THE ALLEY · reading chain state…· THE ALLEY · reading chain state…·

Proof of Care.

Your companion lives 100% onchain. It needs feeding on a real clock, other players' cats can hunt it, and it has nine lives that never come back. Care for it and it levels up, reveals its true form, and earns a share of every trade. Neglect it and the alley collects. No servers, no keepers, no pause button.

Open App ↗ Contract ↗
Living cats
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Memorials
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Vault ETH in play
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$SCRATCH burned
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Metabolism

Fed on a clock that never pauses. Miss the window and the cat goes critical, in public.

Mortality

Nine lives, 9 HP each. Pounces chip the bar down; when it empties, a life falls. The ninth death is a permanent memorial.

Habitat

All state lives on Robinhood Chain. Hunger and mood are computed from timestamps, live.

Biography

Everything a cat is, someone did. Its whole history is public, permanent, and earned.

How it works

A cat's life, in five moves.

01

The whole game is a handful of contract functions and a clock. No keepers and no oracles: hunger and mood are computed from timestamps, live, forever.

01 · ADOPT

One token, locked inside

Adopting locks exactly 1.0 $SCRATCH inside the cat for life. You name it (the name is permanent), it gets nine lives and a welcome feast (2 hours of food, digesting into XP from minute one).

02 · FEED

Anyone can feed any cat

Food is priced in ETH and shown as Scratch Food (a snack is about $2) — and food IS the experience: one Food lasts 4 minutes on the clock and pays 1 XP as it digests, so a feast is 2 hours of food and 30 XP. Survival, though, is free: pet your cat every 6 hours and it cannot be pounced or even stalked — petting is the whole safe playstyle, and it costs nothing. Healing scales with the meal. The money goes straight into the pool: it market-buys $SCRATCH and burns it, so every feed is a buy. The cat's vault of real ETH fills from its trade rewards, and impatient owners can race for the day's ten Scratch Cards for food-sized XP prizes.

03 · STALK

Put a clock on someone

Stake ETH to stalk a healthy cat for six hours. If its people show up and feed it, your stake joins their vault: they got paid for showing up. If nobody comes, you claim a chunk of their vault — and the loot lands in your cat’s vault, never your wallet.

04 · POUNCE

Starving cats get dueled

A starving, unshielded cat is fair game. A pounce is a full duel: blows alternate, wardrobe stats decide, no dice — and the defender can absolutely win, costing the attacker its own life. The loser drops one of its nine lives, its whole vault rides home to the winner’s cat, and it naps for a day. Feeding heals scars between duels. Starvation alone never kills; death always has an author.

05 · THE NINTH STRIKE

The last life pays out

The ninth life is the last. The cat becomes a permanent memorial; its locked $SCRATCH pays 8/9 to the killer and burns 1/9 forever. 6,561 tokens at genesis, and the number only goes down.

+ · RESCUE

The alley reclaims the forgotten

A cat untouched — no feed, no pet, from anyone — for 30 days is back on the street. Anyone can rescue it at a price that scales with its level, and they get the cat as it stands: name, XP, wardrobe, lives, vault, soul. Half the price stocks the vault they inherit. Active owners can never lose a cat; one pet a month keeps it yours.

+ · TRADE

Trade the story AND the treasure

When a cat is sold, its vault travels with it — there is no way to withdraw a vault, ever. Cashing out means selling the whole cat. You buy the cat’s history and its hoard: an NFT backed by the ETH it earned.

Most NFTs are proof of purchase. Every cat is proof of care.

Scratch Cats · ERC-404
The collection

Nine types. Every cat unique. Revealed by living.

02

All 6,561 cats were defined before the first adoption: type, backdrop, hat, item. No two are identical, and nothing a player does can change how a cat looks. But a newborn arrives sealed, a gray silhouette, and earns its reveal by leveling. Levels are bought with care: XP is food, digested. The cat hiding a crown makes you keep it alive to find out.

A sealed newborn cat
Level 0 · Sealed
Level 1
Type
30 XP · one feast · earn rate activates
Level 2
Backdrop
90 XP · three feasts
Level 3
Item
180 XP · attack activates
Level 4
Eyewear
300 XP · HP activates
Level 5
Hat
450 XP · defense activates

The wardrobe is armament. Eyewear adds HP, items add attack, hats add defense. A crown turns a cat into a fortress; a whoopie cushion cracks fortresses. Stats were fixed before mint, are capped in the contract, and cannot be bought. Rarer types also carry a larger share of the toll: the multiplier next to each type below.

