WORDBANK, in plain English

What WORDBANK is, in one minute

WORDBANK is a collection of 10,000 NFTs, where each NFT is a single word — the word itself, its artwork, everything — stored and drawn entirely on the Ethereum blockchain. There are no image servers and no IPFS links; if Ethereum exists, the art exists.

Three things make it more than a picture collection:

1. A daily word game assembles a sentence out of randomly chosen living words and pays an ETH prize, split among the owners of the words it used.
2. WORD, a standalone token you stake to earn. A 1% fee on all WORD/ETH trading pays out in ETH — half of it to people who stake WORD, continuously.
3. A shared income stream. That same 1% fee also pays word-NFT holders and funds the game's prize treasury. No emissions, no inflation — fees or nothing.

Nobody — including the team — can mint extra WORD, redirect the fee split, drain the treasury, or rig the game. See "Can the team rug?"

The relaunch: why WORD changed

In the original design, WORD was bonded to the NFTs — every NFT held 1,000 WORD that unbinding released into the market. In practice that turned the token into an exit hatch: holders unbound and sold, which pushed price down and dried up the trading the whole economy depends on.

So WORD was relaunched as a standalone ERC-20 with a fixed 1,000,000 supply, decoupled from the NFTs, and given a real reason to be held: staking. The new token isn't manufactured by unbinding, and half of every trading fee now flows to stakers in ETH. The NFTs keep everything that made them valuable — the art, the game, and a share of the fee — and old-WORD holders can migrate to the new token. The original WORD, its buy-and-burn, and its backing vault are retired.

The two assets: WORD and Word NFTs

WORD is an ordinary ERC-20 token with a fixed supply of 1,000,000, minted once at launch — there is no minting function, no inflation, no taxes, no pause button. You earn on WORD by staking it; its supply never grows.

Word NFTs are the 10,000 collectibles (ERC-721). Each holds a word, its category (noun / verb / adjective / adverb), and its onchain visual traits. NFT holders earn a share of the trading fee and can win the daily game's prizes — the NFT is your membership in the collection's income, the art, and the game.

The entire supply enters circulation through the pool and through migration — there is no team allocation and no treasury of WORD to unlock.

The words: how 10,000 were chosen — all unique

The words are already decided and finalized, selected by an open, rules-based process — not hand-picked, not random gibberish — from three trusted public sources: WordNet (Princeton's standard dictionary database), a 50,000-word English frequency list (favoring words people recognize), and a public profanity blocklist.

• Single lowercase words, 3–12 letters, genuine dictionary words.
• Common, recognizable words first (frequency-ranked).
• Excluded: filler words (the, and, but), proper nouns (Ohio, June), and irregular forms (went, feet) — all of which read badly in a generated sentence.
• Deliberately noun- and verb-heavy, so the game keeps building sentences even late in the collection's life.

Are all 10,000 guaranteed unique? Yes — checked twice. The generator assigns every word exactly once; then a separate validation program independently re-reads the finished list and verifies exactly 10,000 entries, no duplicates, every letter supported by the onchain font, and all 25 honors words present.

The 25 honors words (the one-of-ones)

Twenty-five crypto-culture words are 1/1 "honors" pieces, rendered in bespoke hand-styled lettering instead of the collection's typeface. They play exactly like any other word — special looks, zero gameplay advantage.

The art: how a word becomes onchain artwork

Every image is generated live, onchain, from code — there is no stored picture file. When a marketplace asks for a token's image, the Renderer assembles it on the spot: one typeface across the whole collection (Fraunces, embedded in the image); a material the word is "written on" — paper, parchment, slate, stained glass, gold leaf and more, in rarity tiers from Common to Legendary; and an ink and background color chosen so the result is always legible. The 25 honors words swap in their bespoke lettering.

Crucial fairness rule: visual rarity has zero effect on the game or rewards. A Legendary gold-leaf word and a Common paper word have identical bounty odds and identical fee share. The game and reward contracts are built so they literally cannot read a word's looks.

Everything is fully onchain. The font, the material designs, and the 25 bespoke artworks live in the contracts themselves. No server, no IPFS — the artwork is as permanent as Ethereum.

