The Introduction, 2026
Generative image, 2048 × 2048
Two figures in the same yellow on the same deck, one half a step ahead of the other. Which of them is being shown the boat is not stated anywhere in the frame, and is the whole of the picture.
Paid by telephone, weeks later
A dealer sends a collector to a gallery. The collector buys. The gallery pays the dealer out of its margin. It is settled by telephone at a number neither the artist nor the buyer ever sees, and nobody thinks it is corrupt. Everybody thinks it is nobody else's business.
The share
No pool is configured, so there are no prices here. Everything below describes contracts that exist and are tested against mainnet state.
What was built
One per cent follows the note
One per cent of what a buyer pays goes to the person whose note sent them. If nobody sent them, it goes to the artist. The price is identical either way, so a collector is never choosing between a work and a referral, and arriving through a recommendation never costs more than arriving cold.
The note is a public thing. A curator publishes one at the bottom of a piece of writing, anybody who reads it can use it, and it is not signed because a signature would only prove the curator consented to being paid, which was never in doubt.
Being honest about the direction: the one per cent is added to the purchase. A buyer here pays slightly more than they would at a pool with no such rule. What they get for it is that the money reaches the person who actually did the work of putting them in front of the picture, instead of disappearing into a margin.
One purchase, measured
The share arrives in the same transaction as the sale
The work
Ξ1.023
The buyer paid
Ξ1.034
The note received
Ξ0.010
Run against the real Uniswap PoolManager on a fork of Ethereum mainnet. No invoice, no reconciliation, and no month between the sale and the payment. The test is in the repository and re-runs on demand.
Read this part carefully
This one can be paid by a trade
The other contracts in this series sit at addresses ending in a zero. That is not decoration. A hook's powers are the last fourteen bits of its own address, checked by Uniswap when the pool is created, and the four that let it take value from a trade are the final character. A zero there means the protocol will discard anything the contract tries to take, whatever its code says.
This one ends in a four, because it has to move money to a third party. So the promise it can make is a weaker one, and it should be read as weaker.
What is still true: it can take exactly one per cent, that figure was fixed when it was deployed and has no setter, and the only addresses it can pay are the ones in a list committed to before it existed. The list is a merkle root given to the contract at birth. There is no function to add anybody, including us.
A different set of curators means a different contract at a different address with a different pool, done in public, where every collector who ever bought through the old one can see it happen.
It keeps nothing
The share is turned into a claim for the recipient inside the same call. The contract never holds a balance, which is asserted in the tests rather than promised here.
An imposter is refused
A well-formed note naming somebody outside the set does not fall back to the artist. It reverts the purchase, because silently redirecting a payment somebody expected is worse than not selling them the work.
A tenth is not a referral
The contract refuses to deploy at a cut above ten per cent. Past that it is not a recommendation business, it is a different business wearing the word.
What it costs
It pays for the note, not for the judgement
A share that follows a recommendation rewards recommending. That is the point, and it is also the risk: the same mechanism pays for a good note and a loud one, and it cannot tell them apart. Nothing in this contract knows whether the writing was any good.
Naming a curator who did not introduce you is possible and pointless, since the price is the same either way. The only thing it can do is make somebody a gift, which is a failure mode we can live with.
Nothing here is deployed to a public network, and the curator set is empty until somebody decides who is in it. That decision is the actual product, and it is not a contract problem.
The edition that prices copies as they sell is at editions, the one that charges for selling too soon is at fresh to market, the right to take a work at the price just agreed is at pre-emption, and the reasoning behind all of them is at the art of code.