Raid tickets & burn
Opening the vault costs a ticket, paid in $SHARD and burned on use. This is the only mechanism in Robinfall that removes $SHARD from supply, and because there is no mint function, burned means gone for good.
Ticket pricing is a fixed dollar cost, for exactly the reason the gate is: a tier buys a fixed amount of content, and content does not get harder because the coin pumped. Elasticity-3 pricing on the quantity side made sense only against a curve that moved ×19; against the shipping ×12 curve it would have inflated the cost of a T1 ticket from $3.00 to $5,184 by graduation, at which point raids simply stop. The old per-tier ceiling ($60 × 2tier, which reached $480 at T3) is replaced by one flat ceiling.
usd(tier) = min( $3.00 × 2^tier , TICKET_MAX_USD ) ← FIXED, never scaled by price
qty(tier) = max( 1 , round( usd(tier) / P ) ) ← burned on use, floats with P
payout = $25.00 × 2^tier, minted as $YIELD
An earlier revision pinned the burned QUANTITY instead (TICKET_ELAST = 1) on the argument that a constant coin burn keeps the deflation rate predictable. Against a ×12 curve that argument fails twice. First it mis-prices the launch window: a constant $3 / P_grad = 75,284 $SHARD is $3.00 at graduation but only $0.25 at the curve's opening price, while a clear pays a nominal $25 — a 100× payout-to-cost ratio for the first cohort and 8.3× for the last. Second it does not actually protect the sink, it just relocates the failure: with the USD cost rising without limit the raids stop being affordable, and burned supply per week falls to zero either way. Fixed dollars keep the value destroyed per raid constant and let the coin count follow the market, which is the same contract the gate has.
| Tier | USD cost | $SHARD burned @ launch | $SHARD burned @ grad | Clear payout |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| T1 | $3.00 | 903,413 | 75,284 | 11.74 $YIELD |
| T2 | $6.00 | 1,806,827 | 150,569 | 23.47 $YIELD |
| T3 | $12.00 | 3,613,653 | 301,138 | 46.95 $YIELD |
| T4 | $24.00 | 7,227,306 | 602,275 | 93.90 $YIELD |
| T5 | $48.00 | 14,454,612 | 1,204,551 | 187.80 $YIELD |
Tiers are derived from weapon level (floor(weapon / 3), clamped to 0–4), so a fresh account can only ever buy T1 and there are exactly five tiers. TICKET_MAX_USD is $60 — a ceiling the progression never actually reaches, since T5 tops out at $48. It is retained as a guard for the day deeper content is added, not as an operating value.
What raiding does to the two ledgers
A raid is the clearest expression of the whole design, because it moves the two coins in opposite directions on purpose:
$SHARD 903,413 burned → supply falls, permanently (at the launch price)
$YIELD 11.74 minted → float rises, diluting R slightly
Deflation on the scarce asset, inflation on the claim ticket. That is not a contradiction — it is the trade. Raiding converts a hard asset into a soft claim, and the claim is only worth something if the fees keep arriving. Players who raid heavily are betting that the economy around them is active.
Burning supply reduces the denominator of every future price. It does not create a bid. After graduation the price is whatever the Uniswap v4 pool says it is, and a deflationary coin with no buyers still goes down.