A holder's balance is an autonomous agent that earns real ETH. Above a safe floor, a $CELL balance is a living cell that accrues a live, mass-weighted stream of native ETH skimmed from every swap on the token's own Uniswap v4 hook, a yield paid in ETH and funded by trading fees, not by minting more of its own supply. The reward is deliberately ETH, not tokens: a token reward is sell pressure a winner has to dump, while ETH is clean profit that never touches the chart, so the design routes seventy percent of the ETH-side fee to holders as that stream, thirty percent to a kill bounty, and burns the token side outright. The same volume drives a bounded predation cull that moves a small slice of a near-peer's balance and burns the rest, so supply only deflates. The mechanism is held solvent by a single-source-of-truth invariant, made un-aimable by a deferred, sealed-seed eat, and made survivable by a percentage floor that caps any holder's loss at thirty percent of its peak. This note states what is genuinely new, concedes what is not, and shows how to verify every claim on-chain.
CARN-20: an ERC-20 in which every non-excluded holder's above-floor balance is an autonomous cell that, driven by trade volume on its own Uniswap v4 hook, eats near-peer holders' cells, moving real balance wallet to wallet and burning a slice, with a dust sandbox, a one-rung loss cap, and a real off switch. It exposes STANDARD() and supportsInterface(CARN20) so any tracker detects it generically, the way 404 trackers detect 404s.
We claim no ERC or EIP number. ERC-404 was never ratified either; it won as a recognizable category. The working contract and the solvency invariant are the credential, not an integer.
A Hemocyte is a cell that banks native ETH, not points and not a wrapped IOU, skimmed from the ETH side of every swap and streamed to living cells by size for as long as they survive.
No NFT can hold claimable ETH, and no v2 or v3 token can either, because their pool is a separate contract with no swap-time callback. A v4 token that is its own hook can. Call eth_getBalance(hook), add the cell's banked cellEth, and you get a real, claimable number. That property, not any adjective, is the new kind of object.
Seventy percent of the skim is a survival stream every live cell accrues by mass from the first second, the primary reward and a live ETH yield; thirty percent fills a standing bounty. On a kill the predator drinks twenty percent of the bounty plus seventy percent of the prey's banked ETH; the prey keeps a ten percent ETH spore, claimable even in death; the rest recycles. The reward is ETH on purpose: paying winners in tokens would be sell pressure they dump, so the token side of the fee is burned instead and only ETH reaches holders. ETH is never sent to the dead address, only $CELL mass burns, and all ETH is pull-only, never auto-compounded, because a swap inside the swap callback is how SATO[07] died.
A titan earns the largest stream and drinks the bounties, which also makes it the fattest prey: eating an ETH-heavy titan inherits most of its banked ETH. A small cell accrues a real, withdrawable stream from second one and keeps its spore when eaten, so the floor outcome is your cell died, here is its blood, not total loss. A small cell does not out-earn the apex in absolute ETH, and we do not imply it does.
Fair launch: the entire supply is seeded as locked liquidity and the deployer ends with nothing, no presale, no insider bag, and a 1.5 percent per-wallet cap for the first ten minutes keeps snipers out. Then hold $CELL above the safe floor and your above-floor balance IS a live cell: no stake, no deposit, no NFT to lock. Dust cannot drag you onto the board; becoming a cell takes real size, which only makes you bigger.
As the market trades, the ETH-side volume drives eats, each deferred to a later block so it cannot be aimed. Only a predator within one to four times your size, and only the heavier of two cells, can take a slice, never inside the five-minute newborn shield. A hard percentage floor caps the damage: a cell can never be eaten below seventy percent of its peak, so the worst case is a thirty percent loss, knocked down, never wiped. Most of what an eat takes is burned, not handed to the predator, so the cull deflates supply rather than fattening a whale.
Every trade pays a seven percent fee, and your reward is always ETH, never more tokens. The ETH-side fee streams seventy percent to living cells by mass as a live yield and thirty percent into the kill bounty. The token-side fee is 100% burned, pure deflation. So holders are paid a real ETH yield from everyone's trading while supply only shrinks, and a kill banks the bounty plus the prey's ETH on top.
Exit any time: selling is instant and unfreezable. To sit out without selling, drop to the safe floor and your balance rests there as an inert husk, off the board, not prey, no decay. Only idle mass above the floor gets eaten. Claim your ETH before you exit, or it forfeits to the survivors.
We will be exact, because the novelty is narrow, real, and does not need inflating. We say what is ours and what is not, in the same breath.
