Artemision is the desk where a Deviant asset is issued. Two things happen here:
you create an asset at genesis, and you register assets — your own or someone
else's — so your wallet knows what they are.
Everything decided at genesis is decided permanently. There is no admin key, no recall, no
upgrade path, and no privileged party who can change the terms afterwards — including us.
Lydian electrum, seventh century BCE — among the first coin-minting sites in history. The name is not decoration. It marks what this surface is for: the moment a unit of account starts existing, which for most of history was a privilege and is here a function anyone can call.
Name it, choose its class along three axes, set its terms, and read the wall. The wall shows you the values your choices derive — the category id, the contract address, the minimum viable claim — before it will accept the word CREATE.
Then it broadcasts. The asset is on chain and in your directory in the same breath.
A πίναξ was the tablet a name was inscribed on to enter a register. Pinax is where an asset enters yours — because Deviant ships no default registries, and every entry is a decision you make rather than one made for you.
Which is exactly why the wallet derives and checks the asset's contract addresses instead of asking you to trust a pasted string.
Is it backed? Who may mint it? Is the supply capped? Answer those and the class is determined — you do not pick a label, you pick properties and the label follows.
A backed asset carries its BCH inside its own UTXO. Redeeming it is an ordinary spend of your own coin — no counterparty has to agree, no desk has to be open, no reserve has to be audited. The floor is the coin.
A non-backed asset locks nothing. There is no redemption path and no floor; it is worth what someone will pay. Most tokens in the world are this, including every fiat-backed "stablecoin" whose reserves live off-chain where consensus cannot see them.
The canonical contracts take no owner parameter. There is no function that pauses, upgrades, freezes or claws back, because none was written.
Rate, fee, mint rule and supply are constructor arguments. Change any of them and you get a different contract at a different address — a different asset.
The BCH floor stays redeemable whether or not anyone is still maintaining the software. Consensus does not need us to keep running.
Five steps. The last one is a wall: it shows you what your answers derived, and it will not arm the button until you type the word out. After that the transaction is on chain and the terms are fixed — for you as much as for anyone else.
Name, ticker, description — published on-chain as BCMR metadata. This is how every wallet that ever displays your asset will refer to it.
Three toggles — backing, mint rule, supply — and the class derives itself. The screen also tells you what will be deployed: a backed asset gets the reservoir covenant, a permissionless non-backed asset gets the draw covenant, and a managed non-backed asset gets no covenant at all, because a key gate needs no script.
A backed asset picks one of seven fixed backing tiers, and is divisible by default: pick 100,000 bits per whole coin and it deploys at 1,000 bits per atomic unit with two decimal places, so the coin splits to 0.01 without anyone having to think about it.
A non-backed asset has no rate to set. What it has instead is a supply — and that is where the sharpest constraint in the whole system lives (below).
A backed asset sets the fee its claims pay you. A permissionless non-backed asset sets the terms strangers may draw on: price per unit, ceiling per draw, cooldown between draws. These are constructor arguments, so they change the contract address — which means a token that publishes terms it does not actually run cannot pass verification.
Before the CREATE box will accept input, the wall shows the values your answers derived: the category id, both contract addresses, the reservoir supply, the smallest viable claim, and the exact UTXO that will be spent. Warnings appear here, not in a changelog.
A transaction may create fungible tokens of a new category only in the genesis transaction. Nothing afterwards can raise the supply — not the issuer, not the protocol, not us. A minting NFT authorises new NFTs of the category; it has never been able to mint more fungible units.
| You choose | What actually happens |
|---|---|
| Limited | The number you type is minted at genesis and no minting baton is created. With no baton the category can never gain another token of any kind — so the cap stops being a promise and becomes something anyone can check on chain. |
| Unlimited | A reservoir of 1018 units is minted — large enough that the cap should never bind in practice. It is still a cap. The wizard raises a warning saying exactly this, before you commit. |
It would be easy to label the toggle "unlimited" and let founders repeat that to their holders. The chain would contradict them later, and the holders would be the ones who found out. Naming the constraint at the point of decision costs one warning banner; not naming it costs someone else's trust.
If you want a number people can verify, choose Limited.
That is the difference. In the first case redemption is a plain spend of your own coin, because the BCH is already sitting in it. In the second there is nothing to redeem, and the contract says so by declining to constrain the value at all.
Pinax (πίναξ — the enrolment tablet) is where an asset enters a register. Deviant ships no default registries: nothing is on your list because a vendor put it there, which means every entry is your decision.
A decision needs something checkable. So the wallet does not ask you to trust the asset's contract addresses — it derives them and verifies them against the chain.
There are two registers, and only one of them costs anything: your own list is free, and being findable by everyone else is the paid step.
Registering an asset means supplying its parameters, and two of those are sixty-character P2SH32 addresses. Asking a person to eyeball those is asking them to trust a string — which is not verification, it is verification-shaped ceremony.
They do not have to. For a canonical asset the addresses are not independent facts; they are a pure function of four short values you can check:
Enter those four. The wallet recomputes both addresses locally from the canonical contract, then asks the chain whether that category's reservoir is actually sitting at the address it computed. If it is, the descriptor is self-consistent and live, and nobody had to trust anything. If it is not, nothing is registered and you are told why.
A rate off by a single satoshi derives a completely different address and fails. That is not a nicety — it is the difference between a check and a formality, and it is the reason the matched template, not a self-declared field, is what tells the wallet whether an asset is permissionless or issuer-gated.
Name, category, rate, founder fee, founder bytecode — then press Derive and let the wallet produce and verify the addresses.
The issuer's artifact, as-is. Field names from other Deviant integrations are accepted as aliases, because they are the same values under different names and making you rename them by hand would be pedantry.
Reads your own UTXOs and lists token categories that are not yet in your register. Pick one and its category fills itself in.
| Act | What it is | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Add to my list | A local, private decision. Nothing is broadcast and nobody is asked. The asset appears in your Katalogos, the swap pickers and My Assets. Minting in Create does this for you automatically, so a founder is never left holding an asset their own wallet cannot name. | Free, always |
| Publish to the shared Katalogos | An on-chain inscription into state everyone reads — what makes the asset discoverable by other people. Deliberate, separate, and optional: an unpublished asset behaves identically for its holder. | Small fee |
The shared-register covenant and its fee are a design direction, not running code. Today registration is local-only and free.
It also cuts across ADR-0048, which pins the opposite arrangement: a one-time fee on creation, and free discovery — "Stoa stays FREE … free swap + free discovery; only Olympia, the spotlight, costs." Charging to be findable is exactly what that sentence gives away. Unresolved, and tracked in Parameters/Artemision/REGISTRATION_fee_open-question.md rather than quietly built.
Charging for the local list would be charging you to use your own wallet, which is why it stays free — ADR-0008 says every entry is your decision, and a decision you have to pay to make is not much of one. Publishing is different: it writes state that everybody reads.
To watch an asset rather than inscribe one, that is the Katalogos explorer: live reservoir state read straight from the chain, holding no opinion and storing nothing.