After proof-of-work, what remains?
Bitcoin's genius was not scarcity — scarcity is easy to declare. It was that the act of declaring scarcity cost something outside the chain: electricity, hardware, opportunity. The coin was, in a literal sense, welded to physics.
Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake and, by doing so, returned all of its weld-points to the inside of the machine. Staked ETH is security — but it is ETH securing ETH, with no exterior anchor. The world computer became a closed system.
EIP-1559 re-opened a seam. The base fee is burned each block, not paid to anyone. The chain spends itself to operate. That spending happens regardless of whether anyone notices.
EIP-1559 is the quietest cosmological event in Ethereum's history: the chain learned to consume itself.
eDMT takes this consumption as its element. Not the block. Not the hash. Not the state root. The burn.
Why the block, and not the hash?
A natural competing choice would be the block hash. Block hashes are plentiful and cryptographically unique; they look like perfect serial numbers. But a block hash is arbitrary in the way a fingerprint is arbitrary. It identifies without meaning. It is metadata about the block, not substance of the block.
The burn is different. The burn is what Ethereum spent to produce this particular block. It has an amount; it has a direction; it has consequence. Two blocks with the same burn are not interchangeable — they still differ by their place in history — but two blocks with different burns are not of the same weight.
By using the burn, eDMT ties each eNAT to a specific, non-arbitrary quantity of real-world cost. You cannot mint an eNAT with a burn of zero. The protocol refuses it. The block must have paid something.
This is the sense in which eNAT is non-arbitrary: the minimum criterion is not chosen by a team, it is dictated by whether Ethereum's own fee market thought the block was worth including.
The formula is the only secret.
All of the protocol rests on one integer expression, evaluated against each block's header:
That is the amount of burn, in gwei, captured by block N. It is a public function of public data. It does not consult any oracle, any team, any multisig. Anyone with access to an Ethereum node can compute it, and they will always compute the same answer.
Minting reads block data. Nothing else goes in.
emt-mint, emt-transfer, and FIFO fragment settlement all operate around this integer. Protocol state records capture, transfer, split, and burn; the rule surface contains no adjustable parameters or later phase.
Every block creates a mint right.
Whenever Ethereum produces a block with base fee, it also produces a burn event. eDMT defines a mint right over that event: any address may submit emt-mint calldata for the block, and the first valid mint in canonical chain order becomes the owner of that block's eNAT.
Pricing happens outside the protocol. Ethereum produces the burn; competitors price burn, gas, failure risk, and opportunity cost; block inclusion order settles the result.
Ethereum produces the burn. The market prices the burn. Gas orders capture.
eNAT records the identity and ownership expression of a burn event. Burned ETH cannot be redeemed; the protocol captures the event's position, amount, and first valid claim in the ledger.
Protocol boundary.
Price, liquidity, and cultural consensus are not written into the protocol. The protocol defines replayable ownership rules; markets form above those rules.
Wrappers, marketplaces, and third-party indexers sit at the application layer. They may carry their own assumptions and failure modes, but they cannot rewrite protocol-layer facts.
There are only two protocol facts: a block burned, and a valid mint arrived first.
If every application layer disappeared, the raw calldata rules would remain replayable. The minimal form of eDMT is this rule set plus Ethereum history.
The block is the ledger. The burn is the currency. There is nothing else inside.
— eDMT reference implementation, volume I