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.
A claim's chance of winning is its share of the money. A claim holding a third of everything staked that round wins a third of the time. When it wins, the people who backed it split the whole board in proportion to what they put in, and the house keeps 2%.
Everyone on the other 24 claims gets nothing back that round.
One claim takes the whole board. The other 24 pay nothing.
People assume there is a clever square. There is not, and the arithmetic is short enough to check.
Put $10 on a claim that ends up holding $100 out of $1,000 on the board. That claim wins 10% of the time. When it wins, the pot is $980 after the rake, and you own a tenth of that claim, so you collect $98. Ten percent of the time you get $98, and the rest of the time you get nothing.
The two numbers land in the same place. A $10 stake is worth $9.80 on average no matter where you put it. Crowded claim or empty one, first in or last in, big stake or small, the answer does not move. You get back 98 cents on the dollar on average, and the missing 2 cents is how the game pays for itself.
There is no strategy here. Pick the numbers you like.
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.
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. It comes out on a schedule that halves as it drains, so rounds played early mine faster than rounds played later.
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.
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 2% rake gets spent buying NUGGET on the pons pool, the same pool everyone else trades on, and destroying what it buys. The more the game gets played, the more NUGGET is bought and burned. 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 60% of it now and the rest is destroyed, or wait seven days and take all of it. You decide for each parcel separately, whenever you feel like it.
Collecting starts the seven days running. It does not lock in your choice, so there is no reason to put it off.
A round with less than $40 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 2% 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.