How a crank works

Three moments. You pay, the result gets sealed by something that hadn't happened yet when you paid, and then the capsule opens.

1 · You pay

A dollar goes in and the machine writes down two things: that the capsule is yours, and an anchor — a point in time a few seconds into the future that hasn't arrived yet. That's it. No result exists at this moment, anywhere. Not in a database, not in your browser, not in the queue of pending transactions.

2 · The anchor arrives

Twelve to twenty-four seconds later the anchor happens and the machine can read it. That reading is the seed for your capsule. It cannot be re-picked, re-rolled or swapped — the anchor was written down before it existed, so there was never a menu to choose from.

Those seconds are the crank turning. Not a loading spinner we added for drama; it's the actual wait for something outside anyone's control to happen.

3 · The capsule opens

Anyone can trigger the open — us, you, a stranger, a bot. Whoever pays that gas, the prize always goes to the buyer. The machine cannot pay it anywhere else. In practice we run it for you automatically, and if we ever stop, you can open your own capsule at any point in the next 51 minutes.

If nobody opens it in time, the capsule still pays out — at the lowest tier, automatically. You never end up with nothing.

The odds

Fixed before you crank, identical for every wallet, and locked to your ticket at the moment you pay — so they can't be edited between your crank and your reveal.

The math behind them

Expected value

Multiply each prize by how often it happens, add them up. That's the Contribution to EV column in the table, and it totals $0.896 per dollar. The remaining 10.4% is what the machine keeps.

For scale: the aggregator most people on this chain already route through takes 1% per swap, a state lottery keeps around 50%, and a slot machine keeps 2% to 15%.

Typical is not average

The average is $0.896. The median is $0.30. Those are both true and they are very far apart, because a handful of enormous outcomes drag the average up while most cranks sit at the bottom.

The standard deviation of a single crank is $3.49 — many times the mean. That is a violently swingy distribution, and almost all of that swing is the golden capsule you will most likely never see. Strip the golden tier out and the deviation drops to about $1.81.

What N cranks actually looks like

The band is one standard deviation — roughly two thirds of the time you land inside it, and it is wide on purpose because that is honestly what this distribution does. Do not read the top of the band as a plan.

The chance of at least one

Every crank is independent. Nothing accumulates, there is no pity counter, and the machine has no memory of you. The chance of seeing at least one of a tier across N cranks is 1 − (1 − p)^N:

How the draw is sealed

The seed comes from a block hash on Robinhood Chain — a value produced by the network itself, that did not exist when your dollar went in and that nobody involved in this machine gets to choose.

Your seed mixes that hash with your ticket number, your address and a value you supplied at purchase. Same inputs, same capsule, forever, and anybody can recompute it.

// what your capsule is, in one line
seed = keccak256(anchorHash, ticketId, buyer, yourSeed, machine, chainId)
tier = seed % 1_000_000   // mapped onto the odds table above

Things that are impossible here, and why

Checking a crank

Every crank publishes its ticket, its anchor, the anchor's hash, the seed and the result. You can walk any of them back yourself:

1. Take the anchor number from the crank and ask the chain for that block's hash.
2. Hash it together with the ticket number, the buyer and the purchase seed.
3. Take that number modulo one million and read it off the odds table.

If what you get doesn't match what you were paid, the machine is lying and you have the receipt to prove it in public. The checker on the site does all three steps for you, so you never have to touch any of this by hand.

What gets on the shelf

Prizes come out of stock the machine already holds. It never goes and buys your prize at the moment you win — that would put your result behind somebody else's contract, and a coin that refuses to trade for ten seconds would break your crank.

Four checks, and the first two are questions we ask the chain rather than answer ourselves:

1. Born on Pons. We ask the Pons factory directly whether it created this coin. A hand-maintained allowlist would be a place for a mistake to hide.
2. Already graduated. Still on the bonding curve doesn't qualify. It has to have migrated with a real pool behind it.
3. Provably sellable. A full sale is simulated against the router. This matters more than it sounds: asking for a price is not proof — plenty of coins quote a sale happily and then revert when you actually try, because the quoter bails out before the part that would fail.
4. Deep enough. No single prize is ever large enough to move the coin's own price. Thin pool, small prize, or it doesn't get shelved.

Anyone who launched on Pons can load their coin in as prizes. Same four checks, no exceptions, no fast lane.

The golden capsule

At 0.04% — one in twenty-five hundred — the machine launches a brand new coin on Pons that nobody has seen before, and points its trading fees at the winner's wallet from the first block.

• The name is not chosen by the winner and not announced in advance. It stays a surprise until it is live.
• The fee routing is set on the launch itself, so the fees go from the locker straight to the winner. Nothing is held by us and nothing needs our permission later.
• The first buy is burned. The house does not keep a single token of it.
• Liquidity is locked. Nobody can pull it, us included.

The free crank

One free crank per person, for reposting the launch. It draws from exactly the same table as a paid one, golden capsule included. A free crank is not a worse crank.

It is checked, though — one per person, per wallet, with account history requirements, because a giveaway that can be farmed with a thousand throwaway accounts stops being a giveaway and becomes a transfer from the prize shelf to whoever wrote the best script. There is a daily budget for free cranks, and when it's spent it's spent until tomorrow.

Where the money goes

Every dollar splits at the moment you crank, in the contract, not by hand afterwards:

• About 90 cents goes to the prize shelf, which is where your prizes are paid from.
• About 10 cents is the house cut — gas, restocking, and running the thing.

Those are two separate places, and that separation is the point. The prize shelf has no withdraw function. Not for you, not for us, not for anybody. The only way value leaves it is somebody winning it. The house cut lives somewhere else entirely and is ours to spend.

This is why the split happens in code at crank time instead of being sorted out later: it means "we would never drain the prize pool" isn't a promise you have to take our word for. There is no function to call.

What can go wrong

The honest list, including the parts we can't fix.

The house edge is not a bug, it's the deal

You are expected to lose about ten cents on the dollar, forever, with no strategy that changes it. If you crank a hundred times the honest expectation is ninety dollars back. This is entertainment with a random outcome, not a way to make money.

The network operator could interfere, and we can't stop it

Prize coins are volatile

You can win a coin worth two dollars and watch it be worth one an hour later, or five. Prizes are sized in dollars at the moment they're paid, and after that they do whatever the market does. The shelf checks that a coin can be sold; it cannot check that it will hold its price.

Things break

If the site goes down, your capsules are still yours and still openable directly. If a coin on the shelf turns hostile after it was checked, that prize falls back to a claimable credit instead of jamming your capsule. If the open window is missed entirely, the lowest tier pays automatically.