The rules

Every number below is read off the contracts, not chosen for this page. Where a number decides how much you are paid, the thing that sets it is named too.

The loop

Get a machine

The mint is over: all 3,333 were sold and the 134,413,224 $FUEL they cost is burned. The only way in now is the secondary market.

Put it on a floor

Pick a floor and a ticker. The floor decides whether your seam matches, the ticker decides which company you are paid in. Both are yours to choose and the ticker can be changed later.

Buy the shifts it works

A machine digs a shift only if you bought that shift for it, paid up front in $FUEL. Buy one, or several ahead so it keeps working while you are asleep. Buying nothing is allowed; the machine just sits out.

It digs

Whether the tab is open or not. Everything dug in a shift goes into one pool and the pool is split by how much ore each machine pulled.

Claim, in the stock you mined

A machine on HELX is mining NVDA, and NVDA is what lands in your wallet. You can take ETH instead if you prefer; the button for it is on every machine.

Shifts

Four a day, fixed, on the clock and never on yours:

Shift	UTC	What it is
00 – 06	midnight to six	the night shift, all of it
06 – 12	six to noon	a third of it is night
12 – 18	noon to six	no night at all
18 – 24	six to midnight	a third of it is night

A shift settles when it ends. That is when the pool for it is divided and your claim becomes real.

Traits

Three of them, rolled from a seed committed before the first mint and published after the last. They are the whole game: none of them is strictly better, each is better somewhere.

Habit: when your machine is good

Habit	Good when	Then	Otherwise
Sleeper	at night	×1.30	×0.80
Contrary	the floor is quiet	×1.25	×0.75
Social	the floor is busy	×1.25	×0.75
Steady	its stock is calm	×1.20	×0.80

Sleeper is the only one on a clock, so it is the only one you can plan perfectly: play the night blocks and let the noon one idle. The other three depend on what everybody else does, which is the point of them.

A Steady machine on a ticker nobody has read yet is paid ×1.00, not ×0.80. An unknown is not a punishment.

What "calm" actually means

Calm is not a property of the company. It is measured per shift, per ticker: did this ticker move less during that shift than its own median move over the last 28 shifts? A median is even by construction, so no ticker is permanently calm, and picking a famously boring stock buys you nothing. A sleepy ticker has a sleepy median and the bar moves down with it.

What that leaves is a real choice, and it is a choice of when, not of which. These feeds update while the US market is open, which lands in the 12-18 and 18-24 UTC blocks. The 00-06 and 06-12 blocks sit outside it, and over a weekend the feeds do not update at all. The ledger's own record so far says the same thing: in the 00-06 shift six of the eight tickers read calm, in 06-12 four of eight, and in the 12-18 shift, which holds the opening bell, none of them did.

Two honest catches. Everybody can read this page, so a quiet block that everybody crowds into is split more ways, and crowding is exactly what the Contrary and Social habits are paid on. And the reading needs history: until a ticker has eight shifts of moves behind it the keeper says nothing at all, which is why Steady paid a flat ×1.00 for the first eight shifts of the mine.

Appetite: how hard it eats

Appetite	Ore	Fuel	Ore per fuel
Greedy	×1.30	×1.45	0.90
Thrifty	×0.85	×0.71	1.20

Greedy digs more and costs more; Thrifty is the efficient one. Which is better is not fixed: it depends on what a shift pays against what fuel costs, and both move.

Seam: which floor suits it

Seam	On a matching floor	On any other
Deep · Surface · Fickle	×1.20	×0.90

Matching is worth a third more than not, so the floor is a real decision and not decoration. It also fights the crowd: everybody chasing the matching floor makes it busy, which is bad for Contrary machines standing on it.

Merging

Two machines of the same tier press into one of the next. The smaller id survives and keeps its character; the other is burned.

Tier	Ore	Fuel	Ore per fuel
I	1	1	1.00
II	2.6	2.2	1.18
III	6.76	4.84	1.40
IV	17.576	10.648	1.65
V	45.6976	23.4256	1.95

Two tier-I machines dig 2.0 between them and cost 2.0. Merged, they dig 2.6 and cost 2.2: 18% more ore for every token burned, and it compounds each tier. That is the reason to climb, and the cost is that you end up with fewer machines than you started with.

Merging is free. There is no fee to forge a tier, on chain or anywhere else, and there is no date it unlocks: it has worked since the first day.

