Whitepaper.
A plain account of what The Lighthouse is, how it is built, and how the light pays its keepers. No price talk. Just the mechanics of standing watch.
A light kept against the dark.
The Lighthouse is a collection of 10,000 lighthouses that live entirely on Ethereum. Each tower is generated from a committed seed and drawn, in full, as an SVG by the contract itself, with no image file held anywhere. Owning a tower makes you a keeper: you aim its beam to guide drifting ships home through storms, and the coast rewards you in Lumens, a score that lifts your tower through five orders of light.
The light is not a picture of a lighthouse. It is a lighthouse the network keeps lit.
No server, no decay.
Most generative collections store their art off-chain: a pinned file, a hosted image, a promise. The Lighthouse stores none. The renderer is a pure function: pass it a token's seed and it returns the complete SVG, computing the tapering body, the painted bands, the lantern glass, the lamp and the cast of the beam at read time.
This has one consequence that matters above all the others: nothing can go dark. No host to lapse, no pin to drop, no link to rot. As long as Ethereum produces blocks, your light renders exactly as it did the day it was struck.
One seed, four traits.
Each tower derives from a single committed seed. From it the contract computes four structural traits and one chosen one:
- Tower height: five grades, from a squat Stub to a Towering shaft, setting the silhouette.
- Band pattern: horizontal, diagonal, spiral, barber or solid, setting the paint.
- Lamp order: Beacon, Steady, Halo or Spark, setting how the light spreads.
- Beam cast: the wedge angle, between 28° and 62°, setting its reach on the water.
The fifth trait, the lamp's colour, is the one you set: a single palette applied across the whole coast, so every keeper sees the sea in their own light.
Earned, never bought.
Lumens are a score, not a currency. They cannot be purchased, transferred or traded, only earned by keeping the light. There are three ways to earn them:
| Source | How | Lumens |
|---|---|---|
| Guiding | Bring a lit ship home in The Watch | 40–130 |
| Tending | Trim the lamp, on an 8-hour cooldown | +50 |
| Weathering | Hold the beam through a storm, 20-hour cooldown | +120 |
A risky guide, a ship rescued at the brink of distress, pays the most. Tending and weathering are trustless: free beyond gas and gated by cooldowns, they bank standing on-chain even when you are away from the lamp.
Climbing the light.
Accumulated Lumens raise a tower through five orders, each recorded on-chain against the token. Higher orders widen the beam and increase the keeper's share of the coast's yield.
| Order | Lumens | Bears |
|---|---|---|
| Candle | 0 | First light |
| Lantern | 500 | A steady flame |
| Reflector | 2,500 | Mirrored reach |
| Fresnel | 10,000 | One bladed beam |
| Hyperradiant | 40,000 | Seen from the edge |
The coast is a commons.
Secondary-sale royalties flow into the Harbour, the collection's shared treasury, and are paid out to keepers in ETH. Your share grows with your tower's order, so the keepers who stand the most watches and climb the highest orders take the largest cut. It is a share of real fees, not a promised return: with no trading, nothing flows in.
This is the quiet argument of The Lighthouse: a light is worth more when it is one of many. No keeper is asked to compete with the coast; they are asked to hold their mile of it.
Standing, not capital.
Lumens are deliberately non-transferable, so standing reflects watch kept, not capital deployed. The only on-chain asset is the tower itself, a thing you keep rather than a thing you flip.
Mark it, recast it, burn to rise.
Beyond standing watch, four owner-only rites let a keeper make a tower their own. Each is written directly into the NFT, so a tower carries the full record of how it was kept.
Inscription. A keeper can carve a short mark onto the tower's plaque: uppercase, up to 16 characters, from the set A-Z, 0-9, space, and . ! ? # - + / : (anything else is rejected by the contract). The mark shows on the on-chain art and in the metadata. It is the ownership layer that turns a mint into a claimed relic, and it is free beyond gas.
Recast. A recast re-rolls a tower's looks, its bands, lamp and beam, while keeping its order. It is for visual fate, not forced rank. The first recast is free if you spend the tower's Keeper's Blessing; after that it costs 0.002 ETH, which flows into the Harbour pot shared by all keepers.
Keeper's Blessing. Every tower mints with one Blessing, a single Free Will. Unspent, it covers one rite such as a recast for free. Once used, it is spent for good.
Burn to Rise. A keeper can burn one owned tower into another. The survivor climbs one order and carries the burn forward; the sacrifice leaves circulation forever. This is the only path to the top order, the Hyperradiant, and it makes the collection deflationary: every ascension permanently shrinks supply.
Mint roll and order. Each tower rolls a starting order at mint, weighted 70 percent Candle, 21 Lantern, 8 Reflector, 1 Fresnel. A tower's order is then the higher of two things: the level forged by its mint roll plus burns, or the tier earned from Lumens. Higher orders widen the beam and take a larger share of the Harbour yield.