The About page says there are 86,400 seconds and 86,400 tokens. The home page prints a "free" number that ticks down as people claim. Both come from this site, and this site could, in principle, say anything. So here is the version that does not require trusting us: read the cap and the count straight off the contract on Base, the same way you would check who owns a specific second.
You do not need a wallet for any of this. Reading a public contract is free and signs nothing. The point is to prove to yourself that the numbers on the page are the numbers on the chain.
There are only two figures behind the whole supply story. One is the ceiling: how many seconds can ever exist. The other is the running total: how many have been claimed so far. Subtract the second from the first and you get the "free" count the home page shows.
The contract exposes the ceiling as a read-only view called MAX_SECONDS(). It takes no arguments and returns a single number. On this project that number is the length of a day in seconds, which is why the answer is 86,400 rather than some round figure a marketer picked. Twenty-four hours, times sixty minutes, times sixty seconds. The cap is arithmetic, not a decision, and reading it back from the chain is how you confirm nobody quietly changed it.
The running total is tucked inside a view named getJackpotInfo(), which returns several values at once. The one you want is mintedCount, the count of seconds already claimed. The home page reads exactly this field and computes 86400 - mintedCount to show how many are still open. You can do the same subtraction yourself and check that it lands on the same "free" number the page displays.
0 (00:00:00) to 86399 (23:59:59). That is 86,400 slots counting from zero, not 86,401. If you ever see a tool claim second 86,400 exists, it has miscounted the boundary. Midnight is second 0, and the last second of the day is 86,399.
The plainest way to read either value is through a Base block explorer such as Basescan. No wallet connection is required for reads.
MAX_SECONDS. It should return 86400.getJackpotInfo. Read the mintedCount field from the tuple it returns.86400 - mintedCount. That is how many seconds are still unclaimed, and it should match the home page.If you want to check a single second rather than the totals, getSecondData(second) returns whether that specific second is minted, its token ID, its owner, and its stored URL. That is the per-slot version of the same idea, and it is the one worth learning first, because ownership of your own second is the thing you most want to be able to verify without asking anyone.
One honest wrinkle. The "free" number on the home page and the number you read directly off the contract are the same field, but they are not always fetched at the same instant. The page refreshes its count on a timer, and between refreshes someone could claim a second. So if your explorer read is off by one or two from what the page shows, that is timing, not a contradiction. Refresh both and they converge. The chain is the record; the page is a snapshot of it taken a moment ago.
There is a subtler point here too. mintedCount tells you how many seconds are taken, not which ones. Two different sets of claimed seconds can produce the same count. If you want the full picture of what is claimed and by whom, that is a heavier read: the site rebuilds it by scanning the mint event log, which is a separate exercise from checking a single total. The count is the cheap, instant number. The map is the expensive one.
Reading these views proves that the supply cap is fixed at the length of a day and that the claimed count is a real onchain figure, not a marketing prop. That is worth something. It is the difference between "the site says 86,400" and "the contract on Base returns 86,400 when I ask it directly."
It does not prove anything about value, demand, or whether any given second will ever matter to anyone but you. A fixed supply is a fact about counting, not a promise about worth. Scarcity by construction, which is a phrase I keep coming back to, means the number is honest, not that the number is valuable.
Usual caveats, unchanged. Claiming a second costs a real fee on Base and the transaction cannot be undone. Keys that are lost stay lost. Phishing pages imitate real contracts, so confirm the address against the About page before you ever connect a wallet, and remember that reading, the thing this whole primer is about, never requires connecting one. This is not financial advice and a second is not an investment.
→ Read your second straight off Base · Rarity by construction · The site has no database
MAX_SECONDS() view returns (uint256) and getJackpotInfo() view returns (uint256 balance, uint256 lastDraw, uint256 totalPaid, uint256 mintedCount, bool canDraw); the home page reads mintedCount and displays 86400 - count as the free total. Second picker accepts an integer from 0 to 86399. getSecondData(uint256) returns (bool minted, uint256 tokenId, address owner_, string url) for a single second.