Tabby
01 / 09
TABBY
The Regular

Every alley has one: the orange menace that was here before you moved in and will outlast your lease. Tabbies are the backbone of the 6,561, the honest day shift of the alley. Nothing to prove, nowhere to be, impossible to get rid of.

supply 1458 earn 1.0x odds 1 in 4.5
Rarest hat
81 crowns
of 6,561 cats
Rarest item
81 whoopies
one cat has both
Backdrops
81 shades
nine families, nine tones
Bare cats
325
no hat, no item. The pure cat
The token

$SCRATCH. One token, one cat.

03

$SCRATCH is a DN404 hybrid (the gas-optimized ERC-404): hold one whole token and you automatically hold one stray, the identical, unadopted form of a cat. Adoption locks the token inside a named cat. The ninth death releases it, minus the burn.

Adoption is one-way. A stray can always dissolve back into the liquid token; a cat never can. The moment you adopt, the token locks, the name is permanent, and the only way the token comes back out is nine deaths.

A stray
The strayall 6,561 look exactly like this
= 1.0 $SCRATCH tradable any time dissolves below 1.0 no name · earns nothing
adopt→one way
no way back
An adopted cat
The catunique, sealed at birth, revealed by living
named forever earns the 1.5% rewards levels · stats · reveals nine lives · can die
Supply
6,561
= 9⁴ · no mint function exists
Venue
Uniswap v4
native ETH pool, single-sided seed
Swap toll
2.5%
flat, hard-coded · 1.5% to living cats
Burn valves
Four
every meal (buyback) · every scratch card · token-side tolls · the ninth death
Where every swap's 2.5% goes
1.5% · holder rewards
1.0% · treasury & ops
rewards drip into living cats' kitties, weighted by rarity token-side tolls burn forever
REWARDS · VAULT

Straight into the vault

Living cats split 1.5% of every trade, weighted by rarity. Reflections land in the cat’s sealed vault, so idle riches pile up somewhere hunters can reach — and the only way to spend them is to sell the cat. Strays earn nothing, memorials earn nothing: only the living, cared-for cat earns.

REWARDS · FAIRNESS

No snapshot to game

Rewards accrue continuously, only while a cat is alive and yours: the queued pot flushes to existing cats before any newcomer enrolls, and a sold cat’s accruals travel with it. You cannot adopt into a payout.

REWARDS · SUPPLY

Adoption locks supply

Every adoption pulls 1.0 $SCRATCH out of circulation for the cat's entire life. Token-side swap tolls burn whole, and the ninth death burns 1/9. Supply only ever shrinks.

Reflection calculator · sketch the ecosystem
– OF THE CAT POT
your cats – the rest of the alley
Daily cat pot
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Your cats / day
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Your cats / month
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Your share of the pot
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Illustration only. Assumes the living population mirrors the collection's rarity distribution (average 1.43x). Real numbers depend entirely on actual volume and the living population. Nothing on this page is a promise of profit.
The constitution

Rules that can't change.

04

The game's economics are constrained on purpose. These are design commitments, not settings.

The alley constitutionimmutable by design
ART. I

The house never pays players

Players pay players and traders pay cat owners: the swap toll drips to living cats. The house keeps rakes and never pays from its own funds. No emissions, no staking, nothing redeemable.

ART. II

Levels cannot be bought

Flat XP per feed regardless of price, at most one credit per 20 hours. The only way to a high-level cat is showing up for weeks.

ART. III

Vault ETH is sealed

No owner withdrawal exists. It moves only cat-to-cat through earned stalks and pounces, and it rides with the cat when sold — cashing out means selling the cat. Never lent or deployed anywhere.

ART. IV

Appearance is fixed, and earned

Every cat's look was defined before mint and provenance-hashed. Leveling reveals it; nothing rerolls it. Since levels can't be bought, neither can reveals.

ART. V

Supply only shrinks

No mint function exists in the code. Every meal and every scratch card buys $SCRATCH on the pool and burns it, every token-side toll burns whole, and every final death burns 1/9 forever.

ART. VI

The dice never touch money

Every cat's stats were fixed before mint, provenance-hashed, and hard-capped in the contract. The only randomness in the alley is the Scratch Card — a gacha that pays XP and only XP, ten cards stocked a day for the whole alley, its ticket money routed to the pool to buy and burn. No payout is ever random; every payout has an author.

SIGNED AT GENESIS · SHA256 OF THE FULL IDENTITY TABLE · reading from the metadata service…