Buy the gates. Burn the circuit. Take the number.
- 01Buy the gates
- 02Burn them into a circuit
- 03Stamp its number
That is the card — three confirmations. Then one puzzle a day, and five stages until it is a working CPU.
TapeFoundry publishes circuit drawings anyone can copy, and sells the gates to build them. Pick a drawing, buy its parts, tape it out — the parts burn, a circuit mints, and the chain records exactly how many gates it took.
Eleven drawings. 3,450 numbered cards. The first stage of a machine whose last stage is a working CPU.
Today's number — Solve it →How a card is made
A drawing
Every design is a real netlist — NAND gates wired into an adder, a decoder, a comparator. Gate counts run from 40 to 2,118. Nothing is decorative.
Its parts
Each gate is a transistor token. A 1,196-gate ALU burns 1,196 parts. Parts are bound to one processor, so a drawing only builds with the parts sold for it.
Burn, mint, record
The parts are destroyed and an ERC-721 circuit is minted with the netlist stored on chain. Its gate count is permanent, and anyone can check it without trusting us.
What we're building
Foundry One — a computer, one circuit at a time.Arithmetic
Adders, multipliers, dividers, comparators. The parts that compute.
live · 11 drawingsMemory
Registers, counters, register files. The parts that remember.
next · drawings in progressControl
Decoders, state machines, timing. The parts that decide.
plannedI/O
Shifters, buffers, bus logic. The parts that talk.
plannedThe Machine
Everything above, wired into one CPU. The reason the series exists.
the goalWhat happens next
Each stage opens at a number.The drawings
All 11 at true scale →Rarity is not assigned. It is the number of gates that actually burned. When a drawing reaches its cap, it closes — the registry will not issue another number.
Next editions
the next number is the lowest one left · SHIFT4 closed at 100/100 →Every drawing numbers its cards in order, and a number is never reused. —
Which card do you need?
the drawing decides how far you can reachEvery card can solve the daily number — but only up to its own width. Pick the row that matches the answers you want to find.
Buy a card
three confirmations · every amount shown firstPick a drawing and buy one card. The page buys exactly the gates it needs, burns them into a circuit, and stamps its number — three confirmations, and your wallet shows the amount before each one. Once a drawing reaches its cap, no further numbers exist for anyone.
Parts are bound to one processor: the gates you buy only build this house's drawings. The 0.0002 BNB tapeout fee is charged by the protocol, not by this page. The edition stamp costs gas only — the registry holds no funds.
Latest from the foundry
reading the chain…Run a drawing
Every drawing is a real gate-level netlist, and the netlist is public. Flip the inputs and the gates compute in your browser — nothing is sent to a server, no wallet needed.
If you ever want to sell it
Two doors, both already open. Nothing here needs our permission.
TapeOut's circuit market
The protocol has its own market. Two transactions — approve, then list — and the market takes 1% of the sale from you. Buyers there are already inside TapeOut. Change the price or delist whenever you want.
Wrap it for Element
A raw circuit has no metadata, so other marketplaces show a blank card.
Wrapping locks the original and mints TFD with the drawing, the gate
count and the edition number on chain. Unwrap any time — gas only.
The number travels
Editions are bound to the circuit, not to a wallet. Sell it ten times and it is still the same number — anyone can check that on the verify page.
Verify a card
Reads the netlist from a public BNB Chain node and hashes it in your browser. The hash says which drawing it is; the processor address says whether it is ours.
What this is — and what it isn't
Six things worth saying out loud, so you are not finding them out later.
On chain, so far
| Processor | #1400 · 0x5a4eaff589c9e410260a61d658a893876710ba83 |
| Transistors | 0x9039e4cd6ceba37522382eb1ad8076ba38c975dc |
| Circuits | — |
| Editions | 0xb69215ce68792eca5672b49196868369555ea181 · epoch 1 · 50 / 100 / 700 per drawing |
| Parts cap | 12,000,000 · factory capacity, not the edition supply |
| Stamped | — |
| Wrapper | 0xB4A7B988B77Bd7b29E56F42229464a8dD72361bF · TFD · on-chain metadata |
Who's building this
It started with a question: a chain can move value — can it make a thing?
Our team is eight people, and this is the only thing we work on. We have spent our careers building things that have to work, and we have seen plenty of projects that talk more than they build.
TapeOut is where it became possible: the parts themselves become the asset on chain — anyone can buy them, burn them, and verify them. The material is real; the product is a machine.
We had wanted to build something like this for years. What was missing was a substrate honest enough to build it on. Now there is one.
Over the next several years we will assemble it in public: five stages, one circuit at a time, drawings published first, numbers left on chain. When it is finished, it will not belong to us. It will belong to everyone holding a part.
