A swarm is not an audience. It is a pattern of movement created by many independent bodies responding to the same conditions. The Midnight Moths formed the same way: collectors, artists, builders, and trench survivors moving toward a light none of them owned alone.
The collection gave the signal a shape, but ownership was never meant to turn the world into a velvet-rope room. The important part was continuity—knowing who held the original moths, respecting how they arrived, and giving those holders a real path into whatever came next.
That principle later shaped the ReBase distribution: one counterpart for each qualifying original, direct token-number mapping where possible, bridge-aware eligibility, and room for carefully chosen extras. The swarm remembers its own.