Three caps go up every day: one at auction for eight hours, and two you can buy outright at a fixed price before their own auction opens. 550 caps in all, one for each yard of Otis’s shot; 480 are sold this way and 70 go to draws.
Figures update as the auction runs.
550 pieces, and no two alike: 550 for the 550 yards of the shot in the old ballad, a hundred rods, that made Otis Sherwood an outlaw. 480 are sold three a day, in batches of three. One cap is at auction for eight hours; the two behind it are shown with their pictures and can be bought outright before their own auction opens, at a fixed price by tier: Common 0.1 ETH, Uncommon 0.15, Rare 0.2, Very rare 0.25, Legendary 0.5, each plus 150,000 of his token. A cap bought that way leaves the batch. When the auction ends, the next cap in the batch goes up. The next three open the next day, even if every cap in the batch sold early. The prices can change with a day’s notice, and a cap already waiting keeps the price it was shown at.
A bid is 150,000 of his token and an ETH bid on top. The token part is the same for everyone; the ETH is what you compete on. Whoever is outbid gets both back at once, and an auction nobody bids in repeats until somebody does. The cap at auction is never for sale outright, so it may go for less than a waiting cap’s price.
Every cap is one of 550 finished pictures. Which picture a cap gets is drawn by chance from the pictures of its tier when it opens, and the picture’s fingerprint is written on the chain with it, so the picture a marketplace shows can be checked against the chain and the set cannot be swapped. Every cap has one of four equally likely shapes: pointed, rounded, folded or drooping. Its cloth, band, feathers, badge and wear vary too.
Every eleventh piece and every twenty-fifth, seventy in all, is given instead of sold: fifty to holders of his token and twenty to bidders who were outbid at the auction, by two draws that take turns at the same queue of pieces. Every three days the holders’ draw names five wallets, weighted by how much of his token each one bought at the market and how long it has held it over the last ninety days; tokens received by transfer count for nothing, the coin’s first three days count at a tenth, and a wallet that wins sits out the next five draws and then counts a quarter for each piece it has. The order of the five is shuffled, so the biggest holder is no likelier to be first. The first named wallet can claim at once, the next twelve hours later, and so on; a piece nobody claims goes into the next draw. Every draw is published as a file anyone can recompute.
Whether a cap is won at auction or bought outright, the 150,000 tokens split 80% to the Major Oak, 10% to his purse and 10% to the dev, and the ETH splits 50% to the Major Oak, 20% to his purse and 30% to the dev. A resale on a marketplace that honours the royalty standard pays him 5%. The rules of an auction, the smallest raise and what happens in its last minutes, are published before the first bid, so any one of them can be checked against them.