Mining Protocol Whitepaper

Rips is a mining game on Solana. Miners place SOL on a three by three board, and about once a minute one tile is drawn at random. Everyone on that tile splits the SOL from the other eight, plus a freshly minted RIPS token. A small slice of every round is set aside into two shared pools: the motherlode, a jackpot that hits about once a day, and veins, hidden pots of SOL and RIPS scattered under the tiles that pop every few hours. Those pools are never paid out as cash. They are paid as pack credit, which can only be spent on our gacha machine to open real Collector Crypt trading card packs. Gacha players build the same pools with a small fee on every sellback, and they share the payouts in proportion to how much they have played. Every card sold back is paid in RIPS bought on the open market, so the more packs get opened, the more RIPS gets bought. Miners and collectors feed one pool, get paid in one currency, and that currency only has one exit: cards.

One tile wins, the other eight pay it

A miner picks any tiles they like and places SOL on each. About a minute after the first placement of the round, the board closes. The winning tile is chosen from a public Solana block hash, so the draw is not a secret the operator holds. Anyone can look at the chain and check that the right tile won.

The SOL on the eight losing tiles becomes the prize. Miners on the winning tile get their own stake back and split that prize in proportion to what they placed, along with one newly minted RIPS. Winnings can be withdrawn at any time, or left on the board to keep mining in the next round automatically.

Where each round's SOL goes

Most of the losing SOL goes straight to the winners. Before it does, four small slices come off the top. A protocol fee is used entirely to buy RIPS on the open market, and of the RIPS it buys, nine tenths is burned and the rest goes to stakers. Two slices feed the motherlode and the veins, which are explained below. The last, smallest slice comes back to the miners as pack credit. The RIPS minted each round is split the same way: most of it to the winning tile, a little to the motherlode, and a little to the veins.

RIPS rewards waiting

RIPS has a fixed lifetime supply, and mining is the only way it is created. RIPS you win does not have to be claimed right away. When you do claim it, a refining tax is taken. Half of that tax is burned. The other half is shared among everyone who still has unclaimed RIPS sitting in the system. Leaving your RIPS unrefined is therefore a position, not just a delay.

A jackpot that has to hit

Every round, a slice of SOL and a slice of RIPS are added to the motherlode. It sits there and grows. On a random round, at most about a day apart, it triggers, and the whole pot is handed to the miners on the winning tile on top of their normal winnings. Then it starts again from zero. The odds of a hit rise the longer it has been waiting, so a long dry spell makes the next round more likely to be the one.

Hidden pots under the tiles

Veins work differently. Every round, a slice of SOL and RIPS is scattered across the nine tiles at random. Some tiles quietly collect more than others. Where the value lands is encrypted using Arcium, so miners can see how much SOL is in the vein pool as a whole but not which tile is sitting on it. If those balances were public, everyone would pile onto the richest tile and the game would collapse into a queue. Keeping them hidden is what keeps the board honest.

Every so often, roughly every few hours, one tile is drawn and its vein pops. Everyone standing on that tile is paid what was hiding under it, whether or not the tile won that round. The RIPS arrives as RIPS. The SOL arrives as pack credit.

Pack credit only opens packs

Pack credit is the currency the pools pay in. It comes from the motherlode, from vein pops, from the small slice of each round set aside for miners, and from referrals. It cannot be withdrawn as cash. It can only be spent on our gacha machine, which opens real Collector Crypt packs with the same cards and the same odds as Collector Crypt itself. Mining decides how much credit you have. Collector Crypt decides what card it becomes.

Our gacha differs from the original in two ways. First, when a player sells a card back instead of keeping it, they are paid in RIPS that we buy on the open market, so every sellback is a buyback. Second, gacha players are part of the mining economy. A small fee on each sellback flows into the motherlode and the veins, and when those pools pay out, gacha players share them alongside miners in proportion to how much they have played since the last hit. A pulled card is held for a few days, during which the player can sell it back or wait and claim it outright.

One pool, one currency, one exit

Put together, this is a closed loop. Miners and gacha players both build the same two pools. Both are paid from those pools in pack credit. Pack credit can only become cards. Cards can only be sold back into RIPS, and that RIPS is bought on the open market before it is burned or handed to stakers. Value enters the system as SOL and pack purchases, and the only way it circulates back out is through the token.

That is why we call it a store of value for collectibles rather than a slot machine. The pools are funded by real play on both sides, the payouts can only be spent on real cards, and every card that comes back out of the system is bought with the token.

What is public and what is hidden

The draw is public and anyone can recompute it. The pools are public. Only the location of vein value is hidden, and it is hidden by encryption rather than by trusting us. The operator moves rounds forward and processes encrypted results, and if an encrypted result is delayed for too long, the game moves on without it.