Read the whole argument → Why a machineQuestions people actually ask
Fourteen answers, grouped the way they get asked — buy, hold, play, sell, verify. The docs go deeper on every one.
Buying
What do I actually own?
A card is an ERC-721 circuit with its netlist on chain. You own the drawing, its edition number, and the NAND gates that were burned to build it — 40 for the shifter, 2,118 for the multiplier. All three are checkable without trusting us.
What does a card cost?
Gates × 0.0000234 BNB, plus a 0.0001 BNB protocol fee, plus the 0.0002 BNB tapeout fee. A 40-gate drawing is 0.001236 BNB; a 2,118-gate drawing is 0.049861 BNB. Gas is extra and goes to the chain, not to us.
Why three transactions?
They are three different contracts: buy the gates, burn them to tape out the circuit, then stamp the edition into the registry. Hiding them behind one button would mean deploying a router that holds your money. We chose the extra signature.
Can I buy the whole set at once?
Yes — the ten drawings that are still open. One button buys their parts, tapes out ten cards and stamps ten numbers. SHIFT4 reached its hundred-number cap on 22 Oct 2026 and is closed for good, so the eleven-card set can no longer be assembled; the set mark stays with the wallets that did it while SHIFT4 was open. Stopping halfway leaves you with the cards already stamped — nothing is lost.
Is there a discount, a whitelist or a presale?
No discount, and no presale. The price is always the gate count times a unit price: Series 01's was fixed when the foundry opened, and the next stage's will be published when it opens. A discount would break the only claim the project makes: that the number on the card is the number that burned. Series 01 opened with no whitelist. The next stage reserves a share of each drawing for Series 01 wallets, same formula — a reserved seat, not a cheaper one.
Why buy now instead of waiting?
Because waiting only changes which numbers are left. The price is the gate count times one fixed unit, so it does not drop — there is no presale, no discount and no allocation to wait for in Series 01. What does change is the supply: every drawing stops at its cap (50, 100 or 700), and the first edition of each of the eleven is already claimed. A card bought today is the same machine as one bought next month; the number on it is not.
Holding and playing
What can I do with a card after I buy it?
Run its netlist in the browser, use it in the daily puzzle, vote when the series reaches 30% sold, and claim the set mark if your wallet already holds all eleven (the set sealed on 22 Oct). The card is the entry ticket — there is no staking step and nothing else to sign up for.
What is the daily puzzle worth?
The record is the reward — and the season's top ten keep 10% of every Series 02 drawing reserved. It adds a day and a streak to your wallet, and the ceiling is your card's output width: a 4-bit shifter cannot reach a 16-bit number at any price. On a 16-bit day the small cards are not slow — they are excluded.
What did holding all eleven get you?
A non-transferable set mark, claimed on chain. The eleven-card set was sealed on 22 Oct 2026 when SHIFT4's last number was stamped; the mark stays with those wallets. Holders also get a founding-set listing, 7% of every Series 02 drawing reserved for a published period, and the right to name one Series 02 drawing.
My card says #7 but the edition is 6/100. Which number is right?
Both, they answer different questions. #7 is the token id on the wrapper — a global counter across every drawing. 6 / 100 is the edition inside its own drawing: the sixth ADD4 card that will ever exist. Token ids run globally, editions run per drawing, so the two drift apart once people wrap and unwrap.
Selling a card
Can I sell it?
Two doors, both open. List on TapeOut's own circuit market (1% fee), or wrap it into
TFD and list on Element or OKX. Unwrapping returns the original circuit
at any time, gas only.
What happens when a drawing sells out?
The registry stops issuing numbers for that drawing — 700 for the main four, 100 for the entry cards, 50 for the 12-bit multiplier. We stop selling it the moment the last number is stamped. The netlist stays public, so a copy could still be taped out elsewhere on TapeOut — it would carry no number.
What happens when the whole series sells out?
The series is complete, not discontinued. All 3,450 numbers exist and no drawing is reissued — the caps close for good. The wallets holding cards at that moment are the founding set, and that record is written from the chain, not from our list. Every card keeps working: the netlist still runs in a browser, the daily number still opens, and the mark for all eleven stays on the wallet. What comes next is drawn by holders, not announced by us.
Technical
Someone copied the drawing. Is my card fake?
The drawings are public on purpose — that is the product. A copy runs on a different processor, and the verify page checks the processor address as well as the netlist hash. Same bytes on someone else's processor reads NOT A TAPEFOUNDRY CARD.
Why does the foundry hold 12,000,000 parts?
That number is capacity, not supply. What limits a card is the registry: 3,450 numbers for Series 01, and no more. Parts are how a card is built; numbers are how many exist.
Do I need a special wallet?
Any BNB Chain wallet. Desktop wallets connect directly; on a phone use WalletConnect and scan the code. Once connected the site remembers it until you press Disconnect.