Warbandry Protocol

Frontier · Warbandry · how it works

A coin whose buyers collect an army

Buy the coin and you roll fantasy creatures. Lock some coins and those creatures become an NFT you can trade. Change your mind and you get the coins back. The pictures are made by the blockchain itself — there is no image file anywhere.

One creature costs: 1,000coins bought — that is the whole rule
Creatures to collect: 54across three factions
Exit fee: 2%burned, never collected by us
At risk in a fight: Nothingyou wager coins, never your collection

The whole idea

Five things you can do

There is nothing else. No menus, no crafting, no energy bar.

Buy

Every 1,000 coins you buy rolls one creature. Selling later never takes it away.

Hold

Your creatures show up in your wallet, drawn live. Pin your favourites to the front — that part is free and changes nothing.

Freeze

Lock 1,000 coins behind a creature and it becomes a real NFT — one alone, or a whole squad.

Fight

Warbands wager coins on a match. You can lose the bet — never the NFT.

After launch

Melt

Undo it whenever you want: the coins come back minus a 2% burn, the creatures to your bench.

Melted coins get spent again → more buying → more rolls

What a fight is, in practice: you click once, and the arena finds you an opponent at your rating within the minute. The result lands on your arena balance — play again with it, or take it out. The only way to lose your stake is to lose the fight itself; everything that goes wrong instead hands it back. The whole path is on its own page: The Arena.

The reserve: a warband carries five creatures beside the sixteen that fight, hidden from the opponent, and up to three of them come in for one match, each replacing one fielded creature. Five and three are starting values. In a bracket that runs a window, both players see each other's sixteen once paired and have one minute to send their swaps, which the arena reveals together; silence plays the warband as composed and forfeits nothing. A warband can instead carry its swaps in advance, under one condition about the opponent, and the arena applies them on its own. This is where reading the field lives: the creature built to answer a particular opponent waits in the reserve, where the read is made against a warband already on screen.

Two ways to mint

A single card, or a whole warband

Freezing always works the same way — 1,000 coins locked per creature — but you choose how many go in. One creature alone gives you a card. Several give you a warband.

One creature

A card

A portrait of a single creature, framed by its rarity. The cheapest way to put one creature on a marketplace — 1,000 coins locked, and that is it.

Several creatures

A warband

A squad of up to sixteen creatures in a scene it draws itself, with its own heraldic crest. Worth more than the sum of its parts, because composition is what matters in a fight.

One thing to be clear about: a card and a warband are real NFTs, so selling one means parting with the creatures inside it. That is what minting is for. What can never happen is losing a creature by accident — not by selling your coins, not by losing a match, not by anything we do.

Pinning is a different thing. It chooses which of your creatures show up first in your wallet, and nothing else. It is free, it locks nothing, and you can change it any time.

A real example

Say the coin is worth a million

Then 1,000 coins is worth about one dollar — so one creature costs about a dollar. Here is Ana, who spends fifty.

First

She buys $50 of the coin

That is 50,000 coins, so 50 creatures roll out — mostly common ones, a couple of good ones, maybe something rare. Here are ten of them.

Then

She sells half her coins

Half her creatures go dark. They are still hers — nothing was destroyed, nothing was taken. If she buys back in, the same ones light up again. Selling the coin costs her nothing from the collection.

Next

She picks five favourites and freezes them

Freezing locks 1,000 coins behind each one. In exchange those five become a warband — one NFT, holding five creatures and 5,000 coins, that she can list on any marketplace. Had she wanted to sell just her best creature on its own, she would have frozen that one alone and minted a card instead.

If she does sell the warband, the five creatures go with it — that is what selling it means. The other forty-five stay on her bench, untouched.

Creatures in the warband5 Coins locked inside5,000 Creatures still on her bench45

Later

She changes her mind

She melts the warband and the coins come back to her. The 2% exit fee is burned — destroyed, not pocketed by anyone. And the five creatures return to her bench, ready to be frozen again another day.

Coins locked5,000 Coins returned4,900 Burned forever100 Creatures lost0

Why it holds value

A warband can never be worth nothing

Whoever holds the NFT can melt it and walk away with the coins inside. That gives every warband a hard floor: if it ever traded for less than the coins in it, buying it and melting it would be free money. Buyers make sure that does not last.

Coins you can always take back 4,900

What collectors pay on top the market decides

Guaranteed — 98% of the coins inside Burned on exit — 2% Rarity, composition, taste

The exit fee can be adjusted, but never above 10%. That ceiling is written into the contract and nobody can raise it, so you can work out the worst case before you buy.

