Minor Artifacts are the item reward from the Azerite Dungeon. The design rule behind them is simple and deliberate: player trading is core UO gameplay, so Minor Artifacts are never bound. No soulbind, no account-lock, no character-lock — a Minor Artifact can be bought, sold, and traded exactly like any other item in the game, at any point in its life, upgraded or not.

The two things that are true about every Minor Artifact

• Its identity is fixed the moment it drops. Whatever properties and bonus type it rolled with, that’s permanent — upgrading it later never changes what it fundamentally is.
• Its power level can go up. A freshly dropped artifact starts somewhere below its maximum potential, and you raise that over time by spending a currency called Ichor on it. See Upgrade Resources: Ichor and Attunement & Upgrade Workflow for how that actually works.

Where this fits in the loop

You can’t shop for a Minor Artifact at a vendor as a guaranteed purchase — the only way to get one firsthand is the dungeon’s reward roll, covered on How Players Obtain Them. Once one exists, though, it moves through the economy like anything else: you can buy a partially-upgraded one from another player instead of farming your own from scratch.

Read Initial Quality & Upgrade Potential next to understand what “Dormant,” “Awakened,” and “Ascended” actually mean on an item’s name.