On the Peg

Most NFT collections live as their own contract with a marketplace bolted on the side. The artist sells some on launch, the rest go through a mint, and trading happens on a secondary venue that has its own listing UI, its own fee schedule, and its own running argument about royalty enforcement. The token, if there is one, is a separate thing that points at the same brand but has nothing to do with the art mechanically.

MASK does not work that way. The token is the NFT. One $MASK in your wallet equals one mask in the same wallet. Token supply is fixed at ten thousand whole units. Collection supply is also fixed at ten thousand. They are the same supply because they are the same accounting.

Birth, death, and everything in between

There are four things that can happen to a mask. The whole mechanic clicks once you see them side by side.

• Buy from the pool— a brand new NFT mints. New ordinal, new seed, new face. One NFT per whole $MASK you receive.
• Sell to the pool— an NFT dies. Newest in your wallet burns first, oldest survives. Burnt ordinals are gone forever.
• Transfer to a friend— the NFT keeps existing, just changes owner. Your tenure crystallises into the mask’s permanent state before it leaves you. Their clock starts fresh on top.
• Marketplace— same as a transfer under the hood. The escrow contract holds the NFT during the listing, then hands it to the buyer or back to the seller depending on the outcome. Nothing burns.

Pool sell is death. Pool buy is birth. Everything else is accumulation.

No buy and sell in the same block

One rule: a mask cannot be moved or sold in the same block it was acquired. If you buy at block N, you cannot transfer, list, or pool-sell that specific mask until block N+1. That’s about twelve seconds on L1, a couple of seconds on a fast L2.

The rule kills the atomic exploit that has emptied other token-pegged collections. The attack pattern is well known: a contract buys a hundred NFTs in one transaction, scans them for rares, sends the rares to a second wallet, and dumps the rest back to the pool. All inside one atomic transaction. By the time anyone notices, the bot has extracted every rare in the batch for floor price.

The atomicity is the whole game. Every step has to land in the same transaction or the bot risks the price moving, the mempool noticing, the rare slipping away. Force the buy and the extract to live in different blocks, and the strategy falls apart. A patient bot might still try over multiple blocks, but they have to commit real capital, eat MEV exposure for the gap, and operate in the open. Most rare drops aren’t worth that.

For a real holder the rule is invisible. You buy, you wait one block (which you were already waiting for the transaction to confirm), and from there you can list, send, sell — anything you want.

When you buy $MASK from the pool, the contract mints a new mask for each whole unit you receive. Buy five tokens in one transaction and you get five distinct masks, each with its own seed and its own ordinal. Different bones, possibly different uniques, possibly different colorways. The seed for each one is a hash of the hook’s rolling randomness chain combined with the new ordinal, so vanity mining at the wallet level produces nothing useful.

What burns when you sell

When you sell $MASK back to the pool, the contract burns from the end of your inventory. Newest first. Suppose you hold three:

• · #5     from week one
• · #1287  from month three
• · #4287  from yesterday

You sell one $MASK. #4287 burns. #5 and #1287 are safe. Sell two, #4287 and #1287 burn. #5 still safe. The only way to lose your oldest ordinal in a pool sale is to sell the rest of your stack first.

This is the property the peg has to preserve. Tokens are interchangeable; ordinals are not. If burns went to random ordinals, or to the lowest one, the OG market would dissolve inside a few weeks of normal trading. Burning the newest first is the smallest change that keeps that market alive.

Crystallise on transfer, by example

Each mask carries an effective swap count and an effective volume that grow as the current owner trades. The contract stores them as locked + delta: a permanent locked total accumulated from earlier owners, plus a live delta from the current owner’s activity since they bought it.

On a peer-to-peer transfer the contract freezes the current delta into the locked total before handing the mask over, then resets delta tracking for the new owner. Five steps:

1. You buy #5. Locked total is (0 swaps, 0 ETH). Delta starts empty.
2. Over three weeks you run eight swaps for twelve ETH of volume. The mask’s effective state is (8 swaps, 12 ETH): zero locked, eight in the delta.
3. You hand #5 to Alice. The contract crystallises your delta. Locked total becomes (8 swaps, 12 ETH). Alice’s delta starts at zero.
4. Alice runs seven swaps for fifteen ETH. Effective state is now (15 swaps, 27 ETH).
5. Alice hands it to Bob. Locked total becomes (15 swaps, 27 ETH). Bob starts fresh on top.

Every owner’s contribution stays permanently visible in the art. Marks, crown, background tier all render off the running total of everyone who ever held the mask. A low-ordinal piece that has passed through three engaged owners shows the stacked contributions of all three. Nobody’s work gets washed out by a transfer.

This is also what makes a token-pegged collection survive collectability concerns. People worried that the peg would dissolve the meaning of individual NFTs, since any mask can be replaced by any other in the token sense. The crystallisation mechanic is the answer. Tokens are fungible. Masks accumulate history that tokens do not.

The other consequence

With the peg in place, there is no separate listing UI. There is no royalty-enforcement question, no fee-tier negotiation, nothing to debate about Blur respecting creator fees this week. There is the pool. The pool is the marketplace. If you want to buy, you buy $MASK. If you want to sell, you sell $MASK. Price discovery is continuous, liquidity is real, and the contract that mediates it is the same contract that mints the art.

For a specific ordinal you can’t get from the pool, peer-to-peer transfers handle the rest. Find the current owner, settle a price, the token follows the NFT. There is no listing fee because there is no listing.

The reason MASK can be honest about having no team allocation, no presale, no allowlist, is that there is no mint function to call from a privileged address. The pool is the only door. Anyone who wants to be in the collection walks through it.