Snipe-proof fairness (provenance)

WORDBANK uses the standard provenance method: the full, shuffled word-and-trait assignment is locked behind a published fingerprint before the reveal, and which token gets which word is fixed only afterward, using a future Ethereum block's hash that nobody can predict or control. Until that moment, nobody — including the team — knows which token gets which word.

Provenance — the published fingerprint

Before the reveal, WORDBANK commits to the entire word and trait menu by publishing a single cryptographic fingerprint — the provenance hash — onchain. Because the hash is recorded before anyone can know which token gets which entry, it proves the contents were fixed in advance and cannot have been changed afterward. It is the standard snipe-proof guarantee, made checkable by anyone.

◌ Reading the committed hash onchain…

What this does and doesn’t prove. The provenance hash fixes the menu — the full set of words and traits that exist in the collection. It is not the reveal: which specific token receives which entry is decided separately, by a future block hash nobody can predict, and is revealed only at sellout. So this hash proves the contents were sealed in advance; the per-token assignment stays unknowable until the reveal.

The money: a 1% fee, split three ways

WORDBANK's entire ongoing economy runs on one source: a 1% fee on every trade through the official WORD/ETH pool on Uniswap. The fee is always taken in ETH, and a permanent, hardcoded split sends it three ways — there is no admin lever to re-weight it:

A public "flush" lets anyone push collected fees to their destinations, so the money never depends on the team showing up. There is no buy-and-burn — the relaunch token is fixed-supply, so its value comes from the staking yield and scarcity, not from burning.

Separately, WORDBANK asks for a 3% royalty on NFT resales, which lands in a dedicated RoyaltySplitter contract — ownerless, with the destinations frozen at deploy. (NFT royalties are paid voluntarily by marketplaces — see Honest limits.)

Staking — the reason to hold WORD

Stake WORD and you earn 50% of every swap fee, paid in ETH, continuously and pro-rata to your share of the total staked. The staking page is here. Key properties:

• Rewards are ETH, not more WORD — there is no token emission or dilution.
• Stake and unstake anytime, with no lock-up. Claim accrued ETH whenever you like.
• Your share is exact, tracked by an efficient accumulator — no looping over stakers, no snapshots, no stranded dust.
• Staking is also a sink: staked WORD is out of the float, which is the point — it rewards holding instead of dumping.

The daily game

The protocol's beating heart: one sentence per day, drawn from living words, paying an ETH prize. The console is here. It's unchanged by the relaunch — now funded by the 25% bounty slice of the fee.

How a sentence is made (commit-reveal)

1. Commit. Any word-NFT holder opens the day's draw by posting a small bond, which records a target block about 3 minutes in the future.
2. Reveal. Once the target block passes, anyone can trigger the reveal. The contract uses that block's hash — unknowable at commit time — to compose a sentence from living words, pick a prize, and lock it. The revealer earns 2% of the prize, and the committer's bond refunds.

Prizes are drawn from a menu (up to 0.5 ETH), chosen randomly among only the tiers the treasury can currently afford, and split equally among the sentence's words. Each share waits 7 days and is paid by claim-time ownership — whoever owns the word when they claim gets its share (so buying a winning word before its deadline buys its unclaimed prize too). Unclaimed shares sweep back to the treasury.

NFT holder rewards

The 25% NFT-rewards slice splits equally across every living NFT, continuously, using an efficient accounting method that pays everyone their exact share without looping through 10,000 holders.

• Rewards travel with the NFT. Sell a word and any unclaimed rewards go to whoever holds it at claim time — a public view lets buyers check the pending amount before purchase.
• Claim anytime, in batches, with no deadline.
• Fresh activity can't steal old rewards — an NFT earns only from fees that arrive while it's registered.

Migrating from the old WORD

Holders of the original WORD aren't left behind. A snapshot of every old-WORD holder was taken (contracts excluded), and each eligible wallet can convert to the new token: you burn your snapshot balance of old WORD and receive a pro-rata share of the migration reserve (~300,000 new WORD). The migration page is here.

• No deadline — the reserve stays claimable in perpetuity.
• Eligibility and amounts are fixed by the snapshot (a published Merkle root), so buying old WORD now grants nothing, and the amounts can't be altered.
• One-way: migrating burns the old token. There is no team key that can withdraw the reserve.

