# TAP

TAP ticks and DMT, catalogued through tap-reader, a mirror of Trac's feed, with two hops of derived trust.

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

TAP is a fungible tick ledger. [BTI](https://blockspace.wiki/glossary/bti/)'s token table lists "TAP ticks (+DMT)" as their own category: a tick is a token, because its units transfer by themselves under the protocol's ledger rules. Each tick's identity is the tick as the source reports it.

## How TAP writes to Bitcoin

BTI's TAP attribution study (2026-08-05) describes TAP, the "TRAC Alpha Protocol", as an inscribed token protocol in the BRC-20 lineage: its operations are written as ord [inscriptions](https://blockspace.wiki/glossary/inscription/), and a separate indexer decides which of them are valid. Its ledger is a namespace of tickers. DMT (Digital Matter Theory) is not a second protocol but a flag on a TAP deployment: a deploy record carries a `dmt` boolean and an element reference, and a DMT ticker lives in the same namespace as a plain one. The study measured DMT as the dominant population, with 76 to 1,415 element events per block against 1 to 3 classic mints. TAP's genesis in BTI is block 801,993.

## How BTI attributes its bytes

The tap [metaprotocol adapter](https://blockspace.wiki/glossary/metaprotocol-adapter/) claims for the ticker, the same shape as BRC-20, where the tick and not the sat is the token. One adapter covers DMT too, because both share one namespace and one claim key. The rankings documentation notes that for TAP, as for BRC-20, "the content of a token is the sum of many small files".

The adapter's first source was tap-reader, with derived trust at two hops: tap-reader derives from TRAC. The indexer table calls it "a mirror, not an indexer of the chain": it never reads bitcoind, and it replicates a feed that Trac's writers publish over a Hypercore swarm. The BTI handoff of 2026-08-16 calls those two hops "the weakest" trust in the roster, and describes the move to ord-tap, which indexes TAP locally from bitcoind and serves the same nine routes. By the protocol review of 2026-08-29, the claims pass was probing ord-tap as TAP's source. Either way, bytes never come from the indexer: every byte quantity comes from the raw chain through BTI's own region grammar.

## Quirks on record

The handoff records three facts about this source.

- **One read per record.** A list fetch costs one store read per record on the reader, so the adapter pages far below the reader's default of 500.
- **The fail-closed stall.** On 2026-08-15 tap-reader timed out and the whole claims stage stopped, losing 25 hours. The source gate fails closed by design: an unreachable source is a refusal, never a zero, and there is no switch to skip one unit.
- **The write pathology.** tap-reader's block downloader kept re-replicating a 755,919,070-entry feed, at 806 MB/s of writes. It was disabled on 2026-08-16; the REST routes kept serving.

## Findings of the August review

The protocol review of 2026-08-29 rated one TAP finding critical. The adapter mapped the whole DMT event feed to mints and never read `prv`, the previous-owner field that separates a DMT mint from a DMT transfer. So 454.9 MB of TAP's then 1,023.5 MB of Book A (44.4 %) were dedicated mint claims on transactions with no inscription envelope at all, where the inscriptions adapter rules the same move a [sighting](https://blockspace.wiki/glossary/sighting/). The review also found TAP's Book C at 251.5 MB where the adapter header says zero, traced to a 2026-08-16 schema ruling that span-covering claims own content atoms, which had not entered the ruleset text. As of 2026-10-20, the records do not say whether these have since been fixed.

## An early measurement

From claim regions over blocks 801,993 to 817,999, TAP's first 16,007 blocks, the handoff measured 95.5 MB for TAP, in 1,378,527 regions of 73 bytes each. It extrapolated about 1 GB over TAP's full life and called that a floor.

## Live figures

TAP holds 1.08 GB in Book A, 0.14 % of the chain's bytes and 0.81 % of all Book A, with 0.25 GB in Book C. The books count 85,747 tokens across 3,543,422 operations, from block 801993 to 972299 (as of block 972,299, 2026-10-20 09:30:48 UTC).

Sources:

- Blockspace Holdings records
- block.space docs: rankings · https://block.space/docs/rankings
- 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