Economic whitepaper · preview v0.1

The complete economy, in public.

Pricing, the seven-band odds table, the floor and the cap, the per-epoch commit and reveal, vault weather, the pot, supplier economics, and the assumptions behind every pack.

Player profit is variance; house profit is the published 3.6% edge, split 2.1 / 1.0 / 0.5 between vault suppliers, the protocol and the pot. This is a preview of the economics as designed, not an audit, a prospectus or a promise of any return.

What CHIPSTOCK is

CHIPSTOCK sells sealed packs of tokenized stocks and crypto on Robinhood Chain. You pay a fixed price in USDG, the cards turn one at a time, and the assets settle into your wallet in a single transaction. What separates it from the rest of the category is not the packs — it is that the floor, the cap, the exact band table and the dice are all published, and the house keeps 3.6 cents of every dollar instead of about thirty.

Chain: Robinhood Chain · 4663 · ETH gas
Settlement: USDG, six decimals
Packs: CORE $10 · GROWTH $25 · ALPHA $50 · WHALE $100
House edge: 3.6% at CORE, falling to 2.0% at WHALE
Long-run return: 96.4% at CORE, 98.0% at WHALE
Floor: 50% of price at CORE, 58% at WHALE — enforced in the contract
Cap: $500 at CORE, $50,000 at WHALE
Token: $CHIP — access and prestige only, never odds, never a discount

How a pack works

Weather — the reserve ratio of the vault sets which bands are open today. The exact table is printed before you pay.
Buy — you call buyQuoted with the pack id, your own seed, the version you were shown and the price you were quoted. If the weather moved, the call reverts instead of repricing you.
Roll — the contract computes the outcome from the epoch's committed server seed, your seed and the purchase id.
Deliver — the vault transfers the assets to your wallet in the same transaction. Nothing is delivered from a hot wallet.
Choose — before delivery you may SEAL and keep the pack, or RIP and trade it up a tier.
Record — a Stockdex card is minted with the price you pulled at.

CORE $10 — the published band table

BAND       PACK IS WORTH        CHANCE     1 IN
DUD        $5.00 – $8.00        52.20%     2
SHORT      $8.00 – $9.90        25.00%     4
PAR        $9.90 – $13.00       14.00%     7
GREEN      $13.00 – $25.00       6.50%     15
EPIC       $25.00 – $50.00       2.00%     50
MYTHIC     $50.00 – $200.00      0.28%     357
JACKPOT    $200.00 – $500.00     0.02%     5,000

EV = .522(6.50) + .25(8.95) + .14(11.45) + .065(19.00)
   + .02(37.50) + .0028(125) + .0002(350)  =  $9.64
edge = 3.6%   ·   packs that beat their price ≈ 21%

Why the roll can be checked

Publishing odds is a claim about intent. It says nothing about whether any particular roll followed them. The reference product in this category draws its cards on a private server and writes only the result to the chain, so a player cannot tell an honest pack from a nerfed one. CHIPSTOCK moves the roll itself on chain.

The server seed is committed per epoch — roughly a thousand packs — not per purchase. Committing per purchase would let the house grind seeds until it found a cheap outcome.
Your client seed travels inside the purchase call, so the house cannot see it before its own seed is locked.
The contract derives the roll from keccak(serverSeed, clientSeed, purchaseId).
When the epoch closes the server seed is revealed and anyone can recompute every roll it contained.

Verifying your own pack

commit  = keccak256(serverSeed)          // on chain, before the epoch
roll    = keccak256(serverSeed, clientSeed, purchaseId)
band    = bandFor(roll, versionConfigHash)

// after the reveal
assert keccak256(revealedSeed) == commit
assert bandFor(keccak256(revealedSeed, myClientSeed, myId)) == myBand

Vault weather

The vault holds the assets that packs are paid from. Its reserve ratio decides which bands are open, because a shop that promises a prize it cannot pay is not generous, it is insolvent. The mapping is a public function of on-chain state, printed on the page before you pay, and pinned to your purchase by the version argument.

STORM — reserve under 40%: top band Epic · CORE cap $50
FAIR — reserve 40 to 70%: top band Mythic, reduced · CORE cap $150
CLEAR — reserve 70 to 120%: top band Mythic, full · CORE cap $500
GOLDEN — reserve over 120%: Jackpot band open · CORE cap is the pot

Anyone may deposit stock tokens into the vault and take the largest share of the edge, carrying the variance that comes with it. The expected return is the fee share times how often the inventory turns over: LP APR ≈ 2.1% × (annual volume ÷ inventory). This is not free yield — a depositor stays fully exposed to the assets they deposited, and to the swing of the packs.

The pot

Half a cent of every dollar goes to a progressive jackpot, and the JACKPOT band is paid from that pot rather than from the vault. This is what makes a fifty times payout safe: an extreme win never touches a depositor's inventory. If the pot is too small to cover the band, the band closes and the roll resolves as Mythic instead.

The Stockdex

Every card minted records the ticker, the rarity band and the price you pulled it at. It then carries a grade that moves with the market. Hold the underlying tokens and the card is SEALED, its grade live. Sell them and it becomes CRACKED, its grade frozen at what you actually realised.

Rarity — fixed at the pull, from the band the pack landed in.
Grade — performance since your entry price, recalculated daily.
Sealed or cracked — whether the position is still open.
Sets — sector sets, holo variants for pulls made at a thirty-day low, streak badges.

The point is that selling does not erase your collection, it scores it. A leaderboard of who timed their pulls best needs nobody to lose for someone else to win.

$CHIP

The token cannot discount a pack, and this is arithmetic rather than policy. At a 96.4% return the largest bonus that keeps the house solvent is a factor of 1.037, and the entire edge is 3.6%. A 2% discount would consume more than half the margin. Products charging a 30% rake can afford large token promotions; this one cannot, and says so.

May do: Series access, Stockdex prestige, buyback and burn from the 1.0% protocol cut, demo credits
May never do: Discount a pack, improve odds or rarity, route protocol fees to holders

Risk and eligibility

This is a game of chance. Roughly one CORE pack in five comes back worth more than it cost, which means about four in five do not. A floor is not a refund — it caps how bad a single pack can be, not whether you lose over time. The house edge is the reason the long-run number is 96.4% and not 100%.

Not offered to United States persons. Restricted in the United Kingdom, Canada and Switzerland.
Tokenized stock instruments track a share's price. They are not the share, and carry no voting or ownership rights.
Prices move. A pack delivered at a good value can be worth less an hour later.
Nothing here is financial advice, and nothing here is a promise of a return.