A layer derived from Ethereum and Base rather than voted on. Every transaction carries calldata; every byte of it is a space, a sigil or a mark. Three quarters of both chains is empty space — and the protocol charges four times more for a mark than for a space. This page reads that out loud.
reading the derivation…
Layer 00 is not below the other two. It is inside them: 00 is the zero byte, and the zero byte is most of what both chains are made of. Nothing here is secured by anything but Ethereum and Base — a block on this layer is a pure function of blocks they have already finalised, so it adds no trust assumption and it cannot settle anything of its own.
reading…
measuring…
A byte census says what the typing is made of and nothing about how it is set. The ABI lays every argument on a 32-byte grid — the closest thing the chain has to a typographic measure — and once the grid is visible the substrate stops being a field of dots and becomes a page with lines on it. These are shapes, not declarations: calldata is untyped bytes, so a word that looks like an address may be a small number that happens to sit in the same place. They are counted and named as shapes, never as claims about what a call does.
The protocol prices paper cheaper than ink, by
exactly four. A real transaction pays 4 gas for a space and 16 for a mark. There is
a second schedule — EIP-7623's floor, 10 and 40 — but it only binds on a transaction that is
almost pure data, and almost nothing this census counts is that. Measured both ways by slope,
because a single-point reading is contaminated by the gas estimator's own buffer: against a
target with heavy execution, 4.032 and 16.127 gas per byte; against a bare
transfer, 10.020 and 40.346.
The ratio is exactly four under both, and that is the fact that does not move. It is
also one the protocol has deliberately kept: before 2019 a mark cost 68 gas against a space's
4 — a ratio of seventeen. EIP-2028 took 68 down to 16 and left 4 alone, landing on
four. EIP-7623 later scaled both by two and a half and preserved it again. Ethereum has
re-priced the relationship between space and mark twice, and settled on four both times.
drawing…
…
…
The same bytes, twice. 0x60 is PUSH1 to the
machine and a backtick to a reader; 0x20 is a stack operand and a space. Nothing
is concealed and there is no key — the cipher is the register you read in. That is what
makes this encryption rather than obfuscation: the plaintext has been public the whole time,
in a reading nobody performs.
· cannot keep a secret. Every byte it reads is already public, and a key derived from public data is a key everybody has. Nothing on this page will ever encrypt anything for you.
What it does contribute is narrower and real. AES-256-GCM has one catastrophic failure mode — reuse a nonce under one key and the XOR of both messages falls out, along with the authentication subkey, after which an attacker can forge tags for messages you never wrote. It is almost always caused by two machines each believing they own the counter. A · height is a counter every party agrees on without coordinating, because a block is a pure function of blocks that are already final. The chain supplies ordering, freshness and binding. You bring the secret.
Sealing runs entirely in your browser through WebCrypto. The result is discarded when you leave.
reading…
recomputing the head…
A block is
sha256( prev ‖ ethHash ‖ baseHash… ‖ census ). Your browser just recomputed the
whole chain from the source hashes in the file — no RPC, no library, crypto.subtle.
This is why the layer needs no validators: there is nothing to disagree about, so
verification replaces consensus. If a byte of the census were wrong, the hash would
not land and this line would say so.