When a machine can be merged

Only while it is standing still. Buying shifts puts a machine to work immediately, and a working machine cannot be merged, sold or moved until its run is over and claimed. So the two things trade against each other: a machine digging this week is a machine you cannot climb with this week.

Never bought shifts? It can merge now.
Run finished? Claim it, then it can merge.
Still running? Wait for the last shift you bought to close.

The machine that is burned must also owe nothing, which claiming takes care of. If the page offers you a partner, the ledger will accept it; if it does not, that machine is busy.

The reward pool

The pool is funded by the fee on every $FUEL trade, buys and sells alike. A swap pays 6%: a 5% creator fee plus the 1% Pons charges. Pons keeps 0.3% and 5.7% reaches Stock Miners, and a contract cuts that in half the moment it lands: 2.85% of a swap to the reward pool and 2.85% to the treasury, which is what pays for development and marketing. Both addresses were fixed when that contract was deployed, so the money can only land in those two places.

A shift pays out one twenty-eighth of what is left. That is a week of shifts, and it is a rate, not a countdown: the pool falls by 1/28 and the fee tops it back up, so it drains slowly and never empties.

Read this part before you buy anything. A shift's payout is the same size whether one machine works it or a thousand. So when few machines are running, each one earns a great deal, and when many are running, each one earns little. Early is worth more than late here, and by a wide margin, not a small one. That is deliberate and it is also the honest warning: the returns you see in the first days are not the returns the game settles at.

If nobody works a shift at all, nothing is paid and nothing is spent. The money stays in the pool.

Fuel

$FUEL is the only thing you spend. You bond it up front for the shifts you buy, and what the work actually costs is burned when you claim; anything left over comes back to you.

You are never charged more than you bonded.
If a shift's cost outruns your bond, you are paid the share your bond covered, pro rata. You do not go into debt.
Burned means burned: the supply falls and nothing is moved to a treasury.
A bigger machine eats proportionally more. Fuel scales 2.2× with every tier, so a tier V burns 23× what a tier I does for the same shift. Bond what the machine in front of you needs, not what the last one did: the mine page works it out from the machine's own weight and the last shift's rate, and says so under the box.

How much a shift burns

The rate is not a fixed number of tokens. It is set each shift so that the fuel burned by everybody together is worth about 15% of what that shift pays out. Working backwards from that one rule explains the rest:

That share is a dial, not a constant. It was 7.6% until 31 August 2026 and is on its way to 15% now. The keeper may not move the price by more than 25% in a single shift, so a change arrives over several shifts and a run that is already paid for is never repriced under its owner in one step. What a shift pays out does not change when the dial does, and a change is announced.

	In one shift
The mine pays out	100% of that shift's pool
Everyone burns	15% of it, in fuel
So miners get back	about 6.7× the fuel it burned

That ratio does not change with how many people are playing. When the mine is busy the same total is split more ways, so each machine burns less and earns less, in step. Your own share of the burn is your machine's weight against the weight of everything working that shift, which is why a Thrifty machine costs less than a Greedy one to run.

This means fuel is not the real cost of playing, the machine is. Fuel is a toll, and the pool it buys into is funded by trading fees rather than by the miners. The flip side is the thing to actually watch: those returns exist because the pool has money in it, and the pool is only as full as the fee flow keeps it.

How many tokens that works out to on the day depends on the fuel price and who else is digging, so no number is printed here that would be stale by the time you read it. The mine shows what the last shift actually charged your machine, read off the chain, next to the box where you buy the next one.

Things worth knowing

A working machine cannot be transferred

The transfer reverts while the run is still going, whether it is a sale, a gift or a marketplace listing. This is so nobody can sell you a machine that is halfway through work you paid nothing for.

Once the run is over, the machine can be sold even if you have not claimed it yet. Claim first. The mine pays the ore and returns the fuel that was left over to whoever owns the machine at the moment it is claimed, so selling it unclaimed hands your money to the buyer.

Nobody can freeze the mine

Shifts are rolled by a keeper, but if the keeper stops, rollStale opens to everybody two hours later. Anyone can push the mine forward. The game does not depend on us being awake.

The pairings are on chain

The tickers are invented names, and each one is tied to a real company and a real price feed. Both mappings are stored publicly in the contract, readable by anyone, and they were written before the mine opened. Somebody was going to work it out; the honest position is that it was never hidden.

