Riddlen

Version 6, 2026-09-27. This document is the design. Where the code, the site or another page disagrees with it, this page wins and the other is a bug.

1. What it is

A scavenger hunt for the whole world, run on a blockchain, that lasts about twenty years and then ends.

The house releases a riddle. The contract rolls how many NFTs exist for it and puts them on sale. An NFT is one person’s right to attempt that riddle. You solve the riddle, and the answer unlocks a place. You go there, find what was hidden, scan it, and you have found it. Every finder gets a share of the riddle’s pot, larger the earlier you were, released when the next person finds it too. Every finder also gets a piece of one map. When the thousandth riddle has been released, the map is complete and the final hunt for the grand prize begins.

Every attempt costs Riddlen (RDLN). Every payment is split four ways: a quarter is burned, a quarter feeds the grand prize, a quarter runs the game, a quarter builds the market the prize is paid in. Nothing is refunded. Nothing expires.

The founder writes and hides the first riddles alone. Players earn the right to write them through reputation. A DAO finishes the hunt.

2. The rules that do not move

These are the rules every other decision is checked against. If a proposed mechanic breaks one, the mechanic is wrong.

1. Nothing expires. No deadlines, no windows, no fuses, no settlement step. A riddle is alive until every NFT on it has found it, or forever. An NFT is a live claim on its riddle’s pot for as long as it is held.
2. Every guess costs. Each guess on an NFT is paid, more each time, whether it is right or wrong. The step is a share of the ticket price, so it floats with the pot, the scarcity and the halving floor. The site never checks an answer for free.
3. Everyone who finds is paid, earlier finders more. Shares are set by finishing order and scaled to the riddle’s NFT count. There is no cap on how many finders share the pot.
4. A share is released by the finders who follow. On small pots the first finder is paid when the second person scans, the second when the third does, and so on. On large pots two or three more finders are needed before each release, which makes two friends taking a big pot a much bigger conspiracy. Completion pays everyone still waiting. The code stays at the place because taking it away costs the taker.
5. The answer lives in the world. No machine is in the loop. The hunt’s difficulty comes from places, not from wordplay a model can crack.
6. The treasury pays only for the house’s riddles. Player-written riddles, when they come, fund their own pots.
7. The commitments are immutable. The map root, the prize commitment, the launch, the schedule and the price floor are fixed before the first riddle and held in a contract with no owner and no upgrade path.

3. The commitments

Held in HuntCommitments, a plain contract of immutables.

4. The loop

5. The NFT

• It is the riddle. Its text is the clue people buy. Its metadata shows its state.
• It never expires. A riddle stands until it is solved, however long that takes. An NFT bought in year three is a live claim in year nineteen.
• Its counter is its own. A riddle with a hundred NFTs has a hundred independent counters. Other people’s guesses never change what your next guess costs.
• Everything travels with it. Sell an NFT after 20 tries and the buyer’s next try costs 21. Sell one whose riddle you cracked and the buyer can claim, if they have the answer to read the location. Sell one that has found and its unreleased share goes to the new holder when it is released. The token carries its cost, its progress and its claim; the wallet carries nothing.
• Enough of them that it is a race. The count is random with a floor of ten, so people always compete for the same find.
• Two markets, one token. Before a find, an NFT trades on its chance at the next share. After, it trades on the share it is owed and the map fragment it can read.

6. Money

6.1 The split

Every RDLN payment in the game goes through the token’s game protocol:

This applies to every mint, every guess and every claim. It was 50% burn / 25% / 25% until 2026-09-27; the token was upgraded in place. The reason for the change is in 6.5.

6.2 What is paid

Nothing is refunded, ever. Nothing is burned by time.

6.3 The pot

Each riddle’s pot is set by its difficulty and reserved from the game contract’s balance when the riddle is released. Testnet pots: 10,000 / 25,000 / 60,000 / 150,000 RDLN. The pot is funded from the token’s prize-pool allocation. It belongs to that riddle for as long as the riddle stands; it never rolls anywhere.

6.4 Shares: who gets what

On a riddle with N NFTs, the k-th finder’s share is proportional to 1/k, scaled so that if all N find it the pot is exactly emptied:

share(k) = pot × (1 / k) ÷ (1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + … + 1/N)

Every finder is paid. Earlier finders are paid more. The first finder on a scarce riddle is paid far more than the first finder on a crowded one, so the roll matters:

A share is booked at the scan and released when enough finders have followed: one more on Easy and Medium riddles, two on Hard, three on Legendary. Completion, every NFT on the riddle having found, releases everyone still waiting. A finder whose riddle attracts nobody after them waits, with their share booked, for as long as it takes. That is the cost of being last and the reason the code stays where it is.

Late shares are small in RDLN today. The hunt runs twenty years; what a share is worth in year twelve is not for today’s numbers to decide.

