THE CLAW — the door to the floor

Every arcade has one: the machine you stand at, working the bar, waiting for the drop. On this floor THE CLAW is the door — the machine that decides which cabinets come out of the LOADING DOCK and onto the main floor.

A coin is born on the ASSEMBLY LINE and lands in the dock. It is real, it trades, it has its own pool. What it does not have yet is a spot on the floor. THE CLAW is how it earns one.

The bar is rent

Every cabinet pays RENT — 15% of what its own pool collects in fees — for its spot on the floor. A cabinet in the dock pays the same rent, and the rent it has paid IS the bar. When the bar fills, the claw comes down and the cabinet is seated:

HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER!

EARN YOUR FLOOR: 100,000 sats of rent paid. That is the whole rule. No vote, no application, no queue and nobody at the House deciding your coin is interesting. Trade enough that your cabinet has paid the House 100,000 sats for the privilege, and the door opens on its own.

Why rent, and not market cap

Most launchpads graduate a coin when it reaches a market cap. We do not, and the reason is not philosophy.

A market cap is rentable. In a pool with no custody, a price can be bought up to a threshold and sold straight back out — the cap touches the number, the door opens, and nothing was ever spent. On 09-04 we measured pools sitting 3,760× away from their own market. A number that can be borrowed for one block is not a door, it is a formality.

Rent cannot be un-paid. It is a spent quantity: the fees left the trades, the House has them, and no amount of selling afterwards claws them back. A cabinet that graduates has genuinely put that much through its pool.

And we are relaxed about how the volume happens. If a dev trades against themselves to push their own bar, every one of those trades paid the fee that fills it — the House got its rent either way, and the cabinet paid full price for its spot. The bar cannot be gamed because there is nothing to game: it is the payment.

INSERT A COIN — pushing the bar

The bar is not only the cabinet's own trading. Anyone can push it by burning COIN-OP for that cabinet: dev, community, a stranger who likes the art. A burn lands on the bar at 2× what it was worth, because burning the mother's coin is worth more to the floor than a fee is.

FLOOR TICKET is the same act, all at once: burn COIN-OP worth half the bar and it completes an empty one, seating the cabinet immediately.

The ticket's price is not a number we keep somewhere. It is derived — half the bar, because a burn counts double — so when the bar moves the ticket moves with it, automatically. It used to be its own setting, and when the bar changed the ticket did not follow: the floor published a door price 6.7× the bar it exists to fill, while the dock's own quote had it right the whole time. One definition, one number.

What the claw shows

The dock is public and so is every bar in it: what each cabinet has paid, what it still needs, who inserted coins and when. A cabinet that has been quiet for a long time retires to the Warehouse — still linked, still locked, CONTINUE? if its volume comes back.

Set — and published

• The bar: 100,000 sats of rent paid.
• INSERT A COIN: any COIN-OP burn for that cabinet, at 2× on the bar.
• FLOOR TICKET: a burn worth half the bar seats it at once.
• Who decides: nobody. The bar fills or it does not.
• Both doors have been walked end to end on Base mainnet — a cabinet seated by rent paid, and another by a FLOOR TICKET burned — not just described here.

No cash value. The claw is a game on the floor. Seating a cabinet is entertainment and a place to play, not a return.