uniTensor

00Abstract

Most tokens are inert and most NFT yield needs you to lock the NFT somewhere. uniTensor folds the two together. $TAU is a normal ERC-20 you buy on Uniswap, but it is also the fuel for a living NFT: hold 3,000 $TAU and a Neuron mints itself to your wallet. Each Neuron earns real TAO from Bittensor, streamed to it for as long as you hold. Nothing is staked, there is no mint page, and the art is drawn entirely on-chain.

01The hybrid (how the NFT works)

$TAU is a DN404-style hybrid. The ERC-20 and the Neuron ERC-721 are linked: your Neuron count always equals your balance divided by 3,000. Cross 3,000 and a Neuron appears; cross 6,000 and a second one appears; sell back below a line and the matching Neuron returns. There is no separate transaction to mint, it happens inside the transfer.

• The pool, the hook and other contracts are flagged skipNFT, so the liquidity pool never mints Neurons. Only real holders do.
• Because a Neuron mints per whole 3,000 and a buy is capped at 0.1% of supply, a single buy mints at most seven Neurons, which keeps buying cheap.
• Transferring a Neuron on a marketplace moves its 3,000 $TAU of backing with it, so the NFT and its backing never come apart.

02Real TAO yield

The yield is real, and we are plain about where it comes from. The treasury delegates capital to a Bittensor validator that the project operates, harvests the TAO it earns from network emissions, and streams it back to Neuron holders as wrapped TAO (wTAO). It accrues automatically in proportion to your Neuron weight, and you claim it whenever you want.

Because it depends on how the validator performs, treat it as variable and modest, not a fixed promised rate. The Ethereum contracts handle the token, the Neurons and the wTAO payout on-chain and trustlessly; the Bittensor delegation and the bridge that brings TAO across are run by the operator. We do not pretend an Ethereum contract can stake on Bittensor directly, it cannot, they are different chains.

03Seal & bond

A normal Neuron mirrors your balance, so selling can return it. Sealing a Neuron locks its 3,000 $TAU into the contract and makes the Neuron permanent and yours, detached from your tradeable balance. In return it starts a bond that grows the longer it stays sealed.

• A live Neuron has a reward weight of 100. A sealed Neuron's weight climbs from 100 toward 250 over 90 days, so a fully bonded Neuron earns 2.5x the TAO of a fresh one. (Real Bittensor validators earn more as their bonds mature; this mirrors that.)
• TAO is split across all Neurons by weight using magnified-dividend accounting, so the maths is exact to the wei.
• Unsealing returns the 3,000 backing minus an 8% burn and retires the Neuron. The burn makes leaving slightly costly and removes supply for everyone who stays.

04Fee & the pool

$TAU trades against ETH in a Uniswap v4 pool. A v4 hook takes a 4% fee on the ETH side of each swap and sends it to the treasury, which is what funds the validator delegation that pays holders. The hook does no extra work on a swap, so it does not add cost to a buy beyond the small fee. The pool fee itself is zero, the hook is the only fee.

05Limits & launch

uniTensor is a fair launch: the entire 21,000,000 $TAU supply was paired into the pool with 1 ETH, with no team allocation and nothing held back. To make the opening fair, two limits are enforced on-chain and switch on the moment trading opens:

• Max 0.1% of supply per buy (21,000 $TAU), so no single transaction can sweep the book.
• Max 2% of supply per wallet (420,000 $TAU), so no one wallet can corner the early float.

Both limits are liftable by the owner after launch, and they have a floor so they can never be set to a level that traps holders.

06On-chain art

Every Neuron is drawn on Ethereum, not hosted on a server, and the art is deliberately not crammed into one contract. It is split into a field of small shard contracts: a composer assembles each Neuron by calling around 56 of them, each verifiable on its own. There are 32 subnet generators (one per subnet, each with its own mesh structure), 8 palette banks, and base shards for the background, the bond frame, the geometry maths, and the base64/text encoding.

Your Neuron's look is computed from chain state: its subnet sets the palette and the shape of its mesh, a bond glow strengthens as a sealed Neuron ages, and the frame turns violet when it is sealed. Because the image and traits come from the chain, a Neuron visibly changes as you hold and seal it, and anyone can read every shard on Etherscan.

07The contracts

The core is a small, readable set; the renderer is a larger field of art shards behind a single composer. All verifiable on Etherscan:

08Parameters

Hold $TAU, grow a Neuron, earn TAO. Everything above runs on-chain the moment you cross 3,000.