How the money works

Everything here is played for USDC, a digital dollar. One USDC is one US dollar, and unlike most things in crypto it is not meant to go up or down. That is the point of using it: a five dollar game is five dollars today and five dollars next month.

This article is about the money rather than the games. Where it comes from, where it sits while you play, and how you get it out.

Putting money in

When you first open the deposit page, we create an address that belongs to your account. It is yours, it never changes, and you send USDC to it from wherever you keep your crypto: an exchange, a wallet, anywhere.

Two things have to be right, and they are the only two.

The network must be Polygon. Not Ethereum, not Base, not BNB Chain, not Arbitrum. The deposit page names the network and shows you the token address so you can check it against whatever you are sending from.

The token must be USDC. Not another stablecoin, not the network's own coin.

Get either of those wrong and the money does not arrive, and we cannot get it back for you. That is not a policy we could soften: a transfer on another network never reaches us at all, and a different token is not something our system can move. Check twice before your first deposit, then it is easy forever after.

There is no minimum deposit and we charge nothing to receive one. Once it is sent, the page shows it arriving and counts the network's confirmations. That normally takes a few minutes. Until the count finishes the money is not in your balance yet, because until then the network itself can still reverse a transfer. There is nothing for you to do while you wait, and you can close the page.

Where your money sits

Your deposit is held by us while you play, not in your wallet. It returns to your wallet whenever you withdraw.

That is worth being plain about, because it is the biggest difference between this and a crypto app where you sign every action from your own wallet. Here you deposit once and then play without touching your wallet again. No signing every move, no paying network fees for every game, no waiting for anything to confirm mid-match. The cost of that convenience is that we hold the money in between.

Underneath, your balance is a running total in a double-entry ledger, the same idea a bank ledger uses. Every movement has two sides that must cancel out, so money is never created or destroyed by anything we do: a stake leaves your balance and lands in the match's escrow, and at the end it leaves escrow and lands with the winner. Nothing can leave your balance without a matching entry saying where it went, and your balance can never go below zero.

We also check the books against the chain automatically, several times an hour, comparing what we actually hold against what the ledger says we owe. If those two ever drift apart, it raises an alarm with us.

Taking money out

Withdrawing is one form: an address and an amount.

The address defaults to the wallet you signed in with, and you can send it somewhere else if you want. Be careful here, because we do not check that an address belongs to you, and once a transfer is sent it cannot be pulled back. Paste, do not type.

The fee is 1%. Withdraw 100 USDC and 99 lands. The screen shows you the exact three numbers before you confirm: what comes out, the fee, and what you receive.

The smallest withdrawal is 2 USDC received. After the fee, at least that much has to land.

You do not pay any network fee. We cover it, so you never need to hold the network's own coin just to move your own money.

Your balance is reduced when you press confirm, and the transfer goes out. It usually lands within a few minutes. You can close the page: it carries on without you, and the withdrawals list shows where it got to.

Very large withdrawals are looked at by a person before they go out. If yours is one of those, the page tells you so, and your money is set aside while it waits. Most withdrawals are nowhere near that size and never see it.

Keeping your account safe

You can sign in with a crypto wallet you already have, or with an email code, or with Google. The last two set up a wallet for you, so you can play here without ever having used crypto before.

However you signed in, it is one account and one balance. Adding a second way to sign in does not create a second account.

If you sign in with your own wallet, every withdrawal asks you to sign a message in that wallet. Somebody who somehow got into your session still cannot move your money without it.

If we set up your wallet, you can add a passkey, which is your fingerprint or face on your own device. Once you have one, every withdrawal asks for it. It is the single best thing you can do to protect a balance here.

Changing how you sign in pauses withdrawals for a day. Add an email, or add or remove a passkey, and withdrawals wait twenty four hours. Depositing and playing carry on as normal. It exists so that somebody who briefly got into your account cannot quietly change the locks and empty it. If you ever see that pause and you did not change anything, contact us straight away.

One thing that will never happen: we will never ask you for a seed phrase, and no message claiming to be from us is genuine if it does.

When something goes wrong

A deposit has not appeared. If it was USDC on Polygon it will arrive, and the page shows it counting confirmations even if you close it. If it was on another network or another token, it never reaches us and cannot be returned.

A withdrawal did not go through. If the transfer clearly failed, the money goes straight back into your balance and the page says so. If it is unclear whether it went out, it is held for a person to check against the chain before anything moves, and your funds stay reserved while that happens. Either way nothing is lost in the gap.

A withdrawal is taking a while. It shows as processing until the chain confirms it. That last part is the piece nobody controls, us included.

If something looks wrong and this page does not explain it, write to us through the support page. We would rather hear about it early.

Try it

If you want to see the games before any money is involved, practice is free: pick a bot on easy, medium or hard, or send a friend a link. Nothing is staked and nothing is recorded.

When you are ready, deposit whatever a game costs and no more. Five USDC is enough to start.