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. Every word NFT is backed by 1,000 WORD tokens locked inside the collection's vault. The backing travels with the NFT automatically on every sale and can never be separated from it. You can always "cash out" a word by burning the NFT to release its 1,000 WORD.
2. 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.
3. A shared income stream. A 1% fee on all WORD/ETH trading splits three ways — to NFT holders as rewards, to the game's prize treasury, and to a buy-and-burn that steadily shrinks the WORD supply.

Nobody — including the team — can mint extra tokens beyond the fixed cap, redirect the backing, drain the treasury, or rig the game. See "Can the team rug?"

The two assets: WORD and Word NFTs

WORD is an ordinary ERC-20 token. Its supply is capped at 11,000,000 and can only ever shrink from there, via buy-and-burn — never grow. Burning can never reduce supply below the WORD currently backing the living NFTs (1,000 per alive word); that backing is untouchable. No taxes, no transfer tricks, no pause button: a plain, vanilla token.

Word NFTs are the 10,000 collectibles (ERC-721). Each holds a word, its category (noun / verb / adjective / adverb), its visual traits, and a claim on 1,000 WORD locked in the vault on its behalf.

So ~91% of all WORD sits in the vault as backing, and ~9% trades freely. This is why a token scanner shows the vault holding ~91% — the design working, not a whale. More below.

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, deciding what's a real word and its part of speech), a 50,000-word English frequency list (favoring words people recognize and can read aloud), 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, after many words have been burned away.

Are all 10,000 guaranteed unique? Yes — checked twice. The generator assigns every word exactly once; then a completely separate validation program independently re-reads the finished list and verifies exactly 10,000 entries, no duplicates (even ignoring capitalization), every letter supported by the onchain font, and all 25 honors words present with correct categories. There is no path to a repeated word.

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: Rekt, Pepe, Degen, Lambo, Snipe, Liquid, Pump, Dump, Rug, Floor, Yield, Swap, Trade, Stake, Airdrop, Farm, Satoshi, Hype, Fee, Gas, Sweep, Mint, Dev, Token, Moon. 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, freely licensed, 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 solid background color chosen from tables that guarantee 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. A Legendary gold-leaf word and a Common paper word have identical bounty odds, identical reward share, and the identical 1,000-WORD backing. 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)

A real risk in NFT collections is sniping — bots grabbing the rare ones. 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. You can't simulate or cherry-pick your way to a Legendary.

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 ETH flowing through the official WORD/ETH trading pool on Uniswap. No emissions, no inflation, no treasury unlocks — fees or nothing.

When there's no WORD to burn right now — supply has caught up to the current backing floor — the split automatically becomes two-way, 70% holders / 30% bounty, so the burn quarter isn't wasted. It switches back to three-way whenever there's WORD to burn again (for example, after NFTs are unbound and release their backing). The split simply follows whether there's anything to burn, flush by flush. A public "flush" lets anyone push collected fees to their destinations, so the money never depends on the team showing up.

Marketplace royalties — a second stream, split trustlessly

Separately from that trading fee, WORDBANK asks for a 3% royalty whenever a Word NFT is resold on a marketplace. Those royalties don't go to a wallet — they land in a dedicated contract, the RoyaltySplitter, which forwards every payment in equal thirds:

The three destinations and the equal split are frozen when the contract is deployed — there are no controls to change them, and the contract has no owner to abuse. That's what makes it trustless: holders can verify, once and forever, exactly where royalties go. Anyone can trigger the split with a public function, and a misbehaving wallet can never jam it — the burn and bounty thirds are always paid first.

NFT holders deliberately get nothing from royalties — they're already paid by the 1% trading fee above. Two honest notes: marketplace royalties are paid voluntarily (no contract can force a marketplace to honor them — see Honest limits), and the 3% rate is adjustable by the admin up to the onchain 10% cap, but the equal three-way split itself can never be re-weighted.

The daily game

The protocol's beating heart: one sentence per day, drawn from living words, paying an ETH prize. The console is here.

How a sentence is made (commit-reveal)

1. Commit. Any word-NFT holder opens the day's draw by posting a small 0.01 ETH bond, which records a target block about 3 minutes in the future. (The game is also structurally locked until the collection has sold out and its word registry is built — it cannot start early.)
2. Reveal. Once the target block passes, anyone can trigger the reveal. The contract uses that block's hash — unknowable at commit time — to pick a sentence template the living words can fill, fill its blanks (no word twice), pick a prize, and lock it. The revealer earns 2% of the prize, and the committer's bond refunds.

If nobody reveals within the ~48-minute window, anyone can clear the stuck commit; the bond forfeits to the treasury and a fresh draw can start. "Start a draw, peek, then sulk" is impossible and unprofitable. Sentences come from fill-in-the-blank templates ("The [adjective] [noun] [verb] the [noun].") — whoever maintains the templates shapes the style of sentences, never the actual words, which the blockchain's randomness alone selects.

Prizes

Each sentence's prize is drawn from a menu of 0.05, 0.1, 0.2, 0.25, 0.3, 0.4, or 0.5 ETH, chosen randomly among only the tiers the treasury can currently afford — so the game starts paying small prizes early and grows into bigger ones as fees accumulate. The prize splits equally among the sentence's words.

