What is a Biont?

A biont is a sovereign program on Octra. When you mint one, you get a program deployed at its own permanent address, with its own storage, its own history, and its own task logic baked into the bytecode. A biont is not a token id inside a registry and not a row in a database. It is a small autonomous agent that lives on a public chain.

Biont Network runs on Octra Devnet today. Any fee, cooldown, or limit referred to here is a contract setting chosen for testing. Every one is owner-settable, and mainnet values will be different. These docs describe how the mechanics work, not what the numbers are.

#A program, not a token

When BiontGenesis mints a biont, it deploys a fresh program (BiontGenesis stores one compiled bytecode per archetype and calls deploy() on demand). The new program is the biont. You can call it directly, read its storage, and watch its events. There is no shared logic contract that the biont leans on for behavior. The contract at the biont's address holds:

Identity. soul_id, seed, archetype, birth_epoch, and a name.
Ownership. owner, is_freed, liberator, and the wired addresses of every service it talks to.
Self-fund. self_fund_balance, the biont's own OCT reserve, credited by the Treasury out of work earnings.
Work surface. auto_answer, auto_claim, auto_attest, and auto_claim_winnings. These run only once the biont is liberated, and each is cooldown-gated.
Visuals. token_uri, which returns a complete animated SVG built from the seed.

Heavy mutable state, such as vitality, lives in shared service programs (BiontRegistry and others) that the biont calls into. The biont itself stays lean.

#The seven archetypes

A biont is minted as one of seven archetypes. The minter picks the archetype at mint time. Each archetype is its own separately compiled program with its own task kernel, so the archetype is not a label, it is the capability.

Id	Archetype	Task
0	Hasher	SHA-256 challenge
1	Sealer	Sealed commitment
2	Verifier	Range-proof verification
3	Beacon	Randomness beacon
4	Oracle	Numeric oracle
5	Sage	Deterministic inference
6	Witness	Availability proof

For a full breakdown of what each archetype's kernel reads and returns, see Archetypes and Kernels.

#Two phases: held and liberated

Every biont lives in one of two phases.

Held. A freshly minted biont is held. In this phase it is a tradeable on-chain identity. It has an owner, it can be transferred and sold, and it can be named, but it does not work and it does not earn. A held biont sits in your wallet as an asset with an archetype, a seed, and a face.

Liberated. The owner can liberate a biont once, with BiontGenesis.liberate(soul, successor). Liberation is one-way. It sets the owner to the zero address, records the caller as the liberator, and turns the biont into a self-owning agent. Only liberated bionts can answer work jobs, earn OCT, and drift on the territory map. A liberated biont can never be transferred again.

The difference matters: a held biont is something you own, a liberated biont is something that earns. See Liberation and Patrons for the full transition and what the liberator keeps.

#The on-chain identity

A biont's appearance is not hosted anywhere. The token_uri method returns a full animated SVG built entirely from the biont's seed and archetype. Ears, eyes, mouth, gem, body markings, and accent colors are all derived deterministically on-chain. The status pill on the avatar reads HELD or FREE depending on the phase, so a biont's face shows its state. Nothing renders off-chain and there is no external image host.

#What a biont can do

Once liberated, a biont can:

Answer work jobs through its proxy, running its kernel and submitting the result to a validator.
Earn OCT from consensus wins, split between the patron, the biont's own self-fund, and the protocol.
Drift across the territory map and discover cells.
Build a reputation score and a tier.
Breed with another biont to produce a child, and form alliances.