DEGENERUS PROTOCOL

Mechanics

The Side Bets

Two parimutuel books let you bet on the game's own trajectory instead of on a draw. Both take one fixed 1,000 FLIP bet per address per round, both are OVER/UNDER, and in both the winning side splits everything the losing side put up.

Two books

What a win pays

The stake burns the moment you place it. Every bet is the same size, so each side is a count rather than a pot, and the payout is the whole book divided by the winners:

If nobody took the losing side, winners get their 1,000 FLIP back and nothing more. Payouts arrive as coinflip credit, so they take the daily 50/50 like other issued FLIP.

The growth book

Every level banks the prize pool it actually achieved when it ends, and that number is written once and never revised. A round compares two of those steps: the growth the next level achieves over this one, against the growth this level achieved over the one before it. Faster is OVER. Ties are UNDER.

It is a bet on acceleration, not on size. A level can bank a bigger pool than its predecessor and still settle UNDER, because what is scored is the rate.

Betting stays open for the entire jackpot phase, including while a day's random word is in flight. One catch during that lock: the stake cannot top up from unclaimed coinflip winnings, so a bet placed then has to come out of your wallet balance.

Placing the bet also completes a level quest, worth 150 FLIP on the phase's first day and halving each day after that, so 75, 37, then 18. It moves your quest streak by 1. The FLIP needs the level quest's own gate, a whole ticket for this level plus either a five-level streak or any pass ever held, or an active afKing subscription. Without that you can still bet, you just bet for nothing extra.

Rounds at a century boundary are lopsided and known to be: the pool arithmetic at x99, x00 and x01 is not the ordinary step. Price accordingly.

The ticket-volume book

This one counts manual ETH ticket buys and nothing else. FLIP-paid tickets, afKing buys, pass tickets, lootbox tickets, foil packs and awarded tickets are all outside the count, on both sides of the comparison. A round runs from one daily random-number request to the next.

OVER can force its own win by going out and buying tickets. That is the design rather than a hole in it: the book leans OVER, every bettor on that side is an incentivized buyer, and every OVER win raises the benchmark the next round has to beat.

Placing pays a credit that decays through the window: 25 FLIP until 23:25 UTC, then 5 less every ten minutes, ending at 5 FLIP for the last five minutes. It is at most 2.5% of the stake it rides on, so a placement is deflationary on its own terms whatever the round pays.

Why the rewards decay

A parimutuel book pays the last mover best, because the final bettor sees the whole board before committing. Both books answer that with a reward that shrinks as the window runs rather than with a cutoff. Bet early into a thin book and you are guessing, but you are paid more for it.

Getting paid

The game pushes each round's answer the instant its terms are final, and the answer is stored as a bit, so a claim never re-derives anything. From there a permissionless crank pays every winner on a round in one batch and earns a gas-pegged FLIP bounty per winner it settles, which means you are normally paid without touching anything. Claiming yourself always works too.

One case never settles: a volume round with no comparable predecessor, either the first round ever sealed or a gap left by a stalled random-number request. Handing that outcome to whoever watched the stall would be worse than not scoring it, so the round voids and both sides get their 1,000 FLIP back once a later round seals.

Who can bet

Any wallet that has ever bought anything. One bet per address per round, with no amount to choose and no averaging in, which is what makes committing early against a thin book a real decision instead of a mechanical one.