The army

Common goblins, and the occasional dragon

Three factions — the Order, the Pact, the Wilds — with eighteen creatures each, on six levels of rarity. Every roll is a fresh chance at the top of the ladder.

Common

The rank and file — goblins, slimes, monks

38 in 100

Uncommon

Specialists — knights, orcs, spiders

26 in 100

Rare

Commanders, wizards, werewolves — and the the ones built to answer an army

18 in 100

Epic

Griffin knights, necromancers, paladins

10 in 100

Legendary

Champions, liches, dragons

6 in 100

Mythic

The king, the demon lord, the phoenix

2 in 100

One rare in each faction is a counter-creature: the sentinel burns spellcasters, the hellhound runs down the heavy hitters, the spriggan slips between armour plates. They are deliberately a little weaker than an ordinary rare. You are paying for a read on what the other army is made of, and a wrong read leaves you with a weak creature.

Just under half of all creatures also carry a trait — Brave, Lucky, Giant, or unlucky ones like Toothless and Drunk. A trait can be far rarer than the creature carrying it, so an ordinary slime can turn up with a mythic halo. That is the lottery inside the lottery.

Every creature, palette, trait and scene is drawn live on the forge page.

The money

Who earns what

One rule decides the whole model: we only ever take fees in ETH. Anything paid in the coin stays inside the game, because taking our own token out means selling it into our own market.

The creator earns

The swap fee

Every buy pays a trading fee, and that fee is the revenue. Since rolls only come from buying, the game is built to keep people buying.

Destroyed

The 2% exit fee

Burned rather than collected. It shrinks the supply a little every time someone cashes out, and nobody receives it.

Stays in the game

Match pots

Wagers and the rake feed the season prize pool and a burn. We take no cut of anything denominated in the coin.

Two optional fees exist in the contract — a small charge for freezing and one for naming a warband — both set to zero, both capped, and both in ETH. They can be switched on later if the thing works, and they can never be raised beyond their ceiling.

Guarantees

What we can change, and what we can't

This is the line that matters most. Everything your money depends on is frozen at launch. Everything that is a matter of taste or game balance can be improved later.

Frozen forever

Your side

Your creatures — once rolled, never rerolled, never deleted
Your ownership — nobody can take a creature from you; the only way one changes hands is if you sell the NFT holding it
The coins in the vault — always withdrawable by whoever holds the NFT
The 10% ceiling on the exit fee
What each creature is — which creature it is and its rarity are fixed the moment it is born

Can be improved

Our side

How things are drawn — art can get better without touching a token
How strong a creature is in a fight — balance is meant to be tuned
New game modes — added as separate contracts
New creatures in future seasons — added, never replacing the old ones

The safeguard is structural: the parts we can tune cannot reach coins, ownership or creatures. A mistake on our side can misjudge how strong a warband is. It cannot take anything from you.

Sequence

What ships when

Ready today

The coin

Launches on Frontier with the standard protections against snipers.

Day one — one shot only

The roller

The piece that watches buys and rolls creatures. It must ship with the coin: it can never be added afterwards.

Day one

The collection

Freezing, cards, warbands and trading — the collection is part of the product from the start, not an add-on.

First game mode, then more

Fights, and what follows

Wagered matches are the first way to play a warband. Further modes arrive over time as separate pieces, without disturbing anything already in your wallet.

Only one deadline is truly hard — the roller, because it is bound to the coin at creation. The collection ships alongside it, and the game modes are designed to keep arriving afterwards.

Honesty

Not settled yet

Four things are still moving. None of them blocks the launch, and they are listed here so nobody builds on a number that will change.

The name and the ticker Founder call

"Warbandry" is a working title, and the coin has no name yet. $MINION is the favourite, because the ticker would say the rule out loud: 1,000 MINION buys one.

How strong each creature is In progress

A full first pass of numbers is done and machine-tested. A harder round is running now, hunting for a build that beats everything. Treat any strength value you see as provisional.

What a roll costs as the coin grows Being studied

A creature locks 1,000 coins at launch — that dial can come down, never above 1,000 — so its price in dollars rises with the coin: about $1 at a million, about $100 at a hundred million. Where that stops being reasonable is what the lock's dial exists for.

The stakes and the arena's cut Being studied

How to fight without being cheated is designed: your entry is sealed until an opponent is assigned, you cannot pick your victim, and a rematch waits an hour. What is still moving is the money around it — the stake of the launch bracket, and the arena's cut of each pot.

