TapeOut Protocol: infrastructure for on-chain hardware manufacturers.

Every computation can be built from one gate: NAND. It does exactly one thing: take two boolean inputs and output the negation of their intersection.

In TapeOut, the token is reduced to the most primitive component in information science. This 7-byte thing is the base element that everything digital is made of.

Besides it we give you one more: the LATCH. It holds a single bit of state and updates on every tick. A world of only NAND gates has no memory, and something without memory cannot be called a computer.

One primitive element, and one cell of memory. From these two you can build an entire universe.

You have transistors. Now how do you wire them together? You draw it on the processor canvas.

Drag a transistor in, grab an output pin, pull out a wire, drop it on an input. What you see is a wire; on chain, it is a pointer assignment.

Experiment freely. Everything on the canvas runs live in your browser and costs nothing, until you are satisfied. Then you press the button: TAPE OUT.

The word comes from the real semiconductor industry. The design goes to the fab and gets etched into silicon. At that moment your transistors (tokens) are genuinely burned, and a circuit (an NFT) is born.

• 5 transistors gets you a half adder.
• 9 transistors gets you a full adder.
• 36 transistors gets you a 4-bit adder that actually adds.
• 100 transistors gets you a seven-segment decoder, the first time a number can light up.

And when you build your next circuit, you do not have to start from primitives. Any finished circuit (yours or a complete stranger’s) can be dragged onto the canvas as a black box and wired straight in.

Protocol contracts