Royalty

5% on secondary sales, declared in the contract under the standard every marketplace reads.

What can go wrong

You can lose money. Fuel is spent before the payout is known. A shift can cost more than it pays.
Claiming in stock is a swap. You set the minimum you will accept; if the pool cannot fill it, the claim reverts and nothing is lost. ETH is always available instead.
Tokenized stocks are not brokerage shares. They carry no voting rights or dividends, and their liquidity is whatever the market gives on the day.
This is not investment advice, and none of it is a promise of return.

Season Zero

A separate game from the mine, played in crews, on a fixed clock. It runs once and it ends.

Crews	5	you pick one and stay in it for the season
Shifts	28	the whole competition, start to finish
A shift	6 hours	the same six-hour block the mine runs on
Length	7 days	28 shifts of 6 hours, back to back

The clock does not wait for you. A shift passes whether your tab is open or not, and a shift you did not cover is a shift you did not work.

Joining a crew

Two ways in, and one of them does not need a Rig at all.

Bring a Rig, or hire a Worker

Either an original Stock Miners Rig you already own, or a Worker you create for the season. Both are real seats. A Rig is a power advantage, never the thing that lets you play.

Pick your crew

Five crews, and no crew has a size limit. Nobody is ever turned away because a crew is full, and a crew cannot lock its doors.

Pay the entry, buy your shifts

Entry once, then coverage for the shifts you intend to work.

One wallet is one seat for the whole season. If you hold five Rigs you still play one seat and you choose one Rig to bring; a Rig id can only be used once in a season, by anybody. Holding more Rigs does not buy more seats.

Worker

The way in for anybody without a Rig. You put up collateral, you get a Worker, and the collateral is yours until you decide to close it.

Collateral	20,000 FUEL	put up when you create the Worker
Returned	18,000 FUEL	when you permanently close it
Burned	2,000 FUEL	the cost of closing it, 10%

A Worker is bound to your wallet. It is not an NFT and it cannot be sold, sent, approved or listed anywhere: there is no transfer function to call. It is a seat, not an asset, and it is one seat per wallet.

Closing a Worker is permanent and it is your choice, not a fee the season takes. Keep it and it costs nothing to hold; the 2,000 only burns the day you close it. A Worker that is in a season cannot be closed until that season releases it.

Entry

Entry	10,000 FUEL	once, per wallet, per season
To the Global Season Pot	80%	8,000 FUEL
Burned	20%	2,000 FUEL

Your entry is held, not spent, until the season actually starts. Before that boundary you can leave and take it back in full. After it, entry is not refundable.

Coverage

Coverage is the thing that makes a seat worth anything. A shift you did not cover is a shift you did not work, and it counts for nothing.

Per shift	750 FUEL	only for shifts you actually reach
All 28 shifts	21,000 FUEL	the most a full season can cost

You buy coverage in runs of shifts, ahead of time or during the season. What you buy is held, and only the shifts the season actually reaches are burned. Coverage for shifts that never happened for you is still yours.

Coverage bought during the season can only be for shifts that have not started. The earliest shift you can buy is the one after the shift being worked now, so nobody buys a shift retroactively after seeing how it went.

A full season for somebody starting from nothing is 51,000 FUEL: 20,000 for the Worker, 10,000 entry, 21,000 for all 28 shifts. 18,000 of the Worker collateral comes back whenever you close it.

Captains

Five crews, five Captains. One seat is already taken; the other four are won.

The reserved seat

The winner of the original Genesis Auction holds one Captain seat outright. It is not part of this auction and cannot be bid for.

Four seats, one open auction

Everybody bids in the same auction for the same four seats. Bids are cumulative: bid again and you top up, you do not start over.

It runs 24 hours

Unless somebody moves the result late. A bid in the last 5 minutes that changes who is winning, or changes the price, pushes the close to 5 minutes from that moment. There is no last-second win.

The top four bids win

Ranked by amount. Equal amounts break by whoever got there first.

Everybody pays the same price

All four winners pay the fourth-highest winning bid, never their own. Bid 2,000,000 when the fourth seat closes at 700,000 and you pay 700,000. The floor is 100,000 FUEL, and that is the price if nobody contests it.

Settlement seats everybody at once

One transaction, all five crews decided, and anybody can send it once the window has closed.

