Score and tickets
There are two counters on this floor and they do different jobs. They are easy to confuse because both go up when you hold, so this page starts by telling them apart.
| SCORE | TICKETS | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it lives | one cabinet at a time | the whole floor, one balance |
| What it counts | the coins you bought and still hold in that cabinet, aged | one ticket per sat you paid, per hour you keep holding it |
| What it decides | that cabinet's HIGH SCORE draws | what you can afford at the PRIZE COUNTER |
| What it pays | COIN-OP, with a door out to bitcoin | bitcoin (cbBTC) |
| Is it spent? | never — it is your standing, not a wallet | yes — a shelf has a price and winning charges it |
Your score is the number beside your name on a cabinet's HIGH SCORE board. Your tickets are a floor-wide balance you carry between cabinets and spend at the counter. Playing one cabinet builds both at once.
(The name GOLDEN TICKET is moving. It used to belong to a cabinet and weigh a shared jackpot draw — that jackpot is retired and every cabinet now has its own, so nothing is weighed. The name is being given to the rare entry in a cabinet's own HIGH SCORE. Decided, not yet built — see Golden tickets.)
How score is counted
Your score is built from the coins you hold, weighted two ways:
How much you hold. More coins, more base score. Read live from the chain —
balanceOf(your wallet), never an estimate.How long you've held (COMBO). Every coin carries the time since you acquired it. Older coins score higher, on a multiplier that climbs with age (from ×1 up over a fixed ramp). Diamond hands out-score fresh money of the same size.
No-sell streak (RUN, +0.5x). An unbroken run of never selling adds an extra multiplier on top, ramping over 30 days. Any sell breaks it and it restarts.
This week's volume (ROLLER, +0.5x). Playing the machine — volume through its pool this weekly round (rounds start Monday, UTC) — lights an extra bonus. It ramps: full at volume equal to 25% of your bag, proportional below (move 12.5% → +0.25x). It multiplies only coins you hold: volume with an empty bag is worth exactly zero. The bonus is capped — churning past the ramp buys nothing more. And note the welcome gift: a new player's first buy is volume, so ROLLER lights the moment you sit down.
Holding THE COIN (+0.5x). Hold at least 10,000,000 COIN-OP — 0.01% of the supply — of the arcade's own coin, and every machine you play gets one more bonus. One threshold, every cabinet.
Put together: score = Σ (each coin lot × its age multiplier) + your bag × (RUN + ROLLER + COIN bonuses). Everything maxed out is x3.5 — four power-ups, each one visible on your COMBO meter.
MAX — the rainbow
Nothing on the ladder ramps past day 30 — but the counter keeps going. MAX is made of exactly two things: every coin in your bag rested a full 30 days, and an unbroken 30-day no-sell run. Hit both and your COMBO lights up in the arcade rainbow — the only place the rainbow ever appears, on the whole floor. Your STREAK reads MAX·47d and keeps climbing, unbounded, for everyone to see.
Two things MAX deliberately does not require: the ROLLER and COIN power-ups. Those are weekly and optional — they push your number as high as x3.5 when lit, but a veteran's rainbow never flickers off just because a quiet week went by. Endurance earns the rainbow; endurance keeps it.
One sell — any outflow — and the rainbow is gone, the run restarts at zero. That's the whole game.
Selling — exactly what it costs your score
You can cash out anytime; the board just prices it honestly:
- Sell everything → balance zero, score zero, off the board.
- Sell part → your newest coins go first. The oldest, highest-multiplier lots survive, so your base score drops a little less than the share you sold — veteran coins are protected by design. But the no-sell streak breaks in full either way, and restarts from that moment.
- Any outbound transfer counts as a sell — including moves between your own wallets. The chain can't read intent; the board only sees coins leaving. Keep your stack in the wallet that plays.
Your streak is always counted from your last outflow — not from your first buy. If your streak ever looks shorter than you expected, look for the last transaction that sent coins out of your wallet.
Your SCORE is never spent
Inside a cabinet, you don't "spend" anything to enter its HIGH SCORE draws. Every point of score is entered automatically, winning doesn't burn it, and it is your standing on that machine rather than a consumable. The more you hold and the longer you hold it, the bigger your share of every round that cabinet fires.
Your TICKETS are spent — that is what makes the counter a counter
The PRIZE COUNTER is the other half, and it works like the prize counter in a real arcade: the shelves have prices and you pay them.
- One ticket per sat, per hour. A ticket is a sat you actually paid multiplied by an hour you kept holding it. Cost basis, never today's mark — what you paid already happened, and a price can be pushed in a thin pool.
- A lap's prices are frozen the first time anyone reads them, so weeks of saving raise the next ladder instead of buying out this one.
- Only wallets that can afford a shelf are in its draw, and among them the weight is your ticket balance. Weighted rather than flat, because flat odds can be split across wallets and weighted odds cannot.
- Winning subtracts only the price — charged in the same block that writes the payout, so a prize handed over and its price can never come apart. What you had over the price stays yours, including at the top shelf: nothing is ever wiped.
- Coins that were given to you earn no tickets. A transfer in carries a cost of zero sats, so the "bought, not given" rule is the arithmetic itself rather than a filter bolted on beside it.
- Selling doesn't claw back what you already earned. The tickets a lot had earned by the moment you sold it stay in your balance. What stops is the earning.
Letting a prize expire gives the tickets back. The counter charges for a prize handed over, and nothing was handed over — so the sats climb to the next shelf as THE CHALLENGER and your tickets return. The one thing you cannot do is refuse your way upward: the wallet whose refused prize is still on the stairs is out of the draw for the shelf that prize climbed into, and out of nothing else.
What does NOT earn tickets
- Trading volume, on its own. Volume never creates tickets — it can only multiply coins you actually hold (the ROLLER bonus above), it's capped so churn can't stack it, and selling to generate volume breaks your RUN — the two bonuses cancel and the fees are lost. Wash trading is net-negative by construction. See The boards.
- Airdropped or received coins — on either counter. Coins you bought and hold are what count. Coins that merely landed in your wallet show in your holdings on the display board, but they do not enter you in a cabinet's draws and they earn no tickets at the counter (a transfer in carries a cost of zero sats, so it earns zero sat-hours). See Prizes & fairness. This keeps a prize from ever being drawn to a wallet that never chose to play.
There is no airdrop, and there never will be
COIN-OP's supply is 90% pool, 10% House vault (locked 180 days, then vesting over 720). There is no airdrop, no reserve and no drop to holders — not at launch and not later. This page used to describe one; it was discarded on 2026-09-07 for a simple reason: the thing it was meant to do already happens every time a machine fires. Every cabinet's HIGH SCORE pays in COIN-OP that the House buys on the open market with that cabinet's own 30% leg, so a community that never held the coin ends up holding it by playing — bought with real demand, not printed from a reserve.
What holding COIN-OP does get you: the COIN bonus in every cabinet's draw, cabinet 000's own HIGH SCORE, and the FLOOR TICKET that seats a machine on the floor (The flywheel · THE CLAW).
Tickets are for entertainment. Holding more does not entitle you to a return — it's a bigger share of a game, not a bigger yield.