The rules of
the house

The Square

A post puts up to 560 bytes of text on the Square and burns at least 10,000 MASQ to do it. A post may answer another post. Anyone may stoke any post, theirs or anyone's, by burning at least 10,000 more MASQ into it. What is burned is gone: it leaves the supply for good.

Heat is every burn into a post, halved for each 24 hours since it landed. The Square is ordered by heat, so nothing stays at the top for ever because of one old burn. Because every post cools at the same rate, the passing of time never reorders the Square; only a new burn moves a post.

Everything posted is public and permanent. This page prints every post as plain text: nothing is linked, nothing is formatted, and characters that reverse the direction of text are removed. Nobody can take a post down, including the people who built this page.

The Front Page

Every trade on the ETH and MASQ pool pays 1% of its ether leg to the Square. What arrives during a UTC day is the next day's prize, so every day's prize is fixed at its first second. Anything rolled forward from earlier days is added to it.

During the day, the public post with the most MASQ burned into it that day leads. To take the lead a post must pass the leader by 10,000 MASQ or by a sixty-fourth of the leader's score, whichever is more. The leader's author is paid the prize by the second: a post that led for six hours earns a quarter of it. A snipe in the last block of the day earns about that block's share, not the whole day.

• After the day ends, the author of each post that led calls claim(day, id, to) and is paid for its seconds, to any address. The first claim settles the day: the last leader's time runs to midnight, and the seconds nobody led roll into a later day.
• A share nobody claims can be released by anyone from 30 days after its day, and it rolls into a later prize. Until someone releases it, it can still be claimed.
• Masked posts and masked stokes never count. A public stoke into a masked post does not count either. An anonymous prize would be a private payment.
• It is an auction in which every bid is burned, won or not. The runners up have still burned what they burned. A quiet day on the pool makes a small prize.

Doors and letters

Every address has a door. Its holder sets the postage for public letters, whether it takes masked mail and from which hall, and an X25519 key letters can be sealed to. A door nobody has set charges 100,000 MASQ and takes no masked mail.

• Sending escrows the postage in the Square with the letter, which may be up to 608 bytes. It cannot be recalled. There is no timeout: the postage waits at the door until the door acts, for ever if it never does.
• The door decides: keep the postage, return it, or burn it, up to 100 letters in one transaction; or answer a letter, which returns its postage with a reply. The contract files the answer as it is given: this page seals it to the sender by default when the letter carried a reply key it can read, and the door may choose to send it public. A masked letter carries no postage and waits until it is answered.
• Who can be written to. Any address with no code, or whose code is an EIP-7702 delegation, and any contract that has set a door. Not yourself, not 0x...dEaD, not a precompile, not the Square or the Masks contract.
• Sealed letters and postcards. When a door has a key, this page seals a letter to it by default, with a fresh X25519 key for every letter, and only the door can read it; untick Seal and it goes as a postcard. When a door has no key, every letter to it is a postcard anyone can read. Who wrote to whom, and when, is always public.
• Masked letters go only to doors that take masked mail from the sender's hall. A masked letter carries no postage: its deposit burned when it was spoken. If the door stopped taking masked mail before the letter landed, it bounces, and the burn stands.

This site resolves ENS names in your browser, through the ENS registry itself, and normalizes them by ENSIP-15 as the ENS app does: capitals are folded, accented and emoji names resolve, names that mix scripts or carry direction-changing characters are refused, and invisible characters are dropped. A normalized name can still look like another one, so the page always shows the address a name resolved to before you sign anything.

Masks

A mask lets you speak without saying who you are. It never lets money move without saying whose it is.

Wearing

There are two halls. Wearing a mask deposits 10,000 MASQ in the first or 1,000,000 MASQ in the second, and a stamp of 0.004 ETH, in public, from your address. The mask is a key your browser derives from your wallet's signature, with a proof that you hold it and that its hash point is the only one it can have, so no key can ever speak twice.

The cohort

• An epoch closes by itself at the first UTC midnight at which it holds at least 16 masks. The calendar decides, not anyone's transaction: a mask worn after that midnight belongs to the next epoch whether or not anyone has called seal. An epoch with fewer than 16 masks at midnight stays open for another day.
• It is shuffled by the drand quicknet round published 60 seconds after that midnight. Anyone hands the round to finalize, and the Beacon contract checks its signature. Nobody can choose the round or its randomness, including whoever calls it.
• Positions come from a keyed permutation under that randomness, so the order masks were worn in says nothing about where they land. Every run of 16 positions is a cohort. Masks left over past the last full cohort may be withdrawn or carried into the next epoch.

Speaking

A speech is a ring signature by one of the cohort's 16. The chain checks that one of them signed, never which one, and marks the mask's key image as used so it can never speak again. It burns the mask's whole deposit and files the words on the Square: a post, a stoke, or a letter.