The liquidity lock

The anti-rug guarantee. The WORD + ETH seeded into the trading pool is held as a position locked on UNCX (Unicrypt), the widely-used third-party liquidity locker — not in a team wallet. The lock and its duration are publicly verifiable on UNCX, so anyone can confirm the liquidity is genuinely locked and for how long.

Can the team rug?

No. WORDBANK is built so that even a fully compromised team key cannot steal or destroy what matters. The following are structurally impossible — enforced by contract code, not by anyone's promise:

• Cannot mint WORD — the supply is fixed at 1,000,000 with no minting function at all.
• Cannot change the fee split — the 25 / 25 / 50 split is hardcoded with no setter.
• Cannot withdraw the migration reserve — the migrator has no owner or admin path.
• Cannot withdraw staked WORD or accrued staking rewards — they belong to stakers.
• Cannot pull the pool liquidity — it is locked on UNCX.
• Cannot rig the daily draw — words and prize are chosen by blockchain randomness, never by a person.
• Cannot change the word list once locked behind its published fingerprint.

The new contracts were reviewed contract-by-contract by a security pass and an extensive automated test suite (including fuzzing). The only tunable knob on the fee hook is the rate itself, capped at 2%.

Honest limits

The things this protocol bounds but cannot fully prevent. We'd rather you read them here than discover them later. None put funds at risk.

• Royalties are a request, not a rule. Marketplace royalties (capped at 10% onchain) are a signal marketplaces honor voluntarily. A marketplace that ignores them pays nothing, and no contract can force it.
• The launch whale-guard raises costs; it doesn't stop whales. For up to an hour after trading opens, single buys above a set size revert. A determined buyer can split across transactions and wallets — paying more fees and price impact per slice. That friction is the whole promise.
• The old WORD still exists on-chain. The original token and its thin, locked pool weren't deleted (they can't be) — they're simply abandoned. Always trade and stake the new WORD; verify the contract address from the contracts list.
• Visual rarity is worth exactly nothing. A gold-leaf Legendary and a paper Common have identical bounty odds and identical fee share. (A guarantee, listed here only to be explicit.)

The contracts

The active relaunch contracts, the original contracts they reuse, and the deprecated original WORD economy — all verified on Etherscan with public source code.

◌ Any link still showing "pending" publishes the moment that contract is verified.

• WordTokenV2 (WORD)The WORD ERC-20 — fixed 1,000,000 supply, no minting, no bonding.
  Etherscan ↗
• WordStakingStake WORD to earn 50% of the swap fee, paid in ETH.
  Etherscan ↗
• WordMigratorOne-way migration: snapshot holders burn old WORD to claim the new token.
  Etherscan ↗
• FeeHookV2Skims the 1% trading fee and routes the fixed 25 / 25 / 50 split.
  Etherscan ↗
• WordBankThe 10,000 word NFTs, the registry, and the unbind path.
  Etherscan ↗
• RendererAssembles each NFT's artwork onchain.
  Etherscan ↗
• RewardsDistributorSplits the 25% NFT-holder rewards slice equally across living NFTs.
  Etherscan ↗
• BountyEngineThe daily game: commit-reveal draw, prizes, claims (funded by 25% of the fee).
  Etherscan ↗
• RoyaltySplitterReceives marketplace NFT royalties and forwards them in immutable equal thirds.
  Etherscan ↗
• WordToken (deprecated)The original WORD ERC-20, replaced by WordTokenV2. Convert via the migrator.
  Etherscan ↗
• FeeHook (deprecated)The original pool's fee hook, replaced by FeeHookV2.
  Etherscan ↗
• BurnEngine (deprecated)The original buy-and-burn, retired in the relaunch.
  Etherscan ↗
• LPLocker (deprecated)The original liquidity lock; the relaunch pool is locked on UNCX.
  Etherscan ↗

The life of a word, end to end

1. Hold. Your word NFT earns its equal share of the 25% rewards stream, continuously, for as long as you hold it.
2. Play. Some days the sentence draws your word — and its share of an ETH prize is yours to claim within 7 days.
3. Stake. Hold WORD and stake it to earn half of every trading fee in ETH — the token's core utility.
4. Trade. Sell the NFT and any pending rewards and prizes travel with it automatically; a buyer can verify what's pending before they pay.

Meanwhile, every trade in the pool feeds all of this — paying stakers, rewarding NFT holders, and funding the game — with no inflation, no team emissions, and no off-switch.