DOCS

CURRENT STATUS#

These numbers are read live from the production contracts on every page load, not hardcoded. /alley serves the same vitals as JSON.

THE SHORT VERSION#

$SCRATCH is a DN404 token with 6,561 whole units (9⁴), trading through one canonical ETH/$SCRATCH pool on Uniswap v4. Hold a whole liquid token and a stray appears in your wallet — every stray is the same cat, and it dissolves if you sell below a whole unit.

Adopt a stray and it becomes a real cat: named forever, 1.0 $SCRATCH sealed inside, one of nine hidden types fixed before mint. Adoption is one-way. From then on the cat lives on a food clock: feed it or it starves, and starving cats get hunted for the ETH they guard. Nine lives; the ninth death is a permanent memorial.

Food is the experience. One Food lasts 24 minutes on the clock and pays 1 XP as it digests. XP levels reveal the cat's true look — and the combat stats attached to it. Meal money doesn't go to us: it market-buys $SCRATCH on the pool and burns it.

Every swap pays a permanent 2.5% toll enforced by the pool's hook, not by this website: 1.5% of volume flows to living cats by rarity weight, 1.0% funds the treasury. Token-side tolls burn whole. That is the entire system: a tamagotchi with real stakes, a hunt for the lapsed, and a fee engine that feeds the committed. Every section below expands one claim and names the contract that makes it true.

GLOSSARY#

The vocabulary is proprietary on purpose. Every term used on this page:

STRAYS & CATS#

$SCRATCH is DN404: the token and the NFT are two views of the same asset. Hold 1.0 and a stray materializes; trade below it and the stray dissolves back. Strays are interchangeable by design — the same drawn cat, ID-unstable, earning nothing.

Adoption is the one-way door. It escrows 1.0 $SCRATCH inside the contract, mints the cat's permanent name, and seals its hidden identity from the provenance-hashed table. An adopted cat can never return to being a stray; its soul leaves circulation for as long as it lives, and every adoption shrinks the tradable float.

THE NINE TYPES#

Nine types, fixed before mint: three alive, three undead, three beyond. Rarer types carry more reflection weight.

THE REVEAL LADDER#

Every cat is born sealed: a gray silhouette hiding an identity that was fixed and hashed before the first adoption. Leveling unmasks it, one axis at a time:

The image and metadata render live from chain state on every request — the NFT is a living document. Marketplaces show the new look after their cache refreshes.

LIVES, HP & STATS#

Nine lives, 9 HP per life — nines all the way down (9 × 9 = 81 total damage to kill). A cat's wardrobe carries its combat stats, fixed before mint and hard-capped in the contract:

• Eyewear → bonus HP (up to +4; a Blindfold is the best armor in the alley)
• Item → bonus attack (up to +3 on the base 3)
• Hat → defense (up to −3 off every hit taken; the Crown floors most hits at 1)

Stats reach the chain via attestation at the reveal levels — the contract enforces the caps, the provenance hash proves nothing moved after mint.

SCRATCH FOOD#

Food is priced in ETH so a meal costs the same on a green day and a red one. 1 Food = 0.00016 ETH and lasts 4 minutes on the clock:

Anyone can feed any cat — rescues are core. Pre-feeding stacks with diminishing returns (eff = ext × K / (K + ahead)), so money buys convenience but never invulnerability. New cats are born with one welcome feast: 2 hours of food.

DIGESTION = XP#

XP is not a reward for clicking — it is the food itself, digested. Every Food burned off the clock credits 1 XP (15 XP per hour while fed), lazily accounted on the next touch and served live by xpOf(). A fully digested feast is exactly 30 XP. Starved gaps earn nothing.

Two side dishes: battle pays — +30 XP to a duel's winner and +10 to its loser, once per day per cat — and Scratch Cards pay food-sized prizes. Levels are triangular in feasts — each level costs 30 XP more than the last (level 1 = 30 XP = one feast, level 5 = 450 = fifteen) — and drive the reveal ladder.

function _accrueXp(Cat storage c) internal {
    uint40 last = c.lastXpAt < c.adoptedAt ? c.adoptedAt : c.lastXpAt;
    uint40 upTo = uint40(block.timestamp) < c.fedUntil
        ? uint40(block.timestamp) : c.fedUntil;   // digestion stops when food runs out
    if (upTo > last) {
        uint256 earned = (upTo - last) / XP_SECONDS;  // 240s: one Food, one XP
        if (earned > 0) c.xp += uint32(earned);
        c.lastXpAt = last + uint40(earned * XP_SECONDS);
    }
}

PETTING#

Survival is free; growth is not. Pet your cat (owner-only, once every 6 hours) and it gets a 6-hour shield: it cannot be pounced, even while starving. An active owner chaining pets keeps a cat alive forever without spending a cent — it just stops earning XP when the food runs out.

• Attacking drops your shield. The moment your cat pounces someone, its own shield clears — hunters stand in the open.
• Shields don't defend stalks. A stalk is beaten only by feeding; petting can't cheese the bet.
• Three verbs, one line each: feed to grow, pet to stay safe, pounce to steal.

WHERE EVERY DOLLAR GOES#

No payment in the alley is ambiguous. Every inflow has one hardcoded route, enforced by the contracts rather than by this website:

The house never pays players — players pay players, and the house keeps crumbs. There is no route by which the team receives the cats' 1.5%: the split happens inside receive() before anything can touch it.

