The board consists of 25 tiles. A round runs for one minute and accepts ETH deposits against any tile until it closes. Deposits are held for the duration of a single round and are not carried forward.
At close, one tile is drawn on chain. The drawn tile settles as the winner: its deposits are returned less a settlement fee, and the round's issuance of 33 is minted to its depositors pro rata to deposit size.
All remaining tiles settle as losers. Their deposits are returned less a loss fee, charged at a higher rate than settlement. The spread between the two rates is the protocol's income for that round.
Fees accrue in ETH and are routed at settlement. The majority is used to acquire 33 on the open market and burn it. The remainder accrues to staked 33.
No share is retained by a treasury and no discretionary spending exists. Issuance to winners and market acquisition from losers occur in the same settlement, so both scale with round volume.
The 33 supply is fixed at genesis and allocated in two parts. One part is sealed as backing inside the cat collection. The remainder is issued through mining, one round at a time, until exhausted.
No issuance path exists outside these two allocations. Once mining is exhausted, market acquisition through the fee continues against a static supply.
The cat collection is fixed in size. Each cat is minted against a sealed 33 balance, its backing, held by the contract for the life of the cat.
Burning a cat redeems its backing to the holder, less a redemption fee which is burned. Backing therefore establishes a lower bound on price: below backing net of fee, acquiring a cat and redeeming it is cheaper than acquiring the equivalent 33 on the market.
Holders also settle losing tiles at a reduced loss rate, so cost of participation scales down with holdings rather than with entry price.
Backing is not uniform across the collection. Tiers hold different balances, and the highest tier holds a multiple of the base tier. Rarity is denominated in 33 rather than in metadata.
Because redemption returns backing, the incentive to redeem scales with backing. Higher tiers are redeemed first, and the pool of redeemed cats weights toward them over time.
Re-entry is priced flat. A fixed 33 payment draws one cat uniformly at random from the pool. The payment exceeds base backing, and the spread is burned, so each cycle removes 33 from circulation regardless of which tier is drawn.