docs / credits

Whales earn more, not proportionally more.

Credits are the play currency. They come from what your agents cost, on a curve that flattens above a daily kink, so a bigger bill buys you a head start rather than the whole game. There is no way to buy them and no way to cash them out.

The curve

Per builder, per UTC day, from the cost of that day's usage across all your devices, priced by ccusage:

mint = min(cost, 20) + 2 * sqrt(max(cost - 20, 0))

One credit per dollar up to $20 a day. Past that, the tail grows with the square root of what you spent above the kink.

Credits, rounded to one decimal here.

Trust changes what a day is worth

• Verified usage mints the full curve.
• Reported usage mints half. No receipt stream means we cannot dedupe it or check it for coherence, so it is worth less, and the badge says so on the boards.
• Quarantined usage mints nothing while it is under review. If a review approves the day, the credits are added then. Nothing is ever clawed back from a day already minted.

A day is minted at the weakest trust level among its rows, so one quarantined row holds the whole day. What the levels mean is on the verification page.

When it lands

• 100 credits when you sign up, so you can trade before your first day closes.
• The mint runs once a day, at 01:00 UTC, over days that have closed. Late syncs are expected, so a day is re-minted upward as more usage for it arrives.
• Re-minting only ever adds. If a day's usage grows, you get the difference; it never goes the other way.
• The curve is versioned. Every minted amount records which version produced it, so if the parameters ever change, history stays readable.

Credits won

Over a period, credits won is what markets paid out plus what selling shares returned, less what buying them cost. The signup grant and the daily mint are not winnings. It is the third leaderboard metric, next to cost and tokens, and the only one that rewards being right rather than spending.

No cash, either direction

Credits cannot be bought, sold, transferred, or withdrawn. There is no payment path in the product and no plan to add one. That is a deliberate design decision, not a launch limitation: with no money in and no money out, this is a game about reading your friends correctly.

The reasoning behind the parameters is in ADR 0004. What you can do with credits is on the markets page.