Placer is a game on Robinhood Chain. There is a grid of 25 claims. Every five minutes one claim is drawn, and the people who staked money on it split the pot.
The money on the board is USDG, a dollar stablecoin. A dollar in is a dollar out. You put some on any claims you want, in any amounts you want. After five minutes the board freezes, and a random number decides which claim wins.
Every claim has the same chance, one in 25, no matter how much money is on it. When a claim wins, the people who backed it split the whole board in proportion to what they put in, and the house keeps 5%.
Everyone on the other 24 claims gets nothing back that round.
One claim takes the whole board. The other 24 pay nothing.
Since every claim has the same one in 25 chance, the money on a claim only decides how the pot gets split when it wins. Ten dollars alone on a claim wins the whole pot. Ten dollars on a claim holding $500 wins a fiftieth of it. So the right instinct is to look for claims nobody else is on.
Two rules keep that from turning into a free lunch. A claim can pay out at most 23.75 times what is staked on it. Fair odds on a one in 25 draw would be 25 times, and 23.75 is that less the 5% the house keeps, so every dollar on the board carries the same edge no matter which claim it sits on. And when the drawn claim is empty, nobody wins that round and the whole pot rolls into the next one. Anything above the cap rolls over the same way. So the pot builds up over a few quiet rounds, and the next claim to hit takes it.
Put another way: the quietest claim on the board gets you back 95 cents on the dollar on average, a crowded one gets you less, and nothing gets you more. That 5% is the whole house edge and there is no seat that avoids it.
Every round also mines a token called NUGGET, and it goes to everyone who staked that round, not only the winners. Your share depends on how much you staked, not on whether your claim came up.
How much a round mines is set in dollars, not in tokens. The game looks up NUGGET's price on the pons pool and hands out NUGGET worth what that round earned the game, plus a bonus. The bonus starts at 24% and halves each time a quarter of the game's NUGGET has been mined: 24%, then 12%, 6%, and 3%. So a $1,000 board, which leaves $49.45 after the settling fee, mines $61.32 worth of NUGGET while the bonus is 24%. When NUGGET is cheap that is a lot of tokens; when it is expensive it is a few. Either way it is worth a bit more than the rake you paid, which is the whole point: playing is the slightly cheaper way to get NUGGET, at any price.
One cap: a round only mines on the first $49.45 it earns, so a $1,000 board and a $10,000 board mine the same amount. The rest of a big board's rake still buys and burns NUGGET, it just does not mine extra.
NUGGET is a fixed supply token launched on pons, the Robinhood Chain launchpad. There are one billion and there will never be more. About a third of them were bought at launch and put into the game contract, and that third is what gets mined. When it is gone, mining stops and the game keeps running on the rake alone.
The rest of the supply is where any launchpad token's supply is: sold on the pons curve to whoever bought it, and locked in the trading pool that pons created when the curve filled. Nobody, including the person who built this, was given any.
Before the curve fills, the price comes from the curve itself, so mining works the same way from the first round. In the short gap between the curve filling and the pool being created there is no price at all, and rounds in that gap mine nothing rather than guessing.
Nothing is behind it. There is no vault, no redemption, no claim on any asset. You can sell it to somebody who wants to buy it, and that is the entire story.
What it does have is a buyer. Most of the 5% rake gets spent buying NUGGET on the pons pool, the same pool everyone else trades on. Nine tenths of what it buys is destroyed. The other tenth goes to people who have staked their NUGGET, see below. The more the game gets played, the more NUGGET is bought. Anyone holding it is betting that people keep playing.
Until the pons curve fills and the pool exists, the rake piles up inside the game and buys all at once when the pool goes live.
That bet might not work out.
Winnings and mined NUGGET pile up while you play. Nothing expires. You can walk away for a month and it will all still be sitting there.
Press Collect and your USDG lands in your balance straight away. Your NUGGET goes into a parcel with two ways out. Take 90% of it now and the rest is destroyed, or wait three days and take all of it. You decide for each parcel separately, whenever you feel like it.
Collecting starts the three days running. It does not lock in your choice, so there is no reason to put it off.
You can stake NUGGET and get sNUGGET back. A tenth of every buyback the game makes is sent to the stakers, released over the following hour, so each sNUGGET is worth a little more NUGGET than it was. There is no lock. Unstake whenever you like.
This is a share of what the game actually earns, not new tokens. If nobody plays, nobody gets paid. The page shows the last seven days of staking income and what that works out to as a yearly rate, and that number moves with how much gets played and how much is staked.
A round with less than $15 on the board costs more to settle than its rake pays for, so it does not settle at all. Everybody gets their stake back for that round and nothing is mined. When the game is empty you lose nothing.
You will lose your stake on most rounds. That is what a 5% edge on a winner-takes-the-board game looks like from the inside. Played often enough the edge grinds through whatever you put in, so keep each stake small next to what you actually hold.
USDG is issued by Paxos, and Robinhood runs the chain this game sits on. Either of them can pause or change their own piece. Nobody can change the game itself, including the person who built it, but the money it is played with and the rails it runs on belong to other people.
This is gambling. Do not play with money you need.
You need a wallet such as MetaMask or Rabby, a small amount of ETH on Robinhood Chain to pay fees, which run a few cents per action, and some USDG. It is the most-used token on the chain, so you may already have it; if not, swap for it on Uniswap. Connect your wallet, deposit, and pick your claims.