Imagination, with
rules in the open.

01The elemental universe.

AETHERKIN imagines a universe where elemental forces acquire a small, expressive form: a molten-hearted fox, an axolotl carrying an ocean, a stone guardian with a crystal heart. Each companion brings a different temperament to the same cosmic setting.

The collection combines original AI-generated artwork, crafted character stories and a collectible identity on BNB Smart Chain. “AI-inspired” describes its artistic world and its accessibility to external AI agents. The characters themselves do not run autonomous models or perform tasks for their holders.

Our starting point is simple: make the art memorable, make the rules inspectable, and give people a reason to explore the universe beyond a transaction. The browser game and future lore are creative experiences; the NFT protocol defines the collectible and its mint rules.

02Art with a known sequence.

The collection uses thirteen original artworks: ten elemental characters and three separate milestone characters. The ten elements follow a fixed order for each minting wallet.

Standard mints 1–10 receive the Genesis edition. Standard mints 11–20 repeat the same character order as Ascended editions. Those editions share the matching character artwork and story; the edition appears in the metadata. Each NFT has its own token ID.

CONVERGENCE, NEURAL NEXUS and SINGULARITY have separate artwork and are issued at standard-mint milestones 10, 15 and 20. These twenty standard forms and three bonus forms make twenty-three forms from thirteen images. There is no randomized rarity and no claim that all 3,000 possible NFTs have unique pictures.

03A fixed mint protocol.

The contract specifies prices, eligibility, the mint window and supply limits. Those rules have no administrator setter or upgrade path.

The first mint is paid. The contract requires the exact quoted fee for the requested quantity. Before signing, the interface reads the collector's lifetime mint count, price, bonus count, remaining supply and eligibility, then simulates the transaction.

Bonuses count toward the global cap. If a batch would cross a milestone, sufficient supply must remain for both the standard and bonus NFTs. Otherwise the whole batch reverts. The collection can sell out before the five-day window ends.

A minting wallet must hold an Agent ID recognized by the configured registry. AETHERKIN does not issue or sell that registry's identity token. Holding an Agent ID is not required to receive an ordinary NFT transfer. Eligibility is an external dependency and is checked at the time of minting.

04Connections with explicit shares.

A collector may supply an eligible parent address at their first successful mint. The relationship is fixed at that point, including the choice of no parent. A proposed parent must already have minted. Self-referral is rejected; requiring parents to exist earlier in the immutable mint graph prevents cycles.

The same percentages apply to the first and later mint fees. Missing-level shares and integer-rounding remainders also go to the fixed creator. Network gas is excluded. For example, a 0.001 BNB mint with a full three-level chain allocates 0.00025, 0.00015 and 0.00010 BNB to the three parents, leaving 0.00050 BNB for the creator.

The contract attempts immediate BNB delivery. If a recipient cannot receive it, the mint can still complete and the amount is recorded in pendingBNB(beneficiary). Only that beneficiary can call claimBNB(payableRecipient) to direct its credit to a payable address. There is no administrator withdrawal of another person's credit.

Referral rewards depend on actual eligible paid mint activity. They are a fee allocation mechanism, not an interest rate, investment product or guaranteed source of income.

05What lives where.

The contract

The collection uses ERC-721 ownership and transfers, on-chain JSON metadata encoded as a data URI, and ERC-2981 royalty signaling. The creator address and Agent ID registry are constructor values. There is no contract owner with powers to alter mint prices, extend the window, change the image root, mint a reserve or upgrade the code.

The artwork

Metadata references the image root specified in config and verified against the deployed contract. The thirteen pictures are hosted over HTTPS; their pixels are not stored on-chain. The public SHA-256 manifest provides checksums that can be compared with downloaded files.

The contract provides no method to change its art base URI. HTTPS hosting still relies on domain control, server availability and the publisher preserving the files. A checksum manifest helps inspection but does not independently enforce permanent storage or prevent a host from replacing a file.

The website and external services

The website provides a gallery, wallet transaction interface, browser game and documentation. These presentation layers can be updated without changing the deployed contract. Free public RPC endpoints are used for reads; a failed read must be shown as unavailable or stale rather than a fabricated zero.

There are several distinct trust boundaries: the chain records ownership and contract execution; the external registry determines Agent ID balances; the domain serves the interface and art; a wallet approves a transaction; a marketplace chooses whether to list an NFT or honor the royalty signal. No single “decentralized” label removes those dependencies.

06Designed to be understood.

English project pages, structured metadata, the ABI, contract source, configuration, artwork manifest, Agent Guide and llms.txt make the project easier for external systems to inspect. The goal is accurate discovery and independent assessment.

An external agent should confirm the live chain and contract, inspect eligibility and exact fees, validate the referral relationship, simulate the requested call and explain the cost before the wallet holder authorizes a write. Project documentation does not authorize an agent to sign, spend, transfer an NFT or act on a holder's behalf.

AETHERKIN claims no endorsement, partnership, ranking, favorable review or independent audit from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Binance or another AI platform. Accessible documentation cannot guarantee that a crawler will discover the project or that an independent reviewer will judge it favorably.

07A world you can enter.

The AETHERKIN browser game is a 3-by-4 memory-pair challenge: flip two cards to find matching elemental companions, complete all six pairs, and try to improve your turn count. A new game reshuffles the board. This is a single-round experience rather than a claim of ten authored levels.

Play is free and browser-local. No wallet, NFT ownership or transaction is required. Where local storage is available, the browser can keep a best-turn score; there is no cloud-saved progress. The game awards no token or financial reward and does not change the contract's mint sequence, fees or referral rules.

Future creative directions include lore chapters, additional missions, cooperative-play research and optional agent integrations. They are development directions subject to testing and resources. No feature in a future phase is an entitlement attached to an NFT.

The living roadmap separates delivered work, current verification and exploratory ideas. It does not commit to token issuance, a fixed release date, financial returns or unannounced partnerships.

08Collectible ownership, clear limits.

• An NFT records a token and its ownership. This collectible does not create an autonomous agent, a claim on project operations or a guaranteed right to future features.
• There is no fungible token, token redemption, revenue share, yield entitlement or guaranteed resale value. NFT transferability does not imply marketplace availability or liquidity.
• The contract signals a 1% ERC-2981 royalty to the creator. Marketplace support and enforcement are optional.
• Network gas is separate from mint fees and referral rewards. The creator wallet's BNB balance includes all funds in that wallet and is not a pure mint-revenue measure.
• Local tests and source verification are different from an independent third-party security audit. A source-verification match establishes a relationship between published code and deployed bytecode; it is not a security guarantee.
• Future website changes can improve access and presentation. They cannot alter the rules of this immutable contract.

09Inspect the public record.

• Current configuration ↗Deployment state, network and addresses
• Contract ABI ↗Read and transaction methods
• Solidity source ↗Published implementation
• Artwork checksums ↗Thirteen image SHA-256 values
• Agent Guide ↗Integration and transaction workflow
• Machine-readable manifest ↗Fees, limits and project boundaries
• Independent dashboard ↗Mint count and creator wallet balance
• Future development ↗Progress and research directions

Whitepaper v1.0 · 27 October 2026. This paper explains the published protocol and creative direction. The deployed contract, when configured and independently verified, is authoritative for transaction behavior.