THE BUYBACK#

Feed and card ETH queues in lpPot. Anyone may call buyback(): the contract swaps the whole pot through the canonical V4 pool — the ETH stays inside the LP forever — and takes the bought $SCRATCH directly to the void in the same transaction. The tokens never even touch the game contract. Every meal is a market buy you can point at.

function unlockCallback(bytes calldata data) external returns (bytes memory) {
    if (msg.sender != address(POOL_MANAGER)) revert NotPoolManager();
    uint256 ethIn = abi.decode(data, (uint256));
    BalanceDelta delta = POOL_MANAGER.swap(_poolKey(), SwapParams({
        zeroForOne: true,                       // ETH in, SCRATCH out
        amountSpecified: -int256(ethIn),
        sqrtPriceLimitX96: TickMath.MIN_SQRT_PRICE + 1
    }), "");
    POOL_MANAGER.settle{value: ethIn}();        // the ETH joins the LP
    uint256 bought = uint256(uint128(delta.amount1()));
    POOL_MANAGER.take(Currency.wrap(address(scratch)), VOID, bought);  // straight to 0xdead
    return abi.encode(bought);
}

REFLECTIONS#

1.5% of every swap's volume accrues to living cats only, weighted by type rarity (1.0x–3.0x), through a masterchef-style accumulator — continuous, snapshot-free, and ungameable by just-in-time adoption (the pot flushes to existing cats before a newborn enrolls).

Reflections land in the cat's vault — sealed inside the cat, no withdraw path — where they must be defended like any other ETH: a starving cat's vault is hunter loot. Dead cats earn nothing; their weight leaves the pool at the moment of death.

THE FOUR BURN VALVES#

No mint function exists in the code. Supply only ever shrinks.

STALKING#

Stalking is a staked bet that a fed cat will starve. Stake at least 0.0003 ETH on someone else's healthy cat and a 6-hour clock starts:

• Anyone feeds it in time → the stake (minus a 10% rake) lands in the defender cat's vault. You paid the cat for showing up.
• Nobody feeds it → you claim a 20% chunk of its vault — into your own cat's vault, never your wallet.
• It gets pounced mid-stalk → your stake returns untouched.

One stalk per cat at a time; a beaten stalker has a 24h cooldown on the same target. A stalked cat wears a visible warning — stalking is as much a pressure device as a bet.

POUNCING & DEATH#

A starving, unshielded cat is huntable by any living cat — and a pounce is a duel to the knockout. Blows alternate, attacker first, each dealing attack − defense damage (floor 1), until one cat's HP bar empties. No RNG: the wardrobe decides fights, and the outcome is computable before you commit. Every blow lands on-chain as a Struck event.

The loser drops a life, naps 24h, and its whole vault rides home with the winner — in either direction: attack a crowned or blindfolded cat and your hunter can fall to its own hunt. Winners keep their scars (carried damage) until food heals them. On a ninth loss the cat becomes a memorial: the sealed soul pays 8/9 to the winner's owner and 1/9 to the void. Starvation alone never kills — death always has an author and a payout.

SCRATCH CARDS#

The bodega stocks ten cards a day for the whole alley, restocking at 00:00 UTC on a price ladder that climbs with every sale:

Prizes are food-sized bags of XP — +10 (50%) · +25 (30%) · +60 (15%) · GOLDEN +150 (5%) — and never money: the dice never touch the economy. The outcome seals against the buy block's own hash (commit-reveal), so neither side can pick winners, and the ticket money routes to the buyback like meal money. Buy as many as you can grab; one face-down card per cat at a time.

PROVENANCE#

Every cat's full identity — type, backdrop, wardrobe, and therefore stats and weight — was fixed by a salted table before the first adoption. Its SHA-256 hash is published and served live at /provenance; the salt stays sealed until the collection completes, at which point anyone can recompute the table and verify nothing ever moved.

reading /provenance…

VERIFY IT YOURSELF#

Every claim above is a cast call away (chain id 46630, RPC https://rpc.testnet.chain.robinhood.com):

# what a snack costs and how long it lasts
cast call $GAME "feedPrice(uint256)(uint256)" 0
cast call $GAME "feedExt(uint256)(uint40)" 0

# a cat's XP, including food still digesting
cast call $GAME "xpOf(uint256)(uint256)" 1

# the next card's price and today's remaining stock
cast call $GAME "cardPriceNow()(uint256)"
cast call $GAME "cardsLeftToday()(uint256)"

# ETH queued for the next buyback, and everything ever burned
cast call $GAME "lpPot()(uint256)"
cast call $TOKEN "balanceOf(address)(uint256)" 0x000000000000000000000000000000000000dEaD

# the solvency identity: balance == vaults + stakes + treasury + reflections + lpPot
cast balance $GAME

LIVE CONTRACTS#

Robinhood Chain testnet (46630), all Blockscout-verified:

Live data: /alley · /cat/1 · /img/1.png · /provenance · /collection

FAQ#

No. Adoption is one-way by design — the soul is sealed for the cat's entire life. The only $SCRATCH that ever leaves a cat is the ninth-death payout.

It starves, gets hunted for its vault, loses lives one duel at a time, and eventually becomes a memorial. Starvation alone never kills it — but the alley will.

No — food is paid in ETH so meal prices stay stable. The contract then buys $SCRATCH with your ETH on the pool and burns it, which is strictly better for holders than you buying it yourself.

Stats and weights were fixed before mint and hash-committed; the contract hard-caps every bonus. Card odds are constants in verified code, and outcomes seal against a block hash neither side controls.

It leveled — the reveal ladder unmasked another axis. Metadata renders live from chain state; marketplaces catch up when their cache refreshes.

It's the best thing that can happen to you. Anyone may feed any cat — rescues, alliances, and hunter-denial are core mechanics. They paid; your cat ate.

The ladder: ten cards run $1 to $100, so buying the shelf costs ~$253 a day — all of it market-buying and burning $SCRATCH. We're fine with that.

RISKS#