$WHOLE Protocol

$WHOLE is an ERC-20 token on the Base network whose entire supply is issued exclusively through computational mining. The protocol reframes proof-of-work as "cosmic mining": miners run an off-chain client that searches for a hash meeting an on-chain difficulty target, then submit a compact cryptographic proof that the smart contract verifies. Valid submissions that reach the target discover a Singularity and are rewarded with newly emitted $WHOLE.

There is no presale, no private round, no team or investor allocation. The emission schedule, difficulty, and reward logic are fully defined in the deployed contract and cannot be altered to mint tokens outside the mining process. The maximum supply is capped at 2,100,000 $WHOLE.

Most token launches concentrate supply in the hands of insiders before the public can participate. $WHOLE takes the opposite approach: every single token must be earned by doing work. This makes the distribution as fair as the underlying computation is open — anyone with a computer and a small amount of ETH for fees can participate on equal footing.

The design deliberately favors CPUs over specialized hardware. The proof is structured around a memory-bound search rather than raw hashing throughput, reducing the advantage of GPUs and ASICs and keeping mining accessible to ordinary machines.

The contract is deployed and verified on Base mainnet at:

Emission follows a Warm-Up + Halving curve organized into eras. Each era contains exactly 100 episodes, and each episode emits an equal share of that era's total emission to the miner who discovers it. Emission grows for the first five eras (the Warm-Up), peaks at Era 5, then halves every era thereafter.

Halving continues beyond Era 10, with each era emitting half of the previous one. The sum of all era emissions converges to 2,050,000 WHOLE; together with the 50,000 WHOLE Hawking reserve this reaches the 2,100,000 hard cap.

Mining is a commit-and-verify process:

1. The off-chain client picks a recent target block and derives an anti-frontrunning seed: keccak256(miner, targetBlock, blockhash(targetBlock)).
2. It searches over nonces, building a Merkle tree of candidate hashes, looking for one that begins with N leading hexadecimal zeros (nibbles) — the current difficulty.
3. When a qualifying hash is found, the miner submits a proof on-chain. The contract verifies the Merkle proof (2–3 nodes) and checks the hash against the difficulty target.
4. The contract enforces that the target block is recent and that at least 300 blocks have passed since the previous episode discovery (the cooldown).

Difficulty scales with the era (base 4^(era−1), capped) and adjusts slightly with time between discoveries, so the search stays challenging but never impossible on a normal CPU.

Each on-chain submission costs a fixed 0.0005 ETHscan fee. These fees accumulate in the contract's Cosmic Reservoir. The reservoir is what funds Hawking emissions and seeds the initial DEX liquidity, tying the protocol's economics directly to real mining activity rather than to any external funding.

$GRAV are non-transferable (soulbound) points credited to miners for participation. Accumulated $GRAV grants a small logarithmic difficulty tolerance, capped at a maximum of +20%. This rewards consistent miners with a marginal statistical edge while the logarithmic curve and hard cap prevent any concentration of power. $GRAV cannot be bought, sold, or transferred.

A Hawking emission is a secondary, easier-to-reach reward. When a submitted hash meets an intermediate leading-zero criterion but does not reach a full Singularity, it qualifies as a Hawking event. The discoverer receives:

• 15% of the ETH accumulated in the Cosmic Reservoir, and
• a fixed 100 $WHOLE paid from the pre-minted Hawking reserve.

Hawking events have their own cooldown (~24 hours at Base block times), making them a steadier but smaller reward path alongside the rarer, larger Singularity discoveries.

• Anti-frontrunning: the proof seed binds to the miner's address and a specific block hash, so a submission cannot be copied and re-used by an observer in the mempool.
• Reentrancy protection: reward and liquidity paths are guarded against reentrant calls.
• Cooldowns: a 300-block gap between episodes and a ~24h Hawking cooldown prevent a single actor from draining emissions in bursts.
• Pause timelock: any emergency pause is subject to a 48-hour timelock, so it cannot be used to act instantly against miners.
• Verified source: the contract is verified on the Base block explorer and can be read by anyone.

On the first episode of the first era, the protocol automatically seeds a DEX pool: 30% of the episode's token reward and 70% of the ETH reservoir are paired as initial liquidity. The resulting LP tokens are permanently burned(sent to the dead address), so the genesis liquidity can never be pulled. The remainder of that episode's reward and ETH goes to the discovering miner.

Mining runs on your own computer. You need Python 3.10+, a small amount of ETH on Base for scan fees, and the open-source mining client. The full step-by-step guide walks you through installation, configuration, and running your first scan.

This document is technical and informational. It describes the design and on-chain parameters of the $WHOLE protocol and is not financial advice, an offer, or a solicitation. Interacting with any smart contract carries risk. Always verify the contract address and read the code before participating. Parameters described here reflect the deployed contract; the on-chain source is the authoritative reference.