Mainnet, airdrop, gasless

The hunt runs on the Polygon Amoy testnet today, and the testnet is where the game gets played and argued with before anything is worth money. This page is what has to happen between here and mainnet, and the plan for the three questions that decide whether mainnet works: how people get RDLN, how the airdrop is spent, and how someone who scans a sticker is playing within a minute without knowing what gas is.

Before mainnet

In the order they must happen:

1. The map and the prize. The real map is split into a thousand fragments once, offline; only its root goes on chain. The grand prize is chosen, its location sealed as a hash on chain and in full with a successor who can open it if the founder cannot. Nothing about the hunt can be trusted in year fifteen unless this is checkable in year one.
2. A keyless grand prize wallet. A contract, not an address, receives the quarter of every payment that funds the prize.
3. The schedule. The minimum time between releases set to the real cadence, about a week, and a sealed reserve of riddles so the schedule survives a bad month.
4. Verifiable randomness for the NFT count roll, Chainlink VRF or equivalent, so nobody can influence how many NFTs a riddle gets.
5. A successor house. A person or a multisig who can release riddle 500 if the founder cannot, before any DAO exists.
6. Legal review of the placement rules in each jurisdiction where caches go, and of pay-to-attempt with a prize for skill.
7. A slimmer token. The RDLN contract is 30.9 KiB, over the mainnet limit.
8. The open decisions in the whitepaper: the guess step, the ticker, more finders before the first release on large pots, several caches per riddle.

How people get RDLN on mainnet

A starter dose. The sticker promise stays true: a new player gets enough RDLN for a first ticket and a few guesses, from the airdrop allocation, once. On the testnet the faucet is one claim per wallet; on mainnet wallets are free to create, so the dose needs a cost that bots feel and people don’t. The plan is one dose per verified human, using the humanity gate already in the repository (a signed pass from a service that checks World ID or a similar proof), with a plain per-wallet fallback where verification isn’t available. The dose is small enough that farming it isn’t worth the verification.

Earn it. Find riddles. Pots come from the 700M prize-pool allocation, released to the hunt contract as riddles are released, so the pool lasts the twenty years. Later, write riddles and be paid from the riddles’ own sales.

Buy it. The 100M liquidity allocation seeds a market, and the liquidity quarter of every payment deepens it from then on. No presale.

The airdrop

The 100M airdrop allocation is not a snapshot drop. It is spent three ways, each rewarding the behaviour the game needs:

The 2025 design had a social-proof phase (follow, join, post). It is gone. Social proof is the easiest thing in the world for a bot.

Gasless play

Someone always pays gas: validators are paid in POL. “Gasless” means the player never has to think about it. Three shapes, from simplest to largest:

The player pays in RDLN. A paymaster accepts RDLN from the player and pays the POL itself. The player holds one token, never buys gas, and the house is not out of pocket. On Polygon a transaction costs a fraction of a cent, so the RDLN charged can be tiny and can take the four-way split like every other payment. This is the preferred shape.

The house sponsors. A relayer pays gas for calls to the hunt contract, rate-limited per address, funded from the treasury quarter. Cheap at testnet scale, and the repository already holds a forwarder and gasless manager from 2025; the hunt contract would need ERC2771Context.

Wallets people don’t have to install. For the sticker crowd, a passkey-backed smart account created in the browser with Face ID or a fingerprint, plus a paymaster policy (“only calls to the hunt, at most N per hour”). The account is theirs and works on any device with the same passkey.

An app chain with RDLN as the gas token is possible if volume ever justifies it. Not before the game has players.

Shrinking the house

The house releases riddles and hides caches. Everything else on chain runs without it, and the steps that make even that matter less are in the whitepaper, section 10: proposals from RON holders, review without the founder, then a DAO holding the prize wallet, the sealed reserve and the successor process. RON accrues from every find on the testnet today, so the first candidates for authorship are already being counted.