CAIRN

1. Vision

Cairnheim is an isometric colony builder inspired by the transport mechanics of Settlers II — players build, run a logistics chain carried by cairns (transport relays) rather than flags, and expand their territory. The game embeds a native Solana token, designed to reward real contribution to the game world rather than speculation.

2. The game

• Genre — city builder / management, isometric view
• Core loop — a cairn-based transport network, carriers, production chains, construction and territorial defence
• Economic loop — mines, upkeep, a player-to-player marketplace, expeditions

3. The CAIRN token

• Fixed supply: 1,000,000,000 CAIRN. No additional issuance is possible beyond that cap — the mint and freeze authorities are revoked at token creation, not afterwards. There is never a window during which anyone, the team included, could create new CAIRN or freeze a balance.
• Launched through a Meteora bonding curve (DBC) — open to everyone from the first block, with no prior private sale.
• Automatic migration to a DAMM v2 pool once the threshold is reached, with liquidity locked at 100%.
• Fair launch — no private sale, no allocation reserved for investors or a centralised exchange, no privileged team purchase on the curve. Every buyer enters on the same terms from the first block.

3.1 Supply distribution

Everything is fixed at creation and verifiable on-chain from the first block:

On the emission reserve. This is not an allocation. An allocation can be sold; this one is held by a program, under a frozen emission rule, and can only ever be paid to miners. It is the supply left to mine, made explicit — exactly like Bitcoin's.

On the team share. It is declared before launch, locked on-chain, and its schedule is public. It exists for a stated reason: revenue made only of transaction fees rewards churn, not value. Holding a share aligns the team durably with every other holder.

4. Access to the game — Hold to Play

Rather than a classic payment converted into tokens, access rests on holding a fixed amount of 1,000 CAIRN. The player keeps full ownership of the token — it is not spent to get in.

• Deliberately fixed, not USD-indexed: the threshold's first purpose is the anti-bot filter, not price fairness over time. A fixed, known amount is simpler to operate than a permanent oracle recalculation, and no less effective against automated scripts.
• Grandfathering — if the threshold is later revised by hand, already active players keep their access and are never retroactively excluded.
• Combined with the other anti-bot layers of section 5 (wallet screening, rising marginal cost), not a mechanism standing on its own.

5. Network integrity (anti-bot)

• Automated wallet analysis (on-chain history, age, funding) and technical fingerprinting, invisible to a legitimate player.
• Rising marginal cost for repeated account creation from the same source.
• Caps on farm-sensitive mechanisms — notably Strike acquired through tribute, capped at 50 per rolling 24 hours. Without that bound, reinvesting gains would convert surplus CAIRN into power exponentially and, in time, let someone buy the network.
• Network Strike floor (section 6.1): an account farm captures no more than it dilutes, and on an empty network it cannot drain the reserve.

6. Emission — where CAIRN comes from

6.1 The mine — Strike and Thrift, calibrated like Bitcoin difficulty

The restored Cairn Mine provides a free base Strike — the floor: a penniless player always mines, and consumes nothing. The player then builds a rig by setting picks: a single fungible item where the count is the power.

No slot limit. The three pick tiers of an earlier draft existed only because slots were capped at four: you paid a premium for density. Without that limit the hierarchy loses its purpose — and a fungible pick becomes tradeable on the secondary market at a single price.

Price is therefore not the brake on this economy, and it can stay low and legible. What actually bounds a rig's power is the colony's ability to feed it — see upkeep below.

Four consequences, and this is the model's strongest guarantee:

• the server cannot invent power. It attests, it does not decide — and even a compromised server key could only destroy Strike, never create it;
• anyone can recompute any player's Strike from public history, with no access to our servers or our database;
• the project funds nobody's infrastructure. No on-chain account is opened at the team's expense, however many players arrive;
• a miner account exists only if someone bought. That is what makes an account farm pointless: a seat that cost nothing does not exist, and the free base benefits only those who entered by spending at least one point.

Strike is a relative weight, exactly like hashrate in Bitcoin mining. What is fixed is the total distributed per period, not anyone's share of it.

