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Introduction

Welcome to The tx-manifest Cookbook — a recipe-driven guide to writing manifests: machine-readable descriptions of multi-UTXO protocols on Bitcoin and Liquid.

This book is not a top-to-bottom reference manual. It is a cookbook in the style of the Rust Cookbook: a sequence of small, self-contained recipes, each solving one concrete problem and introducing one or two new concepts. You can read it straight through, or jump to the recipe that matches what you are trying to do.

Who this is for

  • Protocol authors who have a Simplicity or miniscript contract and want a portable description of the transactions that drive it.
  • Wallet and tooling developers who want to read a single file and know which UTXOs to watch, which transactions are valid, and which witnesses to construct.
  • Anyone trying to understand an unfamiliar on-chain protocol without reverse-engineering it from source.

How the book is organised

  1. Getting Started explains what a manifest is, gets the tx-manifest-wallet CLI built and a wallet ready, and dissects the top-level structure of a file.
  2. The Cookbook is the heart of the book. Each recipe builds on the previous one, starting from a no-covenant warm-up (splitting a UTXO) and a single key locking a single output, then growing toward covenants, issuance, and multi-step lifecycles.
  3. The Full Walkthrough ties every concept together on a real peer-to-peer lending protocol.
  4. The Appendix is the quick-reference material: type tables, the formula language grammar, and the full CLI command list.

How to read a recipe

Every recipe in the Cookbook follows the same shape:

Problem — one sentence describing the goal.

Recipe — the manifest JSON you can copy and adapt.

How it works — an annotated tour of the new fields.

Run it — the actual tx-manifest-wallet commands to execute the action.

Try next — where to go from here.

Every JSON snippet and command in this book is drawn from real files in the repository (examples/p2pk/txmanifest.json, example/lending/) and the real CLI in txmanifest_wallet — nothing here is invented.

The authoritative reference is Spec.md in the repository root. When this book and the spec disagree, the spec wins. This cookbook aims to teach; the spec aims to be complete.

Let's start with the big picture: what is a manifest?