Frozen before the bell

THE ART CAME FIRST.

All 2,000 degens were finished, hashed and frozen on Fri, 04 Sep 2026 08:21:04 GMT — before a contract exists, before anyone can mint, and before we could know who ends up holding what. These two numbers are the receipt.

Image provenance (sha256)
ddefe420a7ddc6ec62e7b13b34039967ccea3aea274eeb40530a0fff21c454ef
Metadata provenance (sha256)
54fdf922c0f11137ac66ff9bdcabd46d12480a812a04abb0fb408b506041f324

Why this matters

Badges are sealed until the bell, and a sealed collection invites exactly one suspicion: that the rare ones get moved around once the team can see who minted. Publishing a hash afterwards proves nothing, because the hash would simply describe whatever was decided. Published now, it is a claim that can only be kept or caught.

The images are pinned to it

The image hash covers every one of the 2,000 files, in token order. Change one pixel of one degen and the number below changes.

So are the badges

The second hash covers every metadata file, so which degen wears what is fixed too. The badges are hidden, not undecided.

It goes on chain

The image hash is written into the ERC-721 at deploy, so the receipt lives where nobody can quietly edit it, including us.

The method

Four steps, deliberately boring, so anyone can repeat them.

01Hash every imagesha256 over the bytes of each token’s final PNG, in order 1 to 2,000. These are the files that get pinned, after optimisation, not an earlier copy of them.
02Join them in token orderThe hex digests, concatenated, nothing between them.
03Hash thatsha256 of the joined string is the image provenance hash.
04Repeat for the metadataSame procedure over each token’s metadata file, giving the second hash.

Check it yourself

Every per-token hash is published, so the two headline numbers can be recomputed from them right now, and recomputed from the art itself once it is pinned.

# recompute the image provenance from the published per-token hashes
curl -s https://rhdegen.xyz/provenance.json \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; d=json.load(sys.stdin); \
print(hashlib.sha256(''.join(t['image'] for t in d['tokens']).encode()).hexdigest())"

# after the reveal, recompute it from the art itself
for i in $(seq 1 2000); do sha256sum "$i.png"; done | awk '{printf "%s", $1}' | sha256sum

The per-token list is at /provenance.json. It gives nothing away: a hash cannot be turned back into a picture or a badge.

What this does not prove

Worth saying plainly, because provenance pages usually imply more than they establish. This proves the art and the badge assignment existed, unchanged, from 2026-09-04. It does not prove the mint order is fair, and it does not prove anything about who mints what — that depends on the contract, which is not deployed yet. When it is, its address goes on the home page and the hash goes in it.

See the tenThe desk