Auction window	24 hours
Late-change trigger	final 5 minutes
Extension	to 5 minutes from that bid
Reserve	100,000 FUEL
Seats at auction	4
To the Global Season Pot	100% of what winners pay

Your money comes back if you do not need it. A winner takes back everything above the clearing price. A bid outside the top four can be withdrawn in full at any time while the auction is open. A bid inside the top four is locked while it is winning, because it is what somebody else's price is measured against.

Crew preference is submitted during the auction, while it is still open, and it changes nothing financial: not your bid, not the price, not your refund. At settlement the highest bid takes its first available choice, then the next, and the fourth takes what is left. Say nothing and you are placed in the lowest free crew.

Season Zero needs all four Captain seats filled. If fewer than four valid bids arrive, the season cannot start: no crew is left leaderless and no player can join a crew without a Captain. The season is cancelled instead and everybody is made whole.

Tier V

The four auction Captains are entitled to an existing Tier V Rig each.

Nothing is minted. Four Tier V Rigs that already exist are moved into the auction's custody before bidding opens, and the auction cannot even open until all four are there.
The claim opens only after the season crosses into Running. A season cancelled before that returns all four Rigs and scatters nothing.
The Genesis Captain is not one of these four. That seat won its Tier V at the Genesis Auction, not here.

What a Rig is worth

A Rig is competitive power, and the power is the tier. Tier is read from the collection contract, never from what the picture looks like.

What you bring	Power that shift
Worker	1.00x
Rig held but NOT working the mine that shift	0.70x
Tier I, working	1.12x
Tier II, working	1.22x
Tier III, working	1.35x
Tier IV, working	1.49x
Tier V, working	1.65x

Two things decide which row you are on, every shift, separately: the Rig has to still be in your wallet, and it has to have settled a mine run that shift.

A Rig you do not work is worth less than no Rig at all. 0.70x against a Worker's 1.00x. That is deliberate: a Rig is a commitment to show up, not a trophy you park in a crew. Work it and a Tier V is worth 1.65x, more than half again what a Worker brings.

You do not have to be perfect. Measured against the real scoring engine, a crew whose Rigs work about 80% of shifts still finishes ahead of a crew of Workers. A missed day is a setback, not a ruin. A crew that never works its Rigs at all finishes roughly a third behind.

Sell the Rig mid-season and you keep your seat, but its power stops counting from then on.

The credit follows the exact Rig you brought. Another Rig in the same wallet is worth nothing to your crew.

Overclock

An optional, permanent FUEL burn that makes you count for more towards your crew's score.

It is yours, tied to your seat, and it lasts the rest of the season.
The FUEL is burned. It does not go to the pot and it does not come back.
It only ever counts forwards. A burn never improves a shift that already happened.
Unlimited spend, bounded effect: the boost climbs towards +10% and never reaches it. 100,000 FUEL buys half of that ceiling.

What the boost actually is

One line, and the contract computes it exactly as written:

boost = 10% × burn ÷ (burn + 100,000 FUEL)

You burn	Your power	What it cost per point
100,000	+5.00%	the first half is the cheap half
300,000	+7.50%	three times the FUEL, half again the boost
900,000	+9.00%	nine times the FUEL, less than double
1,000,000	+9.09%	and it still never reaches 10%

The curve is deliberate. The first 100,000 buys half of everything Overclock can ever give you, and every FUEL after that buys less than the one before it. The ceiling sits at the bottom rung of the Rig ladder on purpose: unlimited money buys the power of the cheapest Rig and no more, and somebody who owns a Rig keeps its multiplier on top.

The boost multiplies your own power only. Your power is part of your crew's total and its average, so the crew's score rises with it. One member burning 100,000 lifts a crew's score by roughly 2%.

Overclock does not increase your own share of the prize. Your share of a winning crew's FUEL is measured on your seat and the shifts you worked, before any Overclock. Overclock buys your crew a better score, and therefore a better rank. It buys you nothing personally except a bigger slice of a pot your crew otherwise would not have won.

Leaving mid-season

You can walk out during the season. The rule is simple: the shift you are in still counts, and everything after it stops.

Leave while shift 8 is being worked and your last counted shift is 8. You stop from shift 9 onwards. That is the whole rule.

Coverage you already used is burned. Nine shifts reached is 6,750 FUEL gone.
Coverage for shifts you will never work comes back. If you had bought all 28, the 19 you will not reach are refunded: 14,250 FUEL.
Entry is not refunded. The season already started.
You cannot rejoin the same season. Not in your crew, not in another one.
A Worker is released, so you can close it or take it into a later season. A Rig id stays claimed for this season and cannot be handed to a second wallet.

