Phosphor Rot — Whitepaper

$ cat 1-overview.md

1. What this is

Phosphor Rot is a collection of 6,666 procedurally-generated pixel-art terminals, minting on Ink chain through OpenSea Studio. Every terminal is a fully animated SVG — real SMIL motion, not a static image — built from eight body archetypes, ten chassis colors, and sixteen independently-animated screen states, plus six entirely hand-built 1/1s that sit outside the trait system altogether.

"Phosphor" is the material that actually makes a CRT screen glow. "Rot" is what's happened to the signal. This is an independent project, not affiliated with any other terminal-themed collection it may resemble in aesthetic.

This starts as an art project. Everything in Section 4 (Roadmap) past Phase 1 is a stated direction, built in order specifically so nothing gets promised before the infrastructure to deliver it actually exists.

$ cat 2-the-art.md

2. The art

The generator (rot-gen/) is a from-scratch procedural pixel-art engine — every terminal is built from axis-aligned rectangles, real dithered shading (not flat fills or CSS gradients), and per-token deterministic seeding (keccak256(contractAddress, tokenId, salt), ported bit-for-bit between the JS generator and Solidity so both would produce identical output if the art ever needed to move on-chain).

Body styles (8): CRT monitors, keypad terminals, desk units, a tall spire, a wide wall panel, an orb on a pedestal, and a stacked dual-module rack. Every archetype is its own hand-designed silhouette, not a recolor of one shape.

Screen states (16): Lit, Flicker, Dead, Corrupted, Scanning, Overload, Cycling, Ghost, Encrypted, Standby, Alarm, Rainbow, Mirror, Signal Lock, Waveform (bars that spike together on a shared beat), and Clock (a real 7-segment readout that convincingly ticks — not wired to real time, since a live clock needs JavaScript that marketplaces sandbox out of NFT images). Every screen also carries an animated scanline texture, and roughly 1 in 7 ticker bars flashes bright rather than just pulsing.

Chassis (10 colors): a purple-to-red ramp (Deep Indigo through Blood Ember) plus Chrome Silver, a weighted chase color, plus Vault Gold — a fundamentally different kind of rare: exactly 60 of 6,666, guaranteed by ranking every token and taking the top 60, not a probability that happens to average out to 60 given enough tries. Keycaps and ambient glow are tinted from each terminal's own chassis color, so every piece reads as one coherent object instead of a colored box with generic parts bolted on.

Rarity tiers

Exact counts across the full 6,666, computed by ranking every non-reserved token against every other one and slicing the ranked list — not independent per-token dice rolls, which cannot guarantee an exact number no matter how many tokens you roll.

Tier	Count
1/1	6
Super Rare	60
Rare	600
Normal	6,000

Six 1/1s — GENESIS-0, PRISM SHIFT, MONOLITH, OVERGROWN, JACKPOT, and OMEGA-Ω — are hand-built from nothing, bypassing the trait system entirely. No combination of the normal weighted traits can reproduce any of them.

$ cat 3-minting.md

3. Minting

Chain: Ink (mainnet chain ID 57073)
Supply: 6,666
Platform: OpenSea Studio (no custom minting contract for this drop)
Creator royalty: 6.6%, enforced on-chain from the first sale

Mint order — Vault → GTD → FCFS → Public

Phase	What it is
Vault	666 terminals held by our treasury ("The Storeroom"), released over time rather than dumped at mint
GTD	Guaranteed allowlist mint — a reserved spot if you're on the list
FCFS	First-come-first-served allowlist — same list, no guaranteed spot
Public	Open to anyone, if supply remains after the above

Mint phase is purely an access schedule — it has no effect on what you get. A terminal minted in the Vault phase rolls the exact same Type/Tier/Chassis/Screen odds as one minted in Public. There is no "Vault edition" trait, no visual tell, nothing that makes a Storeroom terminal look different from any other. The Storeroom is a distribution mechanism, not a rarity tier.

$ cat 4-roadmap.md

4. Roadmap

Four phases with a defined scope, plus a fifth left deliberately open. Each phase is sequenced to be buildable on what the previous phase actually shipped.

Phase 01 — Genesis

Mint, as described in Section 3. This is the only phase that's live from day one.

Phase 02 — The Warehouse

A wallet-connected personal dashboard, and an animated space where your terminal actually sits — not just a row in a wallet's NFT tab, but a room in a shared warehouse, other holders' terminals visible around yours. Multiple rooms, ranging from dingy to premium; the nicest, darkest rooms are reserved for higher-tier holders. This phase is infrastructure — wallet connection, holdings lookup, a real backend — not just another art pass.

Phase 03 — Signal Share

A portion of collected creator royalties becomes claimable by holders, weighted by Tier and Reward Weight, surfaced on the same personal dashboard built in Phase 02. Sequenced deliberately after the dashboard, for two reasons: holders need somewhere to actually see and claim it, and royalties need time post-mint to accrue into something worth distributing. Building Phase 02 properly buys that time rather than wasting it.

Phase 04 — Reactivation

The $ROT utility token goes live. Burn it against a held terminal to "activate" it — a real, already-written mechanic (fixed-supply ERC-20, burn-to-activate, MasterChef-style weighted share accounting — see contracts/RotToken.sol and contracts/PhosphorRot.sol in this repo) — and the activated terminal earns a growing share of ongoing rewards for as long as it's held. This was built before the OpenSea Studio mint path was chosen for Phase 01, and shelved for exactly this later phase rather than discarded.

Phase 05 — What's next

Deliberately undefined. Direction from here — a second chapter, deeper Warehouse rooms, something none of this predicts — decided with the holders who are still here by then, not decided for them in advance.

$ cat 5-rot-token.md

5. $ROT

Type: Fixed-supply ERC-20 (RotToken.sol), no minting function beyond the initial treasury allocation, no admin mint later.
Utility (Phase 04): burned, one-way, against a held terminal to activate it. Burning more increases that terminal's share of ongoing rewards. This is a real cost, not a claim mechanism — burned tokens are gone.
What it is not: $ROT is not live yet, is not required to hold or enjoy a terminal before Phase 04, and nothing about owning a terminal today entitles anyone to a specific amount of it.

$ cat 6-security.md

6. Security notes

Minting for this collection happens only through OpenSea. This site and its associated accounts will never ask you to connect a wallet, sign a message, or approve a transaction to "verify," "claim," or "whitelist" outside of an actual OpenSea mint or claim transaction.
Treat any account, comment, or DM claiming to be the team and asking you to connect a wallet or sign something off-platform as a scam.
Contract addresses for $ROT and any Phase 04 reactivation contract will be published from this project's repository and official channels, verified on-chain, before any burn-to-activate action is possible — never take a contract address from a reply or DM.

$ cat 7-disclaimer.md

7. A note on all of this

This document describes current intent, not a contractual promise or a financial offering. Phosphor Rot is, first and foremost, an art project: 6,666 animated pixel terminals, minted for what they are. Every phase past Genesis depends on the project actually building momentum, a holder base, and the engineering time to ship each phase properly — none of it is pre-funded, none of it is guaranteed on a timeline, and nothing here should be read as an expectation of financial return. Royalty redistribution (Phase 03) and $ROT (Phase 04) are utility and community mechanics, not investment products. If a phase's scope changes based on what turns out to actually be buildable, that will be communicated plainly, the same way this document was written.

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