猿の顔

Saru no Kao

Face of a monkey. Every face is seven characters — two ears, two brackets, two eyes and a mouth — drawn as 5×7 pixel glyphs. 53 million combinations exist. 4,444 of them were minted.

Roll the box to see real tokens, or type any id from 1 to 4444 and it draws as you type.

The mint

Supply
4,444
Price
0.00002ETH each
Per wallet
16
Team reserve
222ids 1–222
One of ones
12all above #222
Mint on OpenSea

Anatomy of a monkey

Seven slots, seven traits

Ears and brackets mirror, so a face reads the same from either end. The two eye slots usually match — 7.9% of tokens have odd eyes, where the left and right characters differ.

Background and ink are the two traits that aren't characters. Ink is always chosen to contrast with its ground, so no face ever disappears.

Rarity

Counted across all 4,444 tokens. Rarity is baked into the generator, not assigned afterwards — each trait is drawn from a weighted list seeded by the token id.

The twelve

Hand-built, using glyphs, colours and effects the generator can't produce — no crown, flame, code rain, double-size or multi-coloured face appears anywhere in the other 4,432.

Questions

What is Saru no Kao?

猿の顔 — saru is monkey, no is of, kao is face. Face of a monkey. It's what these are: little faces typed out of punctuation, with two @ for ears, read the way kaomoji have been read in Japan since long before emoji existed.

What am I actually buying?

A 1024×1024 pixel image of one emoticon face, plus its traits in the metadata. Every character is hand-drawn on a 5×7 grid, so the type and the art are the same font — which means your token is also a real string of characters. Roll one above, copy what the readout shows, and paste it in your display name.

How are the rare ones distributed?

The twelve one-of-ones sit at seeded random ids above #222, so the team reserve can't contain one. Their positions were fixed before mint and are reproducible from the seed.