Of the heraldic grammar, the rule of tincture, the ranks of peerage, and the protocol entire.
A coat of arms is not pictured; it is described. The herald speaks the field first, then the charge, then the tincture of each, in that order and no other. To say "a lion of gold upon a red shield" is to speak plainly to the modern reader; to say "Gules, a lion rampant Or" is to speak the proper blazon. Both yield the same banner. Only the second would be accepted by the College.
Within Sigil, the Forge enforces the structural grammar - a shield must have a silhouette, a quartering, at least one charge, and a complete set of tinctures - but it does not enforce taste. A poor blazon is still a blazon.
The oldest law of the field is simple: do not place metal upon metal, nor colour upon colour. The two metals - Or and Argent - are to be set against one of the seven colours. Gules upon Or is well; Gules upon Azure is poorly drawn. The reason is practical, not mystical: a shield must be legible at fifty paces, and like upon like will fail that test.
Sigil does not enforce the rule on chain. The contract will accept a banner of Gules upon Murrey if you mint it. But the herald, the reader, and the lasting reputation of your house will not.
A charge is the figure upon the field. It bears the meaning of the house. Three charges may be placed at most; more crowds the field and renders the banner unreadable in the press of arms. The beasts are drawn in attitudes - rampant (rearing), passant (walking), statant (standing), displayed (wings spread).
Within this Book the available charges include the lion, eagle, stag, wolf, boar, bear, raven, griffin, fleur-de-lis, rose, oak leaf, thistle, tower, sword, anchor, bee, crown, cross pattée, chevron, and estoile. Each carries its own connotation; consult the registers of older houses before adopting a charge already long borne.
The silhouette of the shield places the banner in a tradition. The Heater is the broad warlike form of the high medieval West; the Kite is older, narrower, and Norman; the Oval is gentler, often borne by ecclesiastics and unmarried women. The French and Swiss shapes are regional refinements; the English curves to the period of the late Plantagenets.
Sigil offers six silhouettes. None confers privilege; all are equal upon the chain. Choose what reads best with your charge.
Peerage in Sigil is performative. A rank is not a privilege but a declaration. A house claiming Ducal rank has no contract-level authority over a house claiming Knightly rank. Yet the Book records the claim, and reputation is the only enforcement that has ever mattered.
A house is a collective banner under which any number of vassals
shelter. Founding a house is the act of writing its name into the
HouseBook contract; the founder becomes the first member, and the
founding is recorded as a permanent declaration. Vassals swear fealty
by calling swearFealty(houseId); the act increments the
membership count and is itself a declaration. There is no contractual
obligation, but the chain remembers.
A house may dissolve only by full attainder - every member abjuring in turn. Sigil prefers the slow accumulation of meaning; banners that endure are those longest borne.
Pact and rivalry are the only inter-house motions the protocol recognises. Each is a public declaration, signed by the founder of the proposing house and entered into the Declarations ledger. A pact implies mutual aid in any matter of public dispute; a rivalry implies public opposition. Neither carries on-chain enforcement - they are social primitives, and the protocol's role is only to record them publicly and immutably.
The game-theoretic content of pact and rivalry is therefore reputational. A house that breaks a pact loses standing; a house that escalates a rivalry beyond the field of arms attracts coalitions. Folio VI of the whitepaper develops these dynamics formally.
The protocol mints two kinds of tokens. The first is the sigil itself, an ERC-721 non-fungible token with the SVG written into the contract storage; this is the on-chain banner. The second is $SIGIL, an ERC-20 with a fixed supply of one million units, distributed by schedule to active houses, founders, and treasury. $SIGIL governs parameter changes and funds the keeper of the Book.
The token carries an adjustable buy/sell fee (default 10% on each side) that flows into the marketing wallet to fund growth, listings, and ongoing protocol promotion. Wallet-to-wallet transfers are fee-free. The keeper may lower the fees at any time, but a hard cap of 25% prevents abuse.
Minting a sigil costs a small flat fee in $SIGIL plus the gas to inscribe the SVG. On BNB Smart Chain, gas costs are a fraction of what they would be on other networks, making on-chain SVG storage practical. Founding a house costs more. Declaring pact or rivalry costs little, by design - the chain should not constrain political expression. Detailed parameters live in the whitepaper.
Four contracts compose the protocol on BNB Smart Chain. SigilRegistry.sol holds the ERC-721 mint logic and the immutable on-chain SVG. HouseBook.sol holds the foundings, fealty, pacts and rivalries. SigilToken.sol is the ERC-20 economic layer. SigilFeeOracle.sol is a standalone read-only contract that computes each wallet's fee tier by scanning their sigil holdings and house membership. The fee oracle serves the dApp and off-chain indexers; it does not intercept swaps. Trading occurs on PancakeSwap V2. All contracts are upgradeable only via $SIGIL governance vote; parameters such as mint fee and founding fee are timelocked.
The full source is included in the project archive. Read freely; fork carefully.