Mint

Minting turns a bill into e-cash before it matures. The holder takes the bill to a Wildcat mint, gets a quote, and if they accept it the bill is endorsed to the mint.

From the bill's point of view this is a transfer like any other. What is different is who receives it and what they do with it afterwards.

Who may perform it

The holder.

Conditions

  • The default rule: the bill can't be blocked, recoursed to the end, only recoursable, or paid.
  • The bill has to be accepted.

That second condition is the only place in the protocol where acceptance is a prerequisite for anything. A mint will not take an obligation the drawee has never acknowledged, and the protocol enforces that rather than leaving it to each mint's policy.

The practical order is therefore fixed: request acceptance → accept → mint.

The two steps

Minting is an offer and an acceptance, like a sale, but the negotiation happens off the bill:

  1. Request a quote. The holder asks a mint to quote on the bill. This shares the bill with the mint so it can make a decision, without handing over the bill keys, so the mint can read the chain but not write to it. See Sharing bills.
  2. Accept the quote. If the holder accepts, a Mint block is written and the bill is endorsed to the mint.

Between those steps the bill carries a mint state of requested to mint, visible only to the current holder. See Bill states.

Result

A Mint block. The mint becomes the holder, with every holder action available to it. The former holder becomes a contingent participant: still liable on the bill, and holding e-cash instead of a bill.

The drawee now settles with the mint rather than with the original payee. Nothing about the drawee's obligation changes: they owe the same sum on the same date to whoever holds the bill, and that is now the mint.

Why the mint can verify what it was given

When the holder later endorses the bill to the mint for real, the mint can compare it block by block against the read-only copy it was shown when quoting, matching block hashes and plaintext hashes, and confirm it is the same bill it priced. A holder cannot get a quote on one bill and deliver another.

What the mint does next

That is Wildcat's side of the story: the mint splits the bill's value into e-cash units, each carrying the two attributes that matter: who owes it, and when it falls due.

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