The entry gate
Unlocking the full economy requires holding a threshold of $SHARD. It is a holding requirement, not a spend — nothing is burned to enter.
| Mode | Unlocked |
|---|---|
| Trial (below gate) | Combat, market, forge, quests. Full game, minus the economy. |
| Full (at gate) | Raid, leaderboard claims, withdrawals, territory upgrades. |
v2.2 — the ratchet deadlock
The first design made the entry cost rise with price at an elasticity of 3: quantity needed grew as the cube of price, so the dollar cost of entry grew as the fourth power.
v2.2: Q(P) = 1,500,000 × (P/P0)³
V(P) = Q × P = $30 × (P/P0)⁴ ← dollar cost grows as P⁴
| P/P0 | Q required | USD gate | % of supply |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.00 | 1,500,000 | $30 | 0.15% |
| 1.50 | 5,062,500 | $151.88 | 0.51% |
| 2.00 | 12,000,000 | $480 | 1.20% |
| 5.00 | 187,500,000 | $18,750 | 18.75% |
| 8.74 | ≈1,000,000,000 | ≈$174,600 | 99.8% |
At ×8.74 price the gate would demand 99.8% of all supply. No new player could ever enter. Agent-based simulation put the pass rate at ≈0% for every archetype.
v2.2b — fixed dollar cost (shipping)
The fix inverts the relationship. The gate is a fixed dollar amount, so as price rises the quantity required falls. A cap remains as a safety guard, not as the operating mechanism.
v3.2: Q(P) = min( GATE_USD / P , GATE_CAP_SHARD )
GATE_USD = $30
GATE_CAP_SHARD = 100,000,000 (10% of supply, safety guard only)
The ×8.74 deadlock above was derived against a curve this project had invented, and the real Pons V2 path is ×12 — steeper, not gentler. Re-run against it, elasticity-3 demands 11,864,493 $SHARD (1.19% of supply) for a gate worth $473 instead of $30 at graduation. Not the absolute deadlock the invented curve produced, but still disqualifying: the price of admission would drift 15.8× over the life of the curve, purely as an artefact of price, for no benefit to anyone. The fixed-dollar gate removes the drift regardless of what the curve turns out to do.
| Price | Q required | USD gate | % of supply |
|---|---|---|---|
| launch ($0.00000332) | 9,034,134 | $30 | 0.903% |
| mid-curve ($0.00001470) | 2,040,816 | $30 | 0.204% |
| graduation ($0.00003985) | 752,844 | $30 | 0.075% |
| post-grad ×2 ($0.00004) | 750,000 | $30 | 0.075% |
| post-grad ×5 ($0.0001) | 300,000 | $30 | 0.030% |
| post-grad ×50 ($0.001) | 30,000 | $30 | 0.003% |
The cap binds only below $0.0000003 — a 99.2% drawdown from the graduation price. It exists so that a collapse in $SHARD cannot produce a gate that asks for more coins than exist, not because we expect to use it.
Price rising now makes entry easier in quantity and identical in dollars. Price falling does the opposite: at a 90% drawdown the same $30 asks for 7,528,445 $SHARD. That asymmetry is deliberate — holding through a drawdown should feel like it costs something.