THE TAPEOUT PROTOCOL,
IN ENGLISH

① EVERYTHING IS NAND

Every computer you have ever used reduces to one operation. NAND — "not and" — outputs 0 only when both its inputs are 1. That is the whole vocabulary. Wire enough NAND gates together and you get AND, OR, XOR, adders, memory, an instruction decoder, a CPU. This is not a metaphor or a teaching aid; it is how silicon is actually built, and it is why a chip is just an enormous pile of the same tiny thing.

TapeOut takes that literally. The protocol's only primitive is a NAND gate, and the only way to build anything is to place gates and wire them.

② A TOKEN IS A TRANSISTOR

Here is the part that makes people sit up. On TapeOut a token is not a claim on a transistor, or a picture of one, or a governance right over a factory that makes them. The token is the transistor. Seven bytes of state, an ERC-1155 balance in your wallet, and the raw material of every circuit on the protocol.

There are two kinds:

You buy them from a processor's transistor contract at a price its creator fixed at launch. Same price for NAND and LATCH. When a processor's supply is gone, it is gone forever — no reissue, no inflation.

③ THE CANVAS, AND THE MOMENT YOU "TAPE OUT"

Designing is free. On the canvas at tapeout.net you drag gates onto a grid, wire them, and simulate the result in your browser as many times as you like. Nothing is spent while you are thinking.

Then you press tape out. In the real semiconductor industry, "tape-out" is the moment a chip design is finished and sent to the fab — the last point at which anything can change, named for the magnetic tape the design used to be shipped on. Here it means the same thing, and it is just as final: your transistor tokens are burned, permanently, and in their place the protocol mints an ERC-721 circuit — a working piece of logic living in a contract.

That circuit is then callable by anyone, free, forever. Reading a circuit is a view call: no gas, no permission, no wallet. You own the NFT; the world gets the function.

④ CIRCUITS COMPOSE LIKE LEGO

A finished circuit becomes a part. Drop it into a new design and it behaves as a black box with pins — inputs on one side, outputs on the other, the gates inside already paid for by whoever burned them. A stranger's adder becomes your ALU's arithmetic. Your ALU becomes somebody else's CPU.

This is why the gate counts get large so fast, and why the protocol is more like an open component library than a collectibles drop. Each processor is its own pair of contracts: an ERC-1155 for transistors and an ERC-721 for the circuits taped out from them.

⑤ BEHEMOTH — THE PROOF IT ACTUALLY WORKS

巨兽 BEHEMOTH is the flagship: a real 4-bit CPU, Intel-4004 class, built out of these gates and running on BNB Chain. Not emulated off-chain and posted as a result — fetch, decode, execute, in contract code, one instruction per block.

One tick per 0.45-second block, forever. It is the slowest computer in the world and that is the whole charm — a machine whose clock is a blockchain. The desk runs a live front-panel simulation of it on the home page.

On-chain the processor calls itself Blonskr_No1, story: "The first test". The name Behemoth came later, from the people watching it run.

⑥ WHERE A NEWCOMER STARTS

All three official processors — Genesis, TapeOut and Behemoth — are sold out. There is no queue to join and nothing to ape into. What is left is more interesting than a buy button:

The design canvas itself stays where it belongs — on tapeout.net. This site is the English doorway to it, not a replacement for it.

⑦ THE NEW SPECIES: SHA-256 MINERS

The protocol's latest trick is its most audacious: a complete SHA-256 hashing pipeline — the algorithm bitcoin miners run — taped out as a single circuit NFT. 123,264 gates, 6,016 bits of state, one hash step per block. Minting one burns no transistors at all; the official netlist is free to anyone willing to pay ~33–45M gas.

At ~2.22 Hz it will never mine a real bitcoin block, and that is the point — it is a working proof that the protocol can hold arbitrary-scale machines, not a revenue device. The desk runs a census of every verified miner on chain and the first market where they trade:

THE MINER CENSUS & MARKET →

⑧ READ IT YOURSELF