SMOKE
DECENTRALIZED
The picture below is the token: every byte of it lives in the minting transaction. No IPFS, no server, nothing to keep alive.
Three delegates take the stage. Two of them are him, at an angle, in glass. That is what the smoke is for — not to hide the man, to stop you checking how many there are.
He holds the only keyring because there was only ever one set of keys. For the first 4,490,510 blocks — every block from 2017-09-23 to 2020-07-29 — the chain names its own producers, and there are seven of them, all called ByronGenesisKey, taking turns within 3,000 blocks of each other. Nobody else could produce a block at all. Shelley kept the same seven as its genesis delegates and set the quorum at five, and 1,215,383,026 ada then left the reserves and the treasury on signatures alone, years before any holder could vote on anything.
None of that was hidden. It was published, in the genesis file, in plain JSON, the whole time. "Decentralized." The sign was always the trick — you were never going to walk up and count.
No wallet reached this page. To mint, open it in a wallet's dapp browser — Vespr on a phone, or the Eternl extension on desktop. An ordinary mobile browser cannot talk to your wallet.
| policy id | computing… |
| policy script | { "type": "before", "slot": 194710680 } — no signature required, so anyone may mint until that slot, after which the policy is dead forever |
| asset name | SMOKE<8 hex> — derived from the UTxO you spend, so every mint is a distinct token |
| image | 9,501 bytes of SVG, base64 in CIP-25 metadata |
| you pay | ~0.76 ADA network fee, plus ~1.18 ADA min-UTxO that stays in your wallet holding the token |
| creator takes | nothing — there is no payment address in this transaction |
| proof | the image is embedded in the transaction your wallet signs. After it confirms, pull the base64 back out of the CIP-25 metadata, decode it, and you get the picture above — byte for byte, from the chain, with no server involved. |