across 203,418 operations, from block 809608 to 950155 (as of block 972,299, 2026-10-20 09:30:48 UTC).

The BTI handoff of 2026-08-16 measured 44.7 MB for Pipe in claim regions over blocks 801,993 to 817,999.

Sources:

- Blockspace Holdings records
- block.space docs: data types · https://block.space/docs/datatypes
- block.space protocols API · https://block.space/api/protocols

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

Updated: 2026-10-20