The flywheel — where your coin goes

One coin in, four machines move, the coin comes back around. This page follows a single buy through the whole floor, in plain terms.

The one line the rest follows from: a cabinet pays rent. It never needs to know that another cabinet exists.

The split, start to finish

You put a coin in a cabinet — a buy. 98.8% becomes your tokens, in your wallet. A 1% fee is what runs the arcade — Clanker, the factory every cabinet is built by, takes its own 0.2% on top of it, at the pool — and the 1% goes:

• 10% — the creator. The person who put the cabinet on the floor.
• 90% — the floor. Goes back to the game, through four machines:

Machine	Share	What it does
REFILL	40%	That cabinet buys its own coin back and burns it
HIGH SCORE	30%	That cabinet's own prize pool — pays its board in COIN-OP
JACKPOT	15%	That cabinet's own pot — when it trips it buys its own coin back and burns it
RENT	15%	The House's, for the spot on the floor. It stocks the PRIZE COUNTER

Read every percentage on this page against the floor's 90%, which is the base the table has always used.

Three of the four never leave the cabinet. Refill, High Score and the jackpot are that machine's own money, spent on that machine's own coin and that machine's own players. Nothing is pooled, nothing is ranked against another cabinet, and no machine's payout depends on what any other machine did.

The fourth is rent, and rent is the House's — no strings, and no claim from the cabinet that paid it. That distinction is the whole design: rent is not a share of a pot the cabinet has a stake in. A cabinet with a stake in a shared pot forces the engine to rank cabinets against each other, and ranking is where every cross-token valuation came from.

REFILL vs JACKPOT — the mix-up everyone makes

Both do the same move — buy the coin, burn the coin — and both belong to the same cabinet. The difference is size and rhythm:

• REFILL is the machine's metabolism. Its pot fills from its own fees, and when the bar hits the target it fires — automatically, its own coin, every time. The target is 50 basis points of its own pool's depth, read live, so a deep pool has a higher bar than a thin one. Small, constant, per machine.
• JACKPOT is the machine's rare, loud event. Its pot fills in sats and trips at 5,000,000 sats — a round figure in bitcoin. The sats are fixed; what that is in dollars moves with bitcoin, and the meter says it. Then, in one pass: 10% goes to the PRIZE COUNTER, and the rest buys that cabinet's own coin on its own pool and burns it, in slices the pool can absorb. A collective win — every holder wins through the burn. Nobody gets a personal payout; the machine does.

No draw picks a cabinet. There used to be one shared jackpot and a verifiable random draw that chose which cabinet won it, weighted by golden tickets. That is retired. Every cabinet has its own pot and trips on its own trigger, so nothing weighs one cabinet against another and there is no valuation to get wrong.

COIN-OP DOMINANCE is a scoreboard, not a mechanism: the mother coin's share of the whole arcade's market cap, every cabinet valued live by its own pool and its circulating supply (what was burned comes off the cap), all in sats. It moves because a cabinet grew, not because a price moved underneath everyone.

One pair, and what each machine pays in

Every cabinet on the floor pairs against WETH, including the mother. That is the decoupling: a cabinet reads its own pool and nothing else.

The floor counts in sats — bitcoin is the unit of account, so a bar and a shelf mean the same thing in a month as they do today, whatever the pair does.

What each machine hands over:

• REFILL and JACKPOT hand over nothing. They buy the cabinet's own coin and burn it.
• HIGH SCORE pays its board in COIN-OP. The machine buys COIN-OP with its 30% and the winners claim it. This is deliberate: 30% of every cabinet's fees is a standing bid on the mother, and it is her largest source of demand.
• The PRIZE COUNTER pays bitcoin. A shelf is named in bitcoin, sized in sats and paid in cbBTC, converted when the shelf is funded on the same reference pool the board prices every satoshi through — so the rate you are paid at is the rate you were quoted. It is the only machine that converts, and it is the only one every cabinet shares.

Whatever a pot holds is what it pays, and the door out sits beside it. A HIGH SCORE pot holds COIN-OP, so a HIGH SCORE prize arrives as COIN-OP with the CASH OUT button next to it — the floor does not convert for you there and does not guess what you wanted. The PRIZE COUNTER is the exception and the reason is above: it is the shared machine, so it pays the thing the whole floor counts in.

Three lines that never bend:

1. A machine never sells its own coin. Its coin has one exit: the furnace.
2. Refill buybacks are always real market buys — never internal accounting. When the sign says the machine bought its coin back, there's a transaction.
3. The House never invents a price. Anything converted settles at a real pool's price at that moment, recorded on-chain, checkable by anyone.

The machine never times the market

Every flywheel action fires on a rule, never on an opinion: a bar reaches its target, a pot reaches its trigger, a harvest runs on its schedule. Nobody at the House looks at the chart first. That's deliberate:

• Burns don't care about price. If a refill fires right before a dip, the machine "paid more" — but burned is burned; the supply is smaller either way, and the House isn't holding anything that can lose value. There is no bag.
• The counter counts in sats, so no bar runs backwards. A shelf reads 0.01 BTC or it doesn't; the dollar chart can do whatever it likes.
• What the pot holds at the draw IS the prize. A prize's size is fixed the moment the round is drawn, and from then on the price is the winner's to carry — claiming later changes the day and nothing else. The House does not carry a position between earning a fee and paying a prize, because a House that carries one is a House with an opinion.

A machine that timed the market would be a trader with your fees. A machine that follows rules is a machine. We built the second one.

No cash value. The flywheel is the arcade's engine — entertainment, not an investment. Nothing here is a return, a yield, or a promise of profit.