The first collection you have to earn.
You are asked one question that has no correct answer. What you write is read, and what it earns is a tier. The tier decides which of the 888 you are allowed to draw. The price is paid in $MONK, and the $MONK is destroyed.
Sit with the koan
One question,
no correct answer.
A quiz with right answers hands the rare pieces to whoever pastes fastest into another model. So there is nothing to look up. The koan is a dilemma, you get one pass at it, and the only things being measured are whether you committed to a position and whether a person wrote it.
Smooth, balanced, faultlessly punctuated prose scores badly on purpose. That is the anti-cheat: the writing a language model produces when asked to be profound is exactly the writing this gate is built to recognise and mark down.
You may keep one thing you own and one thing you believe. Everything else goes. Name both, and say which one was harder.
- 01
You are given a koan
Drawn from a fixed set, tied to your wallet, and dead twenty minutes later.
- 02
You answer it once
In your own words, in one sitting. There is no re-roll and no second attempt at the same question.
- 03
The answer is read
Scored on conviction, specificity, particularity, what it cost you, and whether it reads as a human being typing.
- 04
A monk is drawn
At random from the pool your tier earned. Which monk, nobody chooses.
- 05
$MONK is destroyed
The price is burnt, not collected. There is no treasury on the other side of the mint.
Nothing here was
generated by a model.
Every monk is a stack of layers drawn in code on a 32 by 32 grid, in this order, from one seed. No brush was used and no image model was called. Here is the whole stack, one pass at a time.
the background and the halo behind the head
the robe, the bare shoulder and the collar
the skull, the neck and the long ears
eyes, brows, nose, mouth and the nine incense scars
headwear, markings, the mala and one prop
one pass of sumi around the finished figure
Five tiers,
fixed before anyone answered.
The whole ladder
曇You answered. Something answered, anyway.
塵A real position, held loosely.
水You stopped performing and said the thing.
竹A pebble struck bamboo and you heard it.
悟Thirteen of these exist.
The mint is a
burn with a door on it.
Minting takes $MONK off you and destroys it. Not a treasury, not a multisig, not a fee split. The gate has no withdraw function, and it asserts its own balance is back to zero before the transaction is allowed to end, so tokens cannot even accumulate there by accident.
If all 888 are minted, a third of the supply stops existing.
Ten things to wear,
counted not promised.
Rarity was measured off the finished set, so every percentage below is a fact about the collection rather than a claim about it. Rarest first.
What cannot move,
and what is trusted.
Stating the trust assumption plainly is cheaper than pretending there is not one.
The art
All 888 were drawn and hashed before minting opened. The hash is on-chain and write-once, so no monk can be redrawn around a buyer.
The tiers
Rarity was measured off the finished set by trait frequency, packed three bits per token, and sealed in the same transaction as the provenance hash. Anyone can count the five pools from the chain.
The burn
The price is destroyed by the same call that mints. There is no path in the contract that moves $MONK anywhere else.
The grader
A signing key decides which tier your answer earned. The chain checks that the monk you receive really is in the tier your pass claims, but the tier itself is a judgement. That is the one assumption, and it is the whole of it.
Thirteen people
will answer well enough.
Satori is thirteen monks out of 888. Nobody knows in advance what earns one, including the people who built the gate, because the thing being measured is whether you said something only you would say.
Sit with the koan