For engineers — the technical detail

The pieces

A roll observer (a Uniswap v4 hook extension on the pool) and a warband vault (ERC-721, holding coins, compositions and ownership) carry everything a holder's money depends on; the decoder, the renderer, the calculator and the match contract sit around them, each one either append-only or replaceable behind a pointer. The observer is a pure entropy writer: it holds no funds, knows nothing about the vault, and is immutable for the life of the pool — it ships at pool creation or never. The vault ships alongside the coin because the collection is the product, not an add-on, and it ships with its game registry and recomposition-lock hook from v1, since it cannot be redeployed once warbands exist. The full specification, piece by piece, is the Contracts page.

The roll counter

Gross and monotonic per wallet: it counts tokens ever bought and is never decremented by sells or transfers. Buy 10,000, sell everything, rebuy 1,000 and the counter reaches 11,000 — an eleventh creature is born. The ambient view lights floor(balance / 1000) of them; balance gates display only.

Three states, and who keeps a creature

A creature is displayed, dormant on the bench, or frozen in a warband; pinning favourites is a display choice in the app and locks nothing on chain. Freezing copies the seed into the vault — a card is its own kind of token, fixed at creation, holding exactly one creature in the same collection: moving a card into a warband is free, and carving a card out of a warband pays a small fee in coins, burned, on top, so the card keeps its full floor. On melt, the released creature goes to the remover's bench, which is the uniform rule that closes the seller double-dip: sell a warband and its members leave with it, so the buyer is the one who benches them. The alternative — dissolving a creature when a non-origin owner melts it — was considered and rejected, because it destroyed art and stopped buyers from recomposing.

Rolls cannot be farmed

At buy time the observer writes only a record: who bought, which roll indexes, and the height of a draw block that does not exist yet. The seed is the roll's commitment hashed with that block's hash — unknowable when the stake of the buy is taken — so a contract cannot buy, inspect the outcome and revert unless it drew a legendary. A permissionless settle() freezes the draw block's hash on chain while it is still readable, and a lapsed one is re-anchored to a fresh future block by anyone; it is v1 observer scope because the observer can never be retrofitted.

Known caveat: attribution uses tx.origin

Rolls credit the signing EOA, so smart-wallet buyers (4337, multisig) see rolls land on the signer rather than the wallet contract. Accepted, and to be stated in user-facing docs; no claim or redirect surface is added to the vault.

The swappable satellites

Renderer, power calculator and game registry sit behind owner-settable pointers; the roster decoder is append-only and epoch-versioned. A swappable module may read state and gate PvP availability — it may never touch coins, seeds, composition or ownership. The floor — the sum of what each seat actually froze, times one minus the melt fee — reads only immutable state, games lock composition rather than funds, and every epoch must preserve every previous entry at a nonzero weight.

The adjustment stage, and where the draw block sits

A warband carries up to five reserve seats and a mode flag, both inside the composition hash, so the arena's lock covers them and any change of seats clears them. In a bracket whose adjustment window is non-zero, pairing opens that window rather than anchoring the draw: each player signs an Adjustment(matchId, adjustmentHash, nonce, deadline) message, the keeper holds both and calls revealAdjustments for that match as soon as it has both. Before the window's end a reveal has to carry both sides or the match is skipped untouched; from the window's end the keeper sweeps, a missing side counting as an empty adjustment, and after a sweep grace anyone may call it, so a keeper outage costs a window and never a match. Every failure plays the base warband, with a reason code in the event: after the pairing there is no refund and no forfeit. Where the window is zero, both adjustments are bound before pairing and pairing anchors as it did.

The draw block is anchored in the transaction that reveals both adjustments, fifteen seconds out, and never at pairing. The win probability is a public function of the two warbands, so a draw block readable during the window would let a player compute which swap lands the draw on their side and send that one. The rule in one sentence: no draw block exists while a player may still choose.

The events the stage adds:

Paired carries the window's end beside the two warbands.
Adjusted(tick, matchId, player, ok, reason, swaps), one per side, at the reveal.
DrawAnchored(tick, matchId, l2, l1), when the anchor is written.
Nothing at all when a sealed adjustment arrives. An event there would tell the opponent that the other side has answered, and how fast, which is a read the game does not sell.

Fees and royalties

Melt fee 2% default, hard-capped at 10% in code, burned. Carding fee the same values, in coins, burned, paid on top of the card. Two ETH service levers (per-creature mint on freeze, warband naming) at 0 under hard caps. ERC-2981 declared at 0% under a 5% cap. The arena's rake starts at 5% under a 15% cap — half burned, half to a settable address that funds the season rewards, paid by hand at first.