Network Strike floor. Pro-rata sharing has a blind spot: when the network is still empty, the denominator collapses and a handful of players collect the entire pot. Each share is therefore computed against a floor, never against the real network Strike when that is lower:

Player share = (their Strike / max(real network Strike, FLOOR)) × total emission for the period

What is not distributed stays in the reserve and waits for later players: a period's effective emission is min(pool, what the network is entitled to claim). At the chosen floor, the pot is only fully distributed from roughly 48 equipped mines onward.

What this floor prevents is not excess income — a few dozen players on an empty network would earn pennies anyway while the market cap is small. It prevents an supply overhang: without it, a handful of accounts would accumulate several percent of total supply within a year, acquired when the token was worth nothing, and that claim would land on the market the day it was worth something. This is the mechanism that collapsed most token-based game economies.

Why this model. Under a guaranteed-rate model, each mine earns a fixed amount — so the more active players, the larger the total emitted, without limit: real uncontrolled inflation if the game succeeds. Under the difficulty model, the total emitted per period never depends on the number of players: more total Strike on the network simply dilutes each individual share, exactly as a Bitcoin miner's share falls as the network grows without the block reward changing.

Two independent axes of improvement, as on real mining hardware:

• Strike (setting picks, paid in CAIRN) — capital buys power: it raises your relative share, and also your emberwood consumption.
• Thrift (efficiency, continuous) — the emberwood burned per 100 blows; lower is better. It starts at 40 and falls towards a physical floor of 12, never below: the mine is never free. It improves through set diamonds (unlimited in number, brought back by expeditions, but with diminishing returns — each diamond removes a constant fraction of what remains above the floor, so you approach it without ever reaching it and one more diamond is always worth something) and through colony comfort (chapel, baths…). Thrift never raises your share; it only lowers your running cost.

Upkeep is paid in colony resources, never in CAIRN. It starts with emberwood alone and broadens as the rig grows: each material only enters above its own threshold, so a player who cannot yet smelt copper is never asked for any.

The free floor itself consumes nothing: a colony run dry loses the share its rig contributed, never its monument.

The reward pool — how redistribution actually works

A separate program (distinct from the marketplace) holds the emission reserve in a PDA the team cannot drain. It reads the network's total power and each active mine's share, then distributes according to the formula above.

• A period's emission is a percentage of the REMAINING reserve balance (starting point: 2% per month). This rule replaces stepped halvings: it decays smoothly (≈ −21.5% per year, the equivalent of a halving every ~35 months, with no cliff) and, above all, it can never exhaust the reserve — a constant-amount emission stops dead the day the balance hits zero.
• Recycling — CAIRN spent in game (picks, Thrift tempering, tribute) does not vanish entirely: 75% returns to the reserve, 25% is burned permanently. The reserve therefore refills with activity, and the system self-stabilises around reserve = recycling / emission rate.
• Consequence for players — more miners means more upgrades bought, more reserve refilled, and a larger total distributed, which offsets the dilution their arrival caused, without ever creating a single token.
• Anti-deficit guardrail — the distributable amount can never exceed the reserve balance: distribution slows automatically rather than creating a deficit or new tokens.
• No vote on emission. The emission schedule is subject to no governance. Voting power held by locked tokens would let holders decide to cut the pay of active players — an institutionalised conflict of interest, and one that can be bought. A frozen rule draws its value from the impossibility of changing it.

6.2 Two currencies, two roles

This split limits constant pressure on CAIRN: the token is spent in meaningful steps, not nibbled away by daily micro-transactions.

Gold ↔ CAIRN bridge — no fixed conversion rate. The exchange goes through the in-game marketplace (section 7), a gold-rich player selling surplus to another for CAIRN. It reuses existing infrastructure instead of inventing a separate mechanism.

6.3 Bandit camps, marble and the Explorer

• Bandit camps (1 to 2 per map) — cleared by the player to unlock access to an exploration zone. A gameplay challenge, with no financial stake.
• Marble — the resource gathered after clearing, used to build the Explorer.
• Explorer — sent on missions (costing marble and time, no CAIRN to dispatch); never a total failure, always returning loot in variable quantity.
• Loot — exclusively rare, non-monetisable resources, never CAIRN directly, used to improve mine efficiency (section 6.1) or to build and upgrade.
• Several Explorer levels, unlocked through the CAIRN skill tree: access to higher-tier missions with larger and rarer loot.

