Some accounts are special and nothing about the address said so. The treasury
looked like any other empty account, the minting sentinel looked like a wallet,
and the twenty-one accounts endowed at genesis looked like they earned it.
No curated list. The chain names them itself, in three places that are three
different claims and are not flattened into one badge: a runtime constant
(compiled in, immutable for that spec_version), a storage value (assigned, and
changeable), and a balance in block zero (history, and not a role — an account
can be endowed and have no job). Labels derive from the chain's own name, so a
pallet added next year is labelled without an edit. The chip is the claim; the
citation beneath it is the evidence.
Two rules hold it together, both learned the hard way and both now in CLAUDE.md.
An account is told from a hash by registry path, never by shape — after
`normalise` both are `0x` and sixty-four hex characters, so `decode_typed` now
returns the account set the decoder collected while it still knew. And a storage
entry names an account only if its value *is* one: `System::Events` is full of
accounts and names none, and the first cut labelled half the chain's active
addresses `Events`.
Computing all of this walks every plain storage entry and enumerates block zero
— dozens of round trips, fine once and pathological on every account page view —
so it is cached for five minutes. Constants change with the runtime, state
assignments almost never, genesis never.
Block zero gets the endowments, because they have no extrinsic and no event and
are invisible to anyone who has not read the chainspec, and a Genesis link sits
in the nav to give somebody who would never think to look an unmissable way to.
Mainnet started with 5,670,000 QTC across 21 accounts — one holds 5,669,940 and
the other twenty got 3 each — shown beside what each holds today, so what a
founding account did with its stake is one row. When genesis state cannot be
read the page says so rather than showing an empty table: missing data and a
chain that endowed nobody are different claims.
Closes#2
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jp6a8EDar9ueEhAxzep4V5
rob thijssen
dd8086df0d