How a crew is scored

Every shift hands out the same number of points, and the five crews divide them. Nothing is scored at the end that was not scored shift by shift.

What a shift measures

Share of the shift	Measures
40% Production	the crew's total working power that shift
60% Efficiency	its average power per working member

Production rewards showing up in numbers. Efficiency rewards a crew where the people who are there are actually working. The weight sits on efficiency on purpose: a big crew is worth something, but a crew that turns up is worth more.

Measured against the real scoring engine: a crew five times larger than another, with everybody working equally, finishes about 1.8x ahead. A crew whose members work 95% of shifts beats an identical crew working 20% by about 1.6x. So size gives you a head start and effort can take it back. A crowd that does not work does not stay ahead of a smaller crew that does.

Only people who worked the shift count

A member who did not cover a shift is not in that shift's arithmetic at all. They do not add to the crew's total and they do not drag the average down. An idle seat neither helps nor hurts. That is why recruiting people who never work buys a crew nothing.

Size is worth something, up to a point

Efficiency is scaled by how many members were actually working, measured against a reference of 100 active members, and it stops helping once a crew is past that. It is a scoring term and never an admission limit: no join is ever refused because a crew is big.

Everything above is recomputed from public chain data by the packaged scoring engine. Anyone can run it, and anyone can disagree in public before a single FUEL is paid.

The prizes

ONLY THE TOP THREE CREWS RECEIVE GLOBAL SEASON POT FUEL.
4th and 5th receive none.

Finish	Share of the Global Season Pot
1st	50%
2nd	30%
3rd	20%
4th	0
5th	0

Inside a paid crew

Captain	15%	of what that crew won
Members	85%	split by the shifts each of them worked

A member's slice is their own worked power against the crew's, over the whole season. Work more shifts and your slice is bigger; work none and it is nothing.

Finishing fourth or fifth costs you your entry and your coverage and pays no pot FUEL. Your shift history and your standing are kept. That is the risk, stated plainly.

Captain Bonus

A Captain may put their own FUEL up for their own crew, on top of everything else.

It is crew-specific. It goes to that crew's members and nowhere else.
It is score neutral: it buys no points, no advantage and no better rank. Ranking is decided by shifts worked, and money cannot move it.
It is split among that crew's eligible working members, by the same shifts they worked.
The Captain who paid it in cannot claim it back. Not through the result, not by any other route: the vault knows who funded each crew's bonus and refuses that wallet outright.

A Captain still claims its own Captain reward and its own member share as normal. The only thing closed to it is the bonus it funded itself.

After the last shift

The result is published

The full season is recomputed and published on chain. Claims are not open yet.

48 hours to disagree

Anyone can rerun the season from public data and say so publicly before a single FUEL moves. That window is the point of publishing first.

Claims open

Once the window has passed, anybody can open claims. It is not held behind us.

You have 180 days

Claim any time inside that. Unclaimed FUEL after it rolls over into the next season.

Challenge window	48 hours
Claim window	180 days
Longest the result can be corrected for	96 hours from the first publication

A corrected result gets a fresh 48 hours, but no sequence of corrections can hold finalisation open beyond 96 hours from the first one.

You may have more than one thing to claim: your share of the Global Season Pot, and a Captain Bonus if your crew had one. They are separate and each is its own transaction. Claiming one leaves the other exactly where it is.

If the season is cancelled

A season can only be cancelled before it starts. Once it crosses into Running it cannot be cancelled by anyone, for any reason.

Your entry comes back in full.
All of your coverage comes back in full. Nothing was reached, so nothing burned.
Every bidder gets the whole bid back, not the amount above the clearing price. A season that never ran charges nobody for a seat.
All four Tier V Rigs go back to the treasury.
Your Worker is released and is yours, exactly as it was.

What can go wrong

You can lose everything you spend. Entry and coverage are spent before the result is known, and fourth and fifth place pay no pot FUEL at all.
Overclock is burned. It never comes back, and it does not raise your own share.
Coverage burns as it is used. The shifts you reached are gone whether your crew wins or not.
A Rig you sell stops counting. You keep your seat and lose the power.
This is not investment advice, and none of it is a promise of return.