How it works

888 pixel monks on Robinhood Chain. There is no allowlist, no presale and no price curve. There is a question, and what you write decides which of five pools your monk is drawn from.

The koan

When you connect a wallet you are given one of 12 koans and a signed ticket that is good for twenty minutes. Every koan is a dilemma about you. None of them has a correct answer, none can be looked up, and none can be answered by describing what a reasonable person would think.

That is the whole anti-cheat. A quiz with right answers hands the rare pieces to whoever pastes fastest into another model. Here there is nothing to retrieve, and the fifth thing being scored is whether a person wrote the answer at all.

What is being scored

Five dimensions, twenty points each. Conviction: did you commit, or weigh every side and land nowhere. Specificity: real details, a real hour of a real day, rather than abstractions that would fit anyone. Particularity: could only you have written this. Cost: did you actually give something up, admit something, choose something.

And authenticity, which is scored inversely to polish. Balanced structure, tidy tricolons, “it’s not just X, it’s Y”, hedged even-handedness and flawless punctuation across a whole answer are what a language model produces when asked to sound profound, so they score low. Typos, fragments, a strong opinion and an abrupt ending score high.

The five pools

The tier decides the pool. A monk is then drawn at random from whatever is left in that pool, and nobody chooses which one. If the pool is empty the gate falls down the ladder, never up.

What the mint costs

375,000 $MONK, destroyed. Not collected, not split, not routed to a treasury. The gate contract has no withdraw function, and before the transaction is allowed to end it asserts its own token balance is back to zero, so tokens cannot accumulate there even by accident. If all 888 are minted, 333,000,000 $MONK stops existing, which is a third of the supply.

The token launches on Pons V2, which is a bonding curve rather than a pool, so there is nothing to attach a Uniswap hook to until the curve graduates. Burning works identically on both sides of that, which is why the mint is decoupled from the market entirely.

What cannot move

All 888 monks were drawn and hashed before minting opened. The hash is sha256 over every finished PNG in id order, it is written into the collection contract once, and it can never be written again:

0x7190c9fdb39ef722af5b0e63b0b04ee0d81a82109467dcd42f50f9c1bf0227be

The tier table is sealed in the same transaction, three bits per token, packed into eleven words. `tierOf(tokenId)` is a view function anyone can call and `tierCounts` returns the five pool sizes, so the distribution on this page can be checked against the chain instead of believed.

The gate reads that table when you mint. A pass claiming a tier that does not match the token’s real tier reverts on-chain, so even a compromised signer cannot hand out a Satori id under a Clouded label or the reverse.

What is trusted

One thing: the signing key decides which tier your answer earned. The provenance hash stops the art being rearranged around a buyer and the sealed table stops the pools being misreported, but the grade itself is a judgement made off-chain by a model, attested by a signature.

There is no way to make that trustless and no point pretending otherwise. It is stated here rather than buried, and the failure mode is bounded: a leaked signer key mints monks, it does not change what any monk is.

The art

Every monk is drawn in code at 32 by 32 pixels, from eleven trait categories, by a deterministic generator seeded once. Nothing was painted by hand and nothing was generated by a model. The 32px sources are what this site serves, upscaled by your browser with nearest-neighbour, which is the same operation the 1024px files on IPFS were made with.

Rarity was measured off the finished set rather than declared in advance: traits counted, monks scored by the sum of the inverse frequencies of their traits, and the ranking cut into the five pools above.

Contracts