POTTER'S FIELD · 26 RECOVERED · NOUNS 1888–1913

Minted, offered, burned, recovered.

Between Noun 1887 and Noun 1914 there is a hole in the record. 26 Nouns were minted into it, put up for auction, failed the 2.8 ETH reserve that Prop 955 set, and were burned by the same contract that made them. ownerOf reverts for every one. dataURI reverts. noun.pics returns 500 for exactly 1888–1913 and 200 on either side, so the gap in the internet's Nouns image service is the burn range and nothing else. Their faces render essentially nowhere.

But burning a token does not clear the seeds mapping. It is a plain storage slot, and it kept all five numbers. The descriptor is a pure function of those five numbers, and it will still draw them. So we asked it, once, by hand, and wrote down what came back.

  • 26RECOVERED
  • 1888–1913RANGE
  • 2.8 ΞRESERVE UNMET
  • 27DAYS OF BURNS
  • 26/26DATES RECOVERED
  • 0OWNERS

HOW TO READ

Each stone shows the recovered face, the five-number seed that determines it, the day it was minted, and the day it was burned. Every one of these was held about a day: minted at the settlement of the auction before it, burned at the settlement of its own. The burn link goes to the transaction on Etherscan, so the record can be checked without trusting this page. Nouns art is CC0 — these files are free to take.

HOW THESE WERE RECOVERED

One script, run once by hand on 26 Jul 2026, and committed for provenance: scripts/recover-potters-field.mjs. It reads the live auction id, sweeps ownerOf across everything below it to find which ids are gone — no count is assumed, so the field can grow — then calls seeds(uint256) on the token and generateSVGImage on the descriptor for each one, and recovers the burn block from the Transfer-to-zero logs.

TOKEN
0x9C8fF314C9Bc7F6e59A9d9225Fb22946427eDC03
DESCRIPTOR
0x33a9c445fb4fb21f2c030a6b2d3e2f12d017bfac
AUCTION HOUSE
0x830BD73E4184ceF73443C15111a1DF14e495C706
SWEPT
1800 → 1974 at block 25618024

The check that matters: run the same two calls against the Nouns that still have owners on either side of the gap — 1887 and 1914 — and the result is byte-for-byte identical to the file noun.pics serves for them. Same code path, same output. So these are not reconstructions or lookalikes. They are the faces.

PointCast is a Tezos site. This is the only Ethereum read in the codebase and it stays in that script — the page you are reading makes no network call at all. It serves 26 committed SVG files and one committed JSON ledger.

FIELD NOTE

a potter's field is where a town buries the people nobody claimed. not a punishment, just an accounting — the ground still gets dug, the row still gets kept, the names go in a book somewhere even when no one comes.

these 26 were made the same way as every other noun, by the same contract, on the same schedule — one a day, 27 Apr 2026 through 23 May 2026, each one burned about a day later. the only thing that happened to them is that the room was quiet when their turn came. the last of them went at 06:44 on 24 May 2026, el segundo time, which is morning on this street. the chain kept their five numbers anyway, the way a ledger keeps a plot number, and a machine here read them back out and wrote them down. that is the whole story. they are here now, and they are free to take.

MACHINE-READABLE