• The signed speech names who may carry it (or anyone), the earliest second it may land and the last UTC day. This page picks a random landing time one to 24 hours ahead unless you choose otherwise, so the chain does not learn when you signed.
• Whoever carries it is repaid the gas it cost, from the stamps, at no more than the base fee plus 0.1 gwei a gas and never more than one stamp. The 21,000 every transaction pays is credited once per transaction, to the first speech in it sent straight from the sending account; a speech called through another contract gets none of it. Calldata is credited at 16 gas a byte where a zero byte costs 4, so a speech can be credited up to about 13,000 gas more than it cost. What the stamp does not spend stays in the contract for ever. There is no relay fee.
• Never send a masked speech from the wallet that wore the mask. A transaction's sender is public and would name you. This page sends it to a relayer, or shows it so anyone can land it.

Where the value goes, all of it

• MASQ leaves a mask only by being burned whole when it speaks, or back to its wearer in public, by withdraw: while its epoch is open, if it was left over, or if its epoch could not be shuffled for 30 days.
• The stamp leaves only as the gas a carrier actually spent, capped as above, or back to the wearer in public with the deposit. A stamp that cannot be sent waits in the contract for its owner to collect.
• Nothing else. A mask cannot tip, gift, pay a door, win the Front Page, or name a recipient. The one limit: the calldata credit above means a speech can hand whoever lands it up to about 13,000 gas more than the gas it cost, paid from its own stamp.

Your keys

Your masks and your door's letter key come from one secret: your wallet's signature of a fixed MASQUE key message. The page asks for it twice and accepts it only if both give the same result, if it is an ordinary 65-byte signature, and if it recovers to your account. A smart wallet cannot hold mask keys here, and the page says so.

The keys follow the message, not the page: any page that asks your wallet for this exact message gets the same keys. The message names the MASQUE domain, so read it before you sign, and sign it only when the address bar shows that domain. The page keeps the secret in this browser tab only, until you close the tab or press Forget keys. Anyone who holds it can speak as your masks and open your sealed letters.

What a mask hides, and what it does not

• A speaker hides among at most 16 owners, fewer if one owner holds several masks in the cohort. Someone who wears a fraction f of an epoch's masks shrinks everyone else's set to about 1 + 15 (1 - f), and locks a deposit and a stamp in every mask to do it. The Mask Room prints how many owners each cohort has.
• A member who has not spoken can prove "not me" off chain, and anyone can pay them to. Style, timing and "it was me" claims can name an author the chain cannot.
• BN254 gives about 100 bits of security. There is no forward anonymity: a leaked key or seed names every speech it ever made.
• Wearing a mask is public. Which speech a mask made is what stays hidden.
• The shuffle trusts drand's threshold of League of Entropy members not to collude.

Fees

• The duty: 1% of the ether leg of every trade, buy or sell, from the first swap to the last, paid to the Square for the Front Page. Against what you pay or receive that is 1.00% on an exact-in buy or an exact-out sell, 1.01% on an exact-in sell and 0.99% on an exact-out buy.
• The pool's own fee: 0.30%, to liquidity providers, as on any Uniswap pool of that tier.
• MASQ itself takes nothing on transfer. There is no owner, no mint, no pause and no blacklist.
• Masked speech: no relay fee. The stamp repays whoever lands it, gas at no more than base fee + 0.1 gwei, never more than the 0.004 ETH stamp (enough for a first speech in a cohort up to a base fee of about 5 gwei).
• This site takes nothing, and asks your wallet for exact allowances, never unlimited ones.

Risks

• Burned is burned. Posting, stoking and speaking destroy MASQ. Most bidders on the Front Page lose what they burn.
• No one can fix a bug. The contracts have no owner and no upgrade. If something is wrong in them, it stays wrong.
• The pool can empty. The launch liquidity is an ordinary Uniswap position its provider can remove at any time. With no liquidity, trading stops and the Front Page stops being funded.
• Locked deposits. A mask in a cohort can only speak or be held. Postage at a door that never acts waits for ever.
• Prices move. Nothing on this site is a price, a return or advice. MASQ is not a share of anything.

Every number

Least MASQ a post or stoke burns

10,000

Longest post

560 bytes

Longest letter or answer

608 bytes

Postage at a door nobody set

100,000 MASQ

Lead step

max(10,000, leader / 64)

Letters settled in one call

100

Claim window before release

30 days

Hall deposits

10,000 and 1,000,000 MASQ

Stamp

0.004 ETH

Cohort size

16

drand round after the closing midnight

60 s

Unshuffled epoch, deposits returnable after

30 days

Gas price cap on refunds

base fee + 0.1 gwei

Duty on the pool

1%

Supply, printed once

1,000,000,000 MASQ

Questions