How it works

What am I actually buying?

A numbered pixel stone — and a permanent, public record on the Quantus chain that names your address as its owner. The record carries the stone's number, its owner, the price it sold for, the block it was inscribed in, and the stone's own image.

That record is the thing. Five years from now anyone can look it up without asking us for anything.

Is this an NFT?

On Quantus, ownership is recorded by the chain itself. So what you get is an inscription: the stone's number, your address, the price and the block it was born in, written into the chain and readable by anyone, forever.

There is no separate token to mint into and nothing that has to be handed over by us — the record is written on-chain under your address, and anyone can read it.

How can a picture live inside a transaction?

The stone's own image is a 40×40 pixel PNG, about 235 bytes, written into the transaction itself as a System.remark — not a link, not a file on our server.

The payload is 292 bytes, laid out like this:

QTCR            4 bytes   magic
version         1 byte    0x01
stone number    2 bytes   little-endian, 1 … 3579
owner           32 bytes  the owner's on-chain account id
price           8 bytes   what it sold for, in plancks
mime length     1 byte    9
"image/png"     9 bytes
PNG bytes       235 bytes  the stone itself

Who can see it — and who can check it?

Anyone, without permission, an API key, or our site. The public indexer is sqm.quantus.com/v1/graphql: pull the transaction, strip the 57-byte header, and the image is right there. There is a working command on the verify page.

And you can read it without us: the same bytes come back from the public indexer, and this site turns them into a picture — type a stone number on the verify page and it reconstructs the stone from the chain, byte for byte.

How does the auction work?

• 0 QTC start, no reserve. No whitelist, no limits, no anti-bot theatre.
• 23 seconds, fixed. Highest bid when the clock hits zero takes the stone.
• Every raise is +10%. A new bid must beat the highest by at least ten percent, so the price moves in visible steps instead of one cent at a time. The opening bid starts at 0.002 QTC; the page always shows the exact minimum for the next bid.
• Bids stay public while they happen. The whole history stays visible.
• Your bid is bound to your address. Enter the QTC address that should own the stone — that is the address the payment must come from, and the address written on-chain.
• Bids must be backed by real balance. We check the address on-chain before accepting, so an empty wallet cannot shout a number.
• You pay after you win, never before. Which also means nobody needs a refund: losing bidders never sent anything.

What happens when I win?

The page switches to the payment step: the amount (your winning bid) and the project's QTC address, in the same tab. Send QTC from the address you bid with; your window is 30 minutes, with a countdown on the page.

When the payment confirms, the inscription is written automatically — your address goes into the owner field, and the transaction hash becomes your receipt.

What happens if nobody bids?

The stone goes to the back of the queue and comes around again. The auction floor keeps rotating — one stone at a time, every 23 seconds — and a stone that gets no bids is not skipped, not burned, and not quietly "sold to the house". It simply waits its turn again.

A stone leaves the queue only when it is actually sold and paid for. So the series keeps cycling until every stone has found an owner.

What if the winner never pays?

The winner has 30 minutes to pay. After that the stone goes straight back into the auction pool and is re-auctioned — it returns to the end of the queue, so the floor never stalls.

That address goes on cooldown too — first offence 2 hours, second 24 hours, third permanent — so it cannot win another stone until the record is settled. A bad-faith win costs the project nothing but half an hour, and costs the bidder their place in the queue.

Does "own" here mean I can sell it?

In this phase the record names your address as owner, and it stays that way — permanently, on the chain. As soon as the auction closes, a trading floor of our own opens: holders list their stones, buyers take them, and every transfer is written to the chain as a new record appended to the one before it — so the whole history stays public and checkable.

Release notes land on X first — @QTCrocks ↗.

What does it cost beyond the bid?

Nothing. The inscription is paid by the project — the project covers it. Your side has exactly one number: the bid you win at. No platform fee, no gas, nothing added on top.

Why should the numbering be trusted?

Numbers are assigned in order and every inscription is public, so the series is auditable end to end. The first stone — #0001 — is already inscribed and kept by the project as its proof stone; you can read it on the verify page.

Why this chain, and why stones?

Quantus is a post-quantum network: it signs with ML-DSA-87 (Dilithium), a lattice scheme built to survive the machines that will break today's signatures — and it mines on ordinary GPUs, so anyone can take part. Its records are native and permanent, which is exactly what a stone needs.

Stone is the most time-resistant object there is. A stone inscribed on that chain is the shortest possible argument: proof that outlasts the era it was made in.