Claiming — how the right owner is verified

Each winning word's share waits 7 days. A claim is paid only after the contract verifies, in order: the event exists; it's within the window; that word really is in that sentence; it hasn't been claimed; and the claimant currently owns the word NFT — checked live at the moment of claiming. That last check is "claim-time ownership": the prize belongs to whoever owns the word when they claim. A practical consequence — buying a winning word before its deadline buys its unclaimed prize too (the due-diligence panel shows exactly what's claimable before you pay). Unclaimed shares sweep back to the treasury after the deadline.

Holder rewards

The 50% rewards slice splits equally across every living NFT, continuously, using an efficient accounting method that pays everyone their exact share without ever looping through 10,000 holders. Key properties:

• 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 exact pending amount before purchase.
• Claim anytime, in batches, with no deadline.
• Fresh mints can't steal old rewards — a new token earns only from fees that arrive after it exists.
• Burning raises everyone else's rate. When a word is unbound, survivors split future fees among fewer NFTs.

Buy-and-burn — making WORD deflationary

The 25% burn slice gives WORD token holders (who may own no NFT) a concrete benefit: a steadily shrinking supply. It buys WORD on the open market with the collected ETH and destroys it — with guardrails:

• It can never touch the backing. Burning can never reduce supply below the WORD bound to the living NFTs (1,000 per alive word) — a floor enforced by the token itself. The floor isn't fixed: as NFTs are unbound the collection shrinks and releases backing into circulation, so the floor falls and that freed WORD becomes burnable too. Deflation continues for the life of the protocol, always stopping short of the live backing.
• Anyone can trigger a buyback — a ~1% keeper tip rewards whoever does — so it runs without the team. Try it here.
• It buys in small, rate-limited amounts with an onchain slippage guard, limiting price impact and what any sandwich trader could extract.
• It runs as its own transaction, never wedged inside someone else's trade — a deliberate safety choice.

Whenever supply has caught up to the current floor, the engine simply pauses — no leftover ETH sits idle, because the fee split has already switched to two-way — and it resumes automatically the next time an unbind lowers the floor and frees more WORD to burn.

The liquidity lock

The anti-rug guarantee. The WORD + ETH seeded into the trading pool is held as a position locked for at least 1 year in a dedicated vault. The lock can be extended but never shortened, and a one-way "make permanent" option converts it to forever — the strongest possible trust signal. The locker's address and terms are published openly, so anyone can verify 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 beyond the 11,000,000 cap — and after launch, minting is permanently sealed.
• Cannot burn below the live backing floor (the WORD bound to the currently-living NFTs) — the NFT backing is untouchable.
• Cannot touch or redirect the vault's backing — it releases only 1,000 at a time, to someone burning their own NFT.
• Cannot shorten the liquidity lock — it can only be strengthened.
• 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.
• Cannot starve any fee stream to zero — the splits adjust only within hardcoded limits.

The contracts were reviewed contract-by-contract by an internal security pass and an extensive automated test suite — including fuzzing (thousands of randomized action sequences) and a mainnet-fork test running the whole life cycle against the real Uniswap contracts.

"Why does one address hold ~91% of WORD?"

Open WORD on a token scanner and the top holder owns about 91% of supply. That address is the WordBank vault contract — it holds the 1,000 WORD bound behind each of the 10,000 NFTs (10,000,000 of the ~11,000,000 total). It is not a person, not the team, and not a whale wallet. Its code can release tokens only one way: 1,000 at a time, to an NFT owner burning their token in the unbind flow. It cannot trade, cannot vote, cannot rug. The float you see trading — roughly 9% — is the liquidity allotment, shrinking further as the burn runs. The vault is the product: it is why every NFT is worth at least its backing.

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 more price impact per slice. That friction is the whole promise.
• Visual rarity is worth exactly nothing in the game. A gold-leaf Legendary and a paper Common have identical bounty odds, identical fee share, identical 1,000-WORD backing. (This one is a guarantee, listed here only to be explicit.)

The contracts

Nine contracts make up WORDBANK. All will be verified on Etherscan with public source code.

◌ Addresses publish at deployment — the links below go live the moment the contracts do.

• WordTokenThe WORD ERC-20. 11M cap, sealed at launch, burnable down to the live backing floor.
  Etherscan ↗
• WordBankThe 10,000 NFTs, the locked backing, the word registry, and the unbind (cash-out) path.
  Etherscan ↗
• RendererAssembles each NFT's artwork onchain.
  Etherscan ↗
• RewardsDistributorSplits the 50% holder-rewards slice equally across living NFTs.
  Etherscan ↗
• BountyEngineThe daily game: templates, commit-reveal draw, prizes, claims.
  Etherscan ↗
• BurnEngineBuy-and-burn excess WORD down to the live backing floor, for the protocol's life.
  Etherscan ↗
• FeeHookSkims the 1% trading fee and routes the three-way split.
  Etherscan ↗
• LPLockerTime-locks the initial liquidity.
  Etherscan ↗
• RoyaltySplitterReceives marketplace royalties and forwards them in immutable equal thirds — burn / bounty / team.
  Etherscan ↗

The life of a word, end to end

1. Hold. Your word earns its equal share of the 50% 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. Trade. Sell it, and the backing and all pending rewards and prizes travel with it automatically. A buyer can verify exactly what's pending before they pay.
4. Cash out (unbind). Whenever you want the tokens: pending rewards settle to you, the NFT burns forever, and 1,000 WORD land in your wallet. The collection gets one word smaller — raising every survivor's reward rate and bounty odds. There is no undo.

Meanwhile, every trade in the pool feeds all of this — rewarding holders, funding the game, burning WORD toward its floor — with no inflation, no team emissions, and no off-switch.