Randomness applies only to intermediate crafting ingredients; CAIRN itself is never subject to a draw — see section 12.

6.4 Other sources

7. Economic sinks

8. Governance — veCAIRN (roadmap)

• Phase 1 (launch) — simple staking: lock and yield, no governance vote, capped in total volume to limit exposure during the running-in period.
• Phase 2 — full veCAIRN: chosen lock duration (3 to 24 months), governance power decaying linearly to expiry (unlike models where power is acquired for life, which would unfairly favour the earliest stakers over newcomers), early-exit penalty.
• What governance will NEVER cover — the emission schedule (section 6.1). Letting locked tokens vote on the pay of active players would institutionalise a conflict of interest, and it could be bought. Governance covers fees, seasons, new resources and content — not what miners receive.
• Yield comes from real fees generated by game activity (marketplace, territory), never from emission created for the occasion.
• Claim window — staking rewards must be claimed within a set period (e.g. 4 weeks) after they are made available. Past that, unclaimed amounts are burned, which avoids an indefinite build-up of outstanding claims and adds a further sink.

9. Funding and transparency

• The project raises no initial liquidity: it is formed organically by the first buyers through the bonding curve — no privileged team purchase on the curve, entirely organic growth. The team share is the one in section 3.1: 5%, declared before launch and locked on-chain, never acquired at buyers' expense.
• Revenue comes from transaction fees generated by the token's trading activity, claimed at regular intervals (every 15 days), plus the fees of the locked liquidity pool.
• Spending principle: the project spends only what it has produced. No expense is committed from personal funds or in anticipation of future revenue — every line item is funded by fees already collected.
• Each fee claim is a public, verifiable transaction on Solana, announced on the official channels.
• Public burn tracking — a monthly summary (amount burned, cumulative, percentage of total supply) is published on the official channels. The data is already continuously verifiable on-chain; this summary simply makes it readable without consulting an explorer yourself.

9.0 Sliding split of creator fees

The team's share automatically decreases as monthly revenue grows — the more the project succeeds, the larger the share reinvested into it:

Rationale. Early on, when the project is fragile and the risk rests entirely on one person, the team share stays high — a few dozen dollars a month does not justify giving half of it to treasury. Once the project is established and profitable, priority shifts to reinvestment (audit, development, marketing) rather than personal pay.

9.0.1 First Infrastructure spend — the public token listing

A correctly indexed token with no logo, no description and no link to the site is indistinguishable, on aggregators, from the thousands of launches with no project behind them. Pool indexing is automatic and free; displaying the project's information is not always.

Rule: as soon as the cumulative Infrastructure share reaches the required amount, it funds first the update of the public token listing — logo, description, official site, socials, and the declaration of locked-supply wallets (emission reserve and team share), so that the displayed market cap reflects the supply actually in circulation.

The order is always the same: free first, paid only if a gap remains.

1. Free route, engaged from launch — several aggregators accept a project information update at no cost, within a few days, provided the official site is online and the information is publicly verifiable. This is the default route, and it is always taken.
2. Paid route, conditional — engaged only on platforms where, after the free route, the listing would remain empty. Never for convenience, never for speed.

• Never in anticipation — per the principle in section 9, the expense is committed only once the corresponding fees have actually been collected.
• One-off spend, published like any treasury operation.

Prerequisite before any submission, free or paid: the official site must be online, the official channels reachable, and the information publicly verifiable. A submission whose links do not respond is rejected.

Why this comes first. Without it, the locks described in section 3.1 — 25% of supply immobilised — would remain invisible on the page most people actually look at, and the displayed market cap would be overstated by that much. A commitment nobody can see is worth nothing.

What this does not cover: aggregators' paid promotional slots. They buy attention, not credibility, and observation of comparable projects shows they retain nobody. The project's visibility budget remains the quality of the game.

9.1 Wallet architecture

All addresses are published and pinned on the official channels at launch, so that every movement of funds stays publicly verifiable.

9.2 Marketplace program authority

The program's upgrade authority and its internal configuration authority (config.authority) remain permanently active — the game and its mechanics evolve over time (content, fixes), and a permanently frozen contract would prevent any future correction.

