The art of
golden repair

01 · Abstract

Kintsugi is a collection of ten thousand ceramic vessels that exist entirely on Ethereum. Each is a unique thrown form, generated and drawn as an SVG by its contract. Unlike a static collectible, a Kintsugi vessel is not finished at mint. It ages. Over time it cracks, and the keeper is invited to mend each fracture with gold.

The project inverts the usual relationship between damage and value. Here a break is not a defect to be hidden but a site of future beauty. The act of repair is recorded permanently in the art, and a vessel that has been thoroughly mended is rarer and more storied than one that was never touched.

02 · The vessel

At mint, each token draws a form and a glaze from its tokenId. Forms come from a library of thrown archetypes, each with its own silhouette, proportions, and a small per-token jitter, so that no two pieces share a profile.

The glaze is a cool, desaturated palette rendered as a vertical gradient with a moving sheen and a form shadow, which give the flat SVG the read of a real object under gallery light. A rim with an inner-mouth shadow, a foot ring, and a soft cast shadow complete the illusion.

Determinism

Everything visual is a pure function of the token. Given a tokenId, anyone can reproduce the exact vessel, its form, glaze, and crack geometry, without trusting any server.

03 · Cracking

A freshly thrown vessel is nearly whole, carrying only a few fine hairlines. As it ages, new fractures appear. Calling age(tokenId) on the Mending contract, once a short per-vessel cooldown has passed, opens fresh breaks in the glaze.

• Each crack path is derived from keccak256(seed, index), so it is fixed and identical for everyone viewing the token.
• Paths are constrained to the silhouette, so a crack always reads as a believable break in the glaze.
• No two vessels crack alike. The path, the count, and the branching all follow from the seed.

04 · The mend

Mending is the central gesture. Calling mend(tokenId, seam) on the Mending contract fills the chosen fracture with gold, drawn along the exact path of the break and written permanently into the token. The repair is a single transaction and cannot be undone.

A small fee (0.0008 ETH) is paid with each mend and forwarded to a single treasury, so no value leaves your wallet without crediting the work. Gold is the only warm colour anywhere in the project. It appears nowhere in the interface, only inside the vessel, where a mended seam belongs, with a soft bloom so that, under raking light, the repairs glint like real metal.

05 · Wabi & tiers

Wabi is a vessel's score, a measure of character rather than condition. It is read as the share of the vessel's cracks that have been answered in gold, a number from 0 to 100. The gold you lay is permanent, so your repairs only accumulate, and a fully mended vessel reaches the top of the scale. Wabi maps to five tiers:

• Raw, whole or freshly cracked, no gold yet. Wabi 0.
• Veined, the first seams laid. Wabi 1 to 39.
• Gilded, a network of repair. Wabi 40 to 69.
• Lacquerwork, gold and glaze in balance. Wabi 70 to 99.
• Treasure, every fracture answered. Wabi 100.

06 · On-chain rendering

There is no image file and no metadata server. tokenURI returns a base64 JSON document whose image field is a base64 SVG, assembled by the contract at read time from the token's form, glaze, cracks, and mended seams.

This means a Kintsugi vessel has no off-chain dependency that can rot or disappear. As long as Ethereum exists, the art renders.

07 · The contracts

Two contracts and a handful of pure libraries, written in Solidity 0.8.26 and compiled through the IR pipeline.

• Kintsugi, a self-contained ERC-721 with no external dependencies. It mints vessels, fixes each one's seed, glaze and shape, tracks the gilded-seam bitmap and the age, seals milestones, and renders tokenURI on-chain.
• Mending, the workshop. It validates each act (mend, age, rename, observe), forwards the ETH to the treasury, and writes the result straight back onto the vessel.
• Libraries: KintsugiArt builds the SVG, Fracture derives the crack paths and milestones, and small Base64 and Strings helpers inline the JSON. All pure, all on-chain.

08 · The Kiln & yield

A vessel is not only an object to keep. It earns. Secondary-sale royalties (5%, via EIP-2981) are routed to a contract called the Kiln, which streams that ETH back to every vessel in proportion to its ember rate. A keeper collects their vessel's accrued share at any time. This is a royalty share, not a promised return: with no trading, nothing flows in.

A vessel's ember rate, its weight in the pool, is a base amount plus a bonus for its Wabi tier, plus its Luster, plus a Founder boost. Luster is earned two ways, both surfaced in the dApp at kiln.html:

• The Firing, a skill game. To lay a seam you lock the kiln heat in its sweet spot; a flawless pour gilds more gold and raises Luster more than a clean one.
• Stoking, the idle kiln. Tending it on a cooldown banks a little Luster over time, rewarding patience.

So tending pays twice. A well mended, well tended vessel is both more beautiful and a larger claim on the Kiln. The accounting is a standard accumulator, and a sale settles the seller's accrued yield to them, so nothing is stranded on transfer.

09 · Scarcity & the Reclaiming

Ten thousand vessels are minted, and that is the ceiling forever. From there the live count only falls. A keeper may reclaim a vessel, returning it to the kiln, by calling reclaim(tokenId) on the Kintsugi contract.

Reclaiming does three things, in order:

• It settles the vessel's accrued royalty yield to your pending balance in the Kiln, which is always withdrawable. You keep every ember the piece earned.
• It burns the vessel forever. The token is destroyed, its seed and gold seams gone, and its id is never re-issued. Each retired vessel is a one-of-one composition gone for good.
• It releases the vessel's share of the pool. Its ember rate is zeroed, lowering the total, so every vessel that remains earns a larger fraction of every future royalty.

The effect compounds. Because the Kiln splits each royalty by ember rate over the living total, a smaller collection pays each survivor more. If the live count settles well below the cap, every remaining vessel earns proportionally more than it would at full supply. The collection is deflationary by construction: no mint re-opens, and no path adds supply back.

10 · Supply & claim

Supply is capped at 10,000 and never inflates; in practice the live count only falls, as vessels are reclaimed (see §09). The first vessel for any wallet is free, the keeper pays only the gas to draw it on-chain. A wallet may hold up to five vessels in all; further vessels cost 0.001 ETH each, paid to the treasury. The first two hundred keepers join the First Firing, marked on their piece for good. There is no token, no presale, no allowlist tax, and no part of the project gated behind a separate coin.