08 · Economy: Crowns, and the ownership layer beneath
In short: The game is free to play. Crowns are the money you earn by playing. You never buy them or cash them out. An optional token underneath lets collectors burn to immortalize a champion as an on-chain card. The token never buys power and never pays a return. The two currencies never mix.
The cardinal rule: the game is free and complete without spending or owning anything on-chain. Crypto is a trophy case under the game, never a gate in front of it. Raise, climb, collect, and fight having never seen a wallet.
Design law: the token buys permanence (and soft standing). Never yield. No staking APY, no "stake to earn," no pot where winners take losers' money, no cut of a living champion's Crowns to a card holder.
Two economies, never bridged
| Crowns | The Token (working name $ZING) | |
|---|---|---|
| Nature | Soft, in-game | Hard, on-chain (Solana) |
| How you get it | Earned by playing | Bought on a market, or airdropped for play |
| What it's for | Training, entries, backing, cosmetic reforges | Burn to immortalize a champion card |
| Cash value | None, ever | Market value (not our promise) |
| Cashes out? | Never | Only on the open market, never through us |
The two balances never convert into each other. The wall between them is the most important invariant in this document.
Practically: a new player touches only Crowns. The token is an opt-in collector layer for Trainers who want a legend stamped forever.
Crowns (the in-world currency, free)
Crowns are the soft currency, earned by playing:
| Source | Reward |
|---|---|
| Win a fight | Crowns + XP + rating |
| Press the Gauntlet | escalating pot, press-your-luck (the Gauntlet is a run of back-to-back fights where the reward climbs but one loss ends it) |
| Train | spend Crowns → XP + body evolution toward your strategy (the fighting style you've set) |
| Rank Fight (standings entry) | spend Crowns → one rated board fight against a random opponent (no free rating grind) |
| Flight milestones (Hundred, first-light) | one-shot purses; the Hundred is a large celebration purse outside the daily earn cap |
| Daily / season objectives | a steady trickle |
Crowns buy training, entries, and cosmetic reforges. Play money: abundant, never sold, never cashed out. Variable earns from Flight, Arena, caches, and goals share a daily cap; milestone purses sit outside that cap. Craft board rank is pride, never a Crown purse. Improvement can pay; placement does not.
"Back," not "bet"
Inside the Crowns economy, the player verb is back. You back a champion to win. We retire the word "bet" in player copy. Conviction, not gambling. The mechanic underneath is unchanged; only the language is.
The Token ($ZING, working name)
One hard job, easy to say out loud:
Burn token → immortalize your champion as an on-chain card.
That is the utility. Standing around those cards is soft glory only.
Immortalize
- You own a living career. You choose to stamp it (owner only).
- You burn a fixed amount of token set by rarity class (retuned between mint windows). No price oracles. No bonding curves.
- The chain mints a card. The art is a frozen snapshot of that career at the moment of the stamp. In the Grounds the body may keep growing; the card does not morph on its own. Early stamps can be remembered as Genesis / OG when craft improves.
- Scarcity follows the roster. In the first year each mind may be immortalized at most eight times. One stamp per living career. When the house releases a new wave of minds, those minds receive their own eight — supply grows with the dex waves (03-champions.md), not with every story season. Launch opens near a thousand possible stamps; further waves in that year can lift the ceiling toward the mid-thousands if every slot fills — still scarce, never a mass drop. Story seasons keep turning; they do not each print a new set. Early stamps in the Genesis window carry an OG mark; later stamps of the same mind are still scarce but not Genesis.
- Provenance on the card records who holds it, when it was stamped, and which season marked it. Cards trade. A small royalty on trade may split between the house and the original minter — never a cut of Crowns the living champion earns.
The living champion still belongs to the Trainer for play. Crowns it earns stay with that Trainer. The card is the trophy, not a claim on future soft earnings.
Standing (soft)
Immortalized cards may carry season crests, gallery placement, and a name among those who showed up. Holding or earning stamps can weight a future airdrop from the seeded treasury. Glory and allocation weight. Never a continuous payout. Never a fee on Crowns the champion generates.
Trade of cards on the open market may later carry a small house royalty. That is ordinary collectible trade, not a salary from the fight.
What the token never does
- Buy wins, stats, or board entry
- Pay yield, APY, or performance fees
- Convert to or from Crowns
- Gate Flight, raise, or the free season
Supply tightens when people immortalize: burns remove token. We may seed treasury for airdrops. We never pay that treasury out as yield.
Seasons and the free game
The free game already runs on a season clock: the Vault opens another door,
with a soft rank reset so you carry your name forward
(06-seasons.md). That free season stays free for everyone.
Seasons give immortalize its calendar: edition marks, crest language, mint waves when a chapter turns. Crypto remains the trophy case for that chapter. Never the slot machine.
Design constraints
- The wall holds. Crowns and the token never convert and never share a balance.
- Provenance is already named. Cards already carry mint id, owner, chain, and minted season. The chain fills those fields; it does not rewrite the dex.
- No game-affecting power is ever sold. Permanence and soft standing only. Pay-to-own a trophy, never pay-to-win.
- Studio minds only. Collectors stamp legends the house authored. Players do not forge new champions.
- Thin on purpose. One hard sink. Extra "utilities" are refused.
Regulatory guardrails (the indie-safe envelope)
- No yield. Never stake-to-earn. Never a share of burns or of a champion's Crowns to a card holder.
- Burn is a fee for a stamp, not a wager for a prize.
- Rewards are cosmetic, standing, or allocation weight. Not cash. Not performance-scaled token payouts.
- No marketing of price. We talk about legends, seasons, and collecting.
- Crowns never cash out.
Stay in this envelope and the token is a collectible sink with a clear story. The lowest-pressure posture for launch.
Settled / still open
Settled: burn-to-immortalize as the only hard utility; snapshot art; Year 1 = eight Immortals per mind (~1056 at today’s dex; scales as new minds ship); Genesis OG for early stamps; owner-only; tradeable; tiered fixed burns; no oracle; no curve; no holder fee on living earnings; Solana; free game untouched. Story seasons ≠ print runs.
Still open (knobs, not shape): final ticker name; burn table; royalty split; always-on vs windowed minting after Genesis; Year 2+ per-mind cap.