Protocol mechanics

Nobody tops the prize pool up by hand. It fills from trading. Every $GAS swap pays a 2% fee, collected in the USO Stock Token. 75% of that fee goes to the prize pool wallet. The other 25% buys $GAS back and burns it.

So a day of trading turns into a day of prize money like this.

USO into the pool over 24h
  = 24h trading volume x 1.5%

At $100,000 of volume in a day that is $1,500 of USO arriving. At $1,000,000 it is $15,000. Nothing is scheduled and nothing is released on a timer. The fee lands in the pool as trades happen, and claims draw the pool back down as players make them.

The base rate is the claim rate. It is the pool spread over the cars that exist, and it is the number every claim is priced from.

base rate = whichever is smaller of
              (a) the ceiling, and
              (b) pool USO / (offset + every car ever minted)

a claim   = base rate x your garage's multiplier
garage    = every car you hold with a use left, each adding its tier's multiplier,
            then up to 20% more the bigger that sum is

Here is what each part means.

• Pool USO is what the prize pool wallet holds right now, read from the chain. It is not a running total of income. Money already paid out has already left it.
• Every car ever minted is the collection’s own count. It counts cars, not tiers and not multipliers. A Gas Porsche adds 1 to this number exactly like a Clunker does. Cars that are used up count, and so do cars nobody ever claims with.
• The offset is a number of pretend cars added to the bottom of the sum. It stops the very first claimer on an almost empty collection dividing the whole pool by one, and it matters less and less as real cars get minted.
• The ceiling caps the base rate before any garage multiplies it, so even when it bites, a better tier still pays more than a worse one. The contract holds a second ceiling on the final amount too: one fill never pays more than that, however big the garage.

Two things follow from this, and they are worth saying plainly. More cars minted makes the bottom of the sum bigger and the base rate smaller, so the pool spreads thinner as the collection grows. More trading makes the pool fuller and the base rate bigger. The rate moves. It is never fixed, and it is never a promise.

Every car with a use left counts toward what a claim pays, and every one of them spends a use on it: three Porsches pay about three times what one does, and a little more for keeping them in one garage, and all three wear by one. A used-up car counts for nothing and wears nothing until it is repaired. One fill never pays more than the ceiling the contract holds.

Here is the shape of it with made up numbers. Say the pool holds 20,000 USO, 2,000 cars have been minted, and the offset is 100. That gives 20,000 / 2,100, which is about 9.5 USO of base rate. Hold one Gas Porsche and your garage pays about 10.5× that, so about 100 USO. Hold one Clunker and your garage pays about 1.003× that, so still about 9.5 USO. Add more cars to either garage and both the sum and the fill grow. One fill never pays more than the ceiling the contract holds.

A tier buys you two things. A bigger weight toward your garage’s multiplier, and a car that lasts more claims before it needs repairing. It does not buy you a shorter wait. The wait comes from how many cars you hold, whatever they are.

A garage adds these up.

The wait is worked out from your whole garage. Every tier starts from a 24 hour base, and the number of cars you hold takes time off it, down to a floor of 12 hours. Any tier counts, used up or not.

wait = whichever is larger of
         (a) 24h minus the discount for the cars you hold, and
         (b) the 12h floor

1 or 2 cars    24h        10 to 19 cars  15h
3 or 4 cars    21h        20 or more     12h
5 to 9 cars    18h

The collection enforces this itself, so the wait you are shown and the wait the chain allows are the same number. Buying a car shortens a wait that has already started ticking.

Every claim rolls once. A win throws away the ordinary amount and pays the base rate times the jackpot multiplier that the contract holds, which is 100× today. Your tier counts for nothing in a jackpot, and the ceiling that trims an ordinary fill never reduces one: a jackpot is paid in full.

chance = 1 / 1000, every claim, every wallet

Flat on purpose. The odds used to divide by every car ever minted, which handed the first person through the door a 50% shot, needed a 10% ceiling patched on top, and would have shrunk towards nothing once the collection grew. One in a thousand is the same for the first claim and the ten-thousandth. Your garage already pays through the ordinary multiplier; it does not also buy odds. The roll uses the server’s own randomness, never a block hash, never a timestamp, and never anything your phone sent, and every claim writes down both the roll and the exact fraction it faced.

A win locks the jackpot for 24 hours, and a win the pool cannot cover pays the ordinary amount instead. See The jackpot.

Mint prices are not flat. Each tier runs a rising curve. The earliest buyers pay a start price, the price climbs in a straight line as that tier sells, and once it reaches the top every car after that costs the same full price for good.

Here is the same thing as numbers.

The free Clunkers are counted separately and never move the price. The curve only counts cars that were paid for, so those 500 free ones do not push the first buyer up the slope. A wallet can take one free Clunker, once. The price always rounds down, so nobody is ever charged above the line, and the contract tells you the exact cost before it takes anything.

Going up a tier is the cheaper way to buy weight for your garage. At full price a Clunker costs 37,500 $GAS for each point of weight, a GTR about 35,700, and a Gas Porsche about 29,400. The tiers are meant to keep that order.

This is the new maintenance model. It is not switched on yet, and until it is, repairs cost a flat price in $GAS.

Maintenance is charged per use, not per day. A car you are not claiming with costs you nothing to keep. Each paid claim spends one use on every car in your garage that has one, and how many claims a repair buys depends on the tier: 3 for a Clunker, 5 for a GTR and 7 for a Gas Porsche. When a car runs out of uses it drops out of your claims until you repair it.

You pay for a repair in USO, not in $GAS, and the price follows what the game has actually been paying out.

repair cost = 20% x the average base rate x your car's multiplier

where the average base rate is the base rate over the last
7 days, from a snapshot taken every hour

A repair is priced off a car’s own weight, not your whole garage, so upkeep is the same slice of what that one car alone would earn, whatever tier you drive. Growing your garage lifts what a claim pays, and every car that counted wears with it, so a bigger garage has more cars to service: eight cars wear on every claim and are eight repairs, where one car is one. One repair still costs about a fifth of what that one car’s claim pays alone, and a higher tier runs longer between repairs: 3 claims on a Clunker, 5 on a GTR and 7 on a Gas Porsche. Spread over those claims, upkeep is about 7% of what that car earns on a Clunker, about 4% on a GTR and about 3% on a Gas Porsche.

The repair price is the same whatever state the car is in. It does not scale with how worn the car is, and a car that is already full cannot be repaired. The USO you pay goes to the treasury. Minting still costs $GAS, and 80% of every $GAS spent on a mint is burned while the other 20% goes to the treasury.

A car you have used up is never destroyed and never taken away from you, and it still counts toward the shorter cooldown in your garage.