The proof that earns a Ranger.

There is no allowlist, no admin mint, no dev allocation. All 2222 Hash Rangers come from proof-of-work mining. Your browser searches for a nonce such that:

hash = keccak256(abi.encodePacked(minterAddress, nonce, lastWorkHash, recentBlockHash))
require(uint256(hash) < currentTarget)

lastWorkHash is the winning hash of the previous successful mint. Chaining each mint to the one before it means nobody can precompute an answer before the previous mint lands. minterAddress is your wallet, baked into every attempt, so nobody can steal a hash you found.

recentBlockHash is blockhash(block.number - 2), read on-chain at mint time. The frontend tells the contract which block it mined against; the contract re-derives the hash itself and reverts if that block has fallen outside Solidity’s 256-block blockhash() window — if your mine attempt takes long enough for that to happen, the miner automatically re-fetches a fresh block and keeps searching.

Finding a valid hash and sending the mint transaction assigns you a uniformly random unused image index from the 2222 pieces still unminted — you don’t choose which Ranger you get.

currentTarget — the number a hash has to land under — is retargeted every 4 successful mints by four independent rules:

1. Pace. Every 4 mints, actual elapsed time is compared against a plan of 60s per mint (240s per 4-mint window). Mints came in faster than planned → tighten. Slower → loosen. Bounded to at most 4x harder or 2x easier in a single step.
2. Idle network. If more than 10 minutes pass since the last successful mint with no retarget having happened, difficulty eases on the next attempt so a quiet collection doesn’t stall waiting on a lucky hash.
3. Streak / heat. Every successful mint adds 10 to a global heat counter; heat decays by 1 every 10s. Difficulty scales up with current heat, so a burst of consecutive mints gets measurably harder in real time, then relaxes once mining goes quiet.
4. Endgame. Once 222 or fewer Rangers remain (the last 10% of supply), an extra multiplier ramps linearly from 1.0x at 222 remaining up to 6.0x at the final token, so the last few can’t be trivially sniped by one fast miner right as supply runs out.

Epoch floor. Supply is split into 5 fixed price/difficulty epochs (see the price table below). Each epoch fixes a minimum difficulty floor stated in required leading-zero bits — a hash needs at least that many leading zero bits to win, and each extra bit is roughly 2x harder. A retarget can never loosen difficulty below the active epoch’s floor; crossing into a new epoch immediately raises it.

Price and difficulty floor are both fixed per epoch, by cumulative supply — not a continuously growing curve. Epoch 0 is free; each epoch after that costs more and requires more leading-zero bits to win.

Price is read from currentPrice() at mint time — the frontend re-checks it right before sending your transaction, in case the epoch changed between finding a hash and submitting.