• Held on a cold wallet (Nano), never on the day-to-day development wallet.
• Solo-run project: no multisig planned at this stage.
• Two instructions allow economic parameters to be adjusted without a full redeploy — see section 10 for the detail and the associated guardrails.

10. Adjustment and incident response

A living project must be able to correct an observed imbalance — whether spotted by the team or reported by the community. The question is not whether an adjustment will be needed, but how it is framed so it never opens the door to arbitrary rule changes.

Guardrails in place:

• The strict bounds set at initialisation (fees capped at 20% maximum) apply to update_config as well.
• The 48-hour timelock makes every parameter change publicly visible before it takes effect — no surprise changes.
• pause affects only purchases (buy_item); existing listings stay visible and nothing is destroyed.
• Every change proposed, change applied, or pause triggered emits a public on-chain event, verifiable by anyone.

11. Economic model

Emission pays out 2% of what remains in the reserve each month. This single rule needs no simulation to be understood: it is geometric decay, and its properties read straight off.

Three consequences, and they hold by construction rather than by forecast:

• No cliff. The rate falls 2% per month, continuously. A stepped scheme (halving) cuts yield in half overnight; here the monthly fall is imperceptible over a play session.
• The reserve never runs out. 0.98ⁿ stays strictly positive: there is no date on which the game stops paying. Its half-life is 34 months.
• Total emitted is bounded in advance by the reserve's 200,000,000 — 20% of supply — and that cap is the one in section 3.1, verifiable on-chain from the first block.

What the rate does not do: it depends neither on player count nor on their activity. Twice as many miners do not produce twice as much CAIRN — they share the same pot, more thinly. Difficulty therefore rises on its own, as in Bitcoin mining, and no crowd can accelerate token release.

These figures are reproducible with the repository's own tools, which read the same constants as the game and the on-chain program — never a copy.

12. Legal considerations

The game's design deliberately excludes any mechanism combining, at once, a financial stake, a random outcome and a monetisable gain — a combination which, in several jurisdictions (including France), would qualify the activity as gambling subject to a specific licensing regime.

• Expedition and Explorer rewards are structured so that randomness applies only to non-monetisable resources (crafting materials with no direct exchange value) — never to CAIRN itself.
• Everything touching CAIRN (unlocks, upkeep, emission) stays deterministic, at a cost and amount known in advance.

This document does not constitute legal advice. Verification by a qualified professional, in each targeted jurisdiction, remains necessary before any public launch.

13. Disclaimer and risks

Crypto-assets are risk instruments subject to high volatility. Nothing in this document constitutes investment, legal or tax advice. CAIRN is designed as a utility token for use inside the game's ecosystem — it is neither designed nor intended to function as a security or an investment. Participation should be motivated by interest in the game and its world, not by an expectation of guaranteed gain.

By holding or using CAIRN, everyone acknowledges in particular the following risks:

• Technical risk — the game, the on-chain programs and all associated systems may contain bugs or vulnerabilities capable of causing partial or total loss of tokens or items, sometimes irreversibly.
• Network risk — the project depends on Solana functioning correctly and on third-party providers (RPC, launchpad, wallets) over which it has no direct control.
• Economic risk — emission, sink and marketplace mechanisms may evolve or fail to behave exactly as modelled; no guarantee is given as to the token's future value, utility or liquidity.
• Personal security risk — custody of private keys and recovery phrases is each user's sole responsibility; their loss or theft causes definitive and unrecoverable loss of the assets concerned.
• Regulatory risk — the legal status of crypto-assets keeps evolving and varies by jurisdiction; future regulatory action could affect access to, use of, or the legal status of the token.
• Tax risk — each user is solely responsible for determining and meeting their own tax obligations related to acquiring, holding or disposing of the token.
• No listing guarantee — nothing guarantees that the token will remain listed or tradeable on any platform over time.

This document may be revised to reflect the project's evolution (clarifications, corrections, new features). Any revision touching an on-chain economic parameter remains subject to the process described in section 10 (public announcement, 48-hour delay before application) — this document can never be used to bypass that process. Revisions are published on the official channels with a change history.

14. Revision history

All these corrections align the document with the game's balance file, which is authoritative. The figures published on this site are generated from that same file, never retyped.