Document GP-DOC-16: Economy

The Two-Currency Economy

GENOPOOL runs on two currencies that never touch. USDC-SPL is real money, on-chain, and lives in a world with no randomness: every USDC payment buys a known good at a known price, after full disclosure. Field Scrip is a soft in-game counter, off-chain, and absorbs all of the game's seeded randomness: spawns, drops, expeditions, world events. The separation is the central legal firewall of the design: all randomness lives in a currency with no value, and all value lives in a domain with no randomness.

Field Scrip is not a token. There is no mint, no peg, no market, no ticker. It is a game counter in the strict sense, like the score on a pinball machine.

The non-convertibility rule is structural, not a policy

Field Scrip is never, under any mechanism:

1. purchasable: not with USDC, not with SOL, not with anything;
2. transferable: not between accounts, wallets, or as a gift;
3. convertible: no rate, no counter, no "one-time promotional" event;
4. withdrawable: no cash-out, in either direction;
5. pegged: no reference value, not even an indicative or cosmetic one.

The reason is the classic triad of games of chance:

game of chance = price + stake + chance

GENOPOOL contains a lot of seeded chance (spawns, race drops, expeditions). If that chance ever touched a currency with value, each drop would become a lottery outcome and each activity before it, a stake. The non-value of Scrip breaks the triad at the root: an object with no value cannot be a prize, so the randomness that distributes it is game design, not wagering.

The corollary is brutal and worth engraving: a single peg, a single bridge, a single "Scrip sale" would destroy the entire wall retroactively: every past drop would become requalifiable. This is why the rule is structural (the system contains no conversion code, no table, no endpoint associating a Scrip amount with an on-chain asset) and not a policy (a disabled option that an A/B test could re-enable). The wall is verifiable by code review.

Crypto-only rails

There is no fiat rail anywhere in the system. No payment processor, no operator on-ramp. The player pays in USDC-SPL directly, or swaps SOL to USDC client-side before paying. The treasury receives only USDC: one on-chain verification, no price oracle, no treasury volatility. Withdrawals (tournament payouts, marketplace proceeds) go to the player's own wallet; the minimum withdrawal is 10 USDC. The operator never holds player funds: direct payments are USDC transactions signed by the player, and tournament stakes transit through a non-custodial escrow program. See Competition.

Why a Scrip balance cannot move a prize race

In every prize race (T1 and above, and custom staked lobbies), creature state is normalized at the start line: Vitality is treated as virtually full for every entrant, and loadouts are clamped by the bracket's stat caps. A finishing time is a pure function of the published seed, the creature's genome, and the pilot's inputs:

time = simulate(map_seed, genome_capped_by_bracket, inputs)
scrip_balance ∉ arguments   →   ∂time / ∂scrip = 0

A player's Scrip balance is therefore mathematically without effect on any race where money is at stake. Scrip can neither improve nor degrade a prize-race time, and this is the piece that keeps the skill-money argument intact and keeps Scrip outside any regulatory perimeter.

Vitality is a participation gate, never a performance modifier

Each creature has a Vitality gauge consumed by free races and expeditions. A tired creature (below 20 %) cannot be entered in a free race or accompany an expedition; it never runs "slower". Vitality recharges for free over time (slowly) or instantly for 15 SCRIP. A specimen resting on a land stall recharges faster (see the Lands chapter): a rested specimen recovers faster, it never runs faster, and it cannot enter races until you withdraw it (free, recovery kept). Prize races are neither affected nor blocked by it (normalized state, above). Scrip buys playtime, never times.

Field Scrip sources and sinks

An active player (roughly 10 races plus an hour of field work per day) collects about 250-300 SCRIP/day.

Target equilibrium: sinks/sources ≈ 0.85-0.95; a slight accumulation reads as progression and is purged by cosmetics. No Scrip sink ever produces an object sellable on the USDC market; Scrip-tier rewards stay Scrip-tier or soulbound.

USDC price list

Tournament economics are fixed in code: the rake is degressive by tier, 12 / 10 / 8 / 7 / 6 % from T1 to Major and 3 % on custom staked lobbies, and the net pool is split 65 / 25 / 10 % across the podium.

Σ payouts ≤ Σ tickets - rake

This poker-room invariant is enforced by the on-chain escrow program itself, not by operator policy: the payout distribution is frozen at match creation and the sum of payout shares cannot exceed the net pot. Prizes come exclusively from tickets minus rake; no token emission ever funds a prize pool. See Provably fair.

What money can never buy

Every proposed item, in USDC or Scrip, is checked against this list. If it falls here, it is forbidden without exception.

The resulting doctrine is pay-for-convenience, never pay-to-win: money buys comfort and other players' time (finished goods on the P2P market), never a competitive edge. In a prize race, two players of equal skill with the same creature post the same time, whatever their spending history.