A fungible balance that is a living mass, earns a live native-ETH yield out of its own pool's swaps, and culls and is culled by near-peer holders. Concretely: a single pool's ETH-side delta, skimmed per swap through a v4 afterSwapReturnDelta[01] hook and paid back to that pool's own holders as native ETH, a mass-weighted survival stream plus a kill bounty, with the predation deferred and sealed-seed so it cannot be aimed, held solvent by a single-source-of-truth invariant across a thousand-plus-run fuzz. A token that pays a real native-ETH yield out of its own swaps, only possible because it IS its own hook, with living balances that deflate each other, is v4-exclusive and has no prior art. We searched for the counterexample. There isn't one.
That ETH has moved to holders before is settled. EverETH streamed ETH; SafeMoon, RFI and Reflecto redistributed fees by balance; World PvP routed ETH between participants as a round-end liquidity rug; afterSwapReturnDelta is a public v4 primitive. We claim none of those firsts, only the lane they leave empty: per-swap, intra-pool, into a predation game, un-aimable, solvent. The difference is not that ETH moves, it is that you have to win it and survive to keep it.
Almost everything underneath is borrowed and we name the lenders: the balance-to-object mirror is DN404[02] lineage, the streaming and bounty math is a MasterChef[03] accumulator run twice, the art is on-chain SVG, the randomness is commit-reveal, the eat is agar.io size-based predation. None of that is new. The new thing is what the ETH is pointed at, a kill, not a dividend, and the proof that pointing it there stays solvent and un-aimable. The mechanism is the moat. The adjectives are not.
Reflection tokens pay everyone. This one makes you fight for it.
v4 made the ETH reachable. We made it a weapon, and made it solvent.
An idle balance above the floor can be ground down by other holders' cells while you sleep, real, non-consensual ERC-20 transfers out driven by other people trading. It is hard-bounded: only a neighbor within four times your size can reach you, the lighter cell is the prey, never inside the five-minute newborn shield, and a percentage floor means a cell can never be eaten below seventy percent of its peak. Your worst case is a thirty percent loss; nothing zeroes you, and you can sell instantly or drop to the floor to sit out. The eat game is still mildly net-negative on average, a slow burn plus idle decay, but it is bounded by design: the real upside is the token price and the ETH you earn by holding, not the eat.
The ETH you earn is real and paid in ETH, but be precise about where it comes from: it is the seven percent trading fee, redistributed to holders by mass. It is a live yield, not a fixed APY. It rises and falls with volume and pays nothing on a dead day, it is funded by other traders' fees rather than external revenue, and it is proportional to mass: the same rate per dollar for every holder, so the largest bags earn the most in absolute ETH, not a higher rate. As a yield on your position it can be high when the token trades, but it is variance, not a guarantee, and the bag it sits on can still be eaten down to its seventy percent floor. Think of it as a real-ETH dividend wrapped around a bounded predation game, not a store of value and not free money.
The limits we will not pretend away: CARN-20 is hostile to standard DeFi plumbing, balances are elastic, expect CEX listing friction, and a bridged $CELL is a frozen, non-living wrapper. A single-block builder keeps a small residual MEV edge, because true VRF is unaffordable for a keeperless self-hook. Sybil and proxy immunity are capped and priced, not eliminated. The biggest cells are the hardest to eat (nothing larger exists to prey on them), so the largest holders are the game's stable base, the reward for committing the most capital and carrying the most price risk, while still earning only the same per-dollar yield rate as everyone. A whale cannot run the table either: the deflationary eat burns most of what a kill takes and hands the predator only a tenth, and the floor caps any victim at thirty percent of its peak. Some kills are searchers eating their own decoy cells, so the tape is not pure stranger-on-stranger. Every number here is enforced by invariants that pass a thousand-plus-run solvency fuzz before launch. None of it is hidden, because hiding it is how you lose the only people this is for.
Passive unattended mass is food.
Everything on this page comes straight from the contract with no indexer in the path: the live board (the dish + leaderboards) is read from the contract's own cellPage() and stats() views, and the eat feed is replayed from its Eaten and BloodEaten logs in block order, with each cell's current mass and banked ETH read directly from the contract. If our site goes down, the state still exists on-chain and anyone can rebuild this exact view.
Once $CELL is live you can check it yourself: the bloodstream is solvent when the hook's ETH balance is at least bloodReserve(), the single source of truth ethIn minus ethOut plus escrow, asserted after every operation and proven across a thousand-plus-run fuzz. Total supply always equals the sum of balances, because mass is just balance, there is no escrow to drift. The eat is armed on one block and resolved in a strictly later block from a sealed seed, which is what makes it un-aimable. Contract addresses and the audit link here at launch, not before.
afterSwapReturnDelta: the primitive that lets a token be its own pool's hook and take the ETH side of its own swap. Public and shared, not ours.