6.5 What the burn actually does

Simulated over the full thousand riddles with the deployed pricing (section 7), the random NFT counts, the testnet pots and the 10 RDLN floor halving every two years:

Against pots of about 29M paid out, 4% of the prize-pool allocation. The burn is real and permanent, but at these pot sizes it is small against the supply. What shrinks the float is the slow payout of the prize pool. What gives a share value is a market, which is why a quarter of every payment builds one. The pot is the lever: because the ticket price is a fifth of the pot per NFT, mint volume scales with the pots, so raising the pots raises every quarter of the split with them. The full numbers are on Tokenomics.

6.6 Collusion

A first finder who brings a friend as the second finder collects two shares, 29% of a 100-NFT riddle’s pot between them. Each needs an NFT, guesses and a claim fee. The design bounds this rather than preventing it: shares fall fast with rank, crowded riddles pay colluders less, every extra collaborator pays, and on Hard and Legendary riddles nothing is released until two or three more people have found it, so taking a large pot needs a larger conspiracy, each member with their own NFT and their own journey.

7. The mint price

An NFT costs a fifth of what one ticket is worth, and never less than the floor:

price = max(floor, 20% × pot ÷ nftCount)

A 150,000 pot with 12 NFTs prices at 2,500 RDLN; a 10,000 pot with 800 at 12.5 on testnet’s 10 RDLN floor. Scarcity and prize are priced automatically, and mint volume scales with the pot, so the burn does too: a fully sold riddle recycles a fifth of its pot through the split. The price is quoted once the count is rolled, which the two-step open allows. The 20% is a tunable snapshotted into each riddle at release; the floor is a commitment and halves every two years from launch. Decided 2026-09-27.

8. Answers, places and codes

The answer never goes on chain. For each accepted answer the house computes a deliberately slow hash, H = PBKDF2-SHA256(canonical answer, salt = chainId‖hunt‖riddleId, 600,000 rounds). From H it builds a 1,024-leaf Merkle tree whose leaf at position i is keccak256(riddleId, i, H), and stores the root. Up to eight accepted answers give up to eight roots; unused slots hold random roots.

A proof works for one NFT only. NFT number i submits its own leaf and the ten siblings from position i to the root. The contract recomputes the root positionally, so a solved NFT’s calldata cannot be replayed by another NFT and a leaf reveals nothing about H.

Guessing offline is possible and priced. On a public chain anyone can run the verifier on their own machine. The site never does; every guess it sends is paid. The slow hash makes the offline route cost real compute per candidate instead.

The location is encrypted with the answer. The clue is sealed under a random key, wrapped once per accepted answer. Whoever knows any accepted answer can read it in the browser.

The place holds a key. The hidden code carries a signing key and a fragment secret. To claim, the browser signs Claim(riddleId, tokenId, owner) under the hunt’s domain with that key and sends only the signature. The key never touches the chain. The fragment secret next to it stays private to people who stood there, which is a physical exclusivity, not a cryptographic one. A destroyed cache can be re-keyed by the house and re-hidden; the answer roots never change and existing claims stand.

9. The map and the grand prize

Every riddle’s map fragment is sealed under a key derived from the fragment secret and committed, as a hash, on chain; the ciphertext lives in the release event. One fragment alone says almost nothing. Hundreds together say where to go. Fragments belong to the tokens that found, not to the people, so a found NFT is worth buying for twenty years.

When riddle 1,000 is released, the grand prize hunt begins: one more hunt, played by whoever holds the most of the map. It is not a payout and not a lottery. Nobody, including the founder, ever held the whole map: it was split before the first riddle shipped, and the root on chain proves it. The prize itself is physical, its location sealed with a successor, and its RDLN side is the grand prize wallet, which receives a quarter of every payment for twenty years.

10. How riddles are made

No one person knows a whole riddle. A riddle is assembled from pieces: writers submit small riddles with sealed answers into a pool and never learn if or when one is used; hiders are given a code, hide it, and never see the riddle; the contract draws pieces at random and combines their answers. A writer who tells a friend gives away one piece of three. A hider who tells a friend gives away a code with no riddle. Two writers on one riddle do not know each other.

The right to contribute is earned. RON is soulbound reputation earned by finding. The tiers already exist in the token.

Player-submitted riddles pay to submit, which burns more RDLN. Their pots come from their own sales and fees, never from the treasury. Not built yet.

Machines. No AI is in the loop of the game. If the system ever offers an assistant to writers or players, its cost must be covered by a fee inside the design, because the house cannot carry it. Not built.

11. In the world

The physical layer follows geocaching practice, adopted whole:

• Placement. Nothing buried. Nothing on private land without permission. Nothing near infrastructure, nothing that looks like a device, nothing that needs a climb or a swim. Every clue leads somewhere public, reachable and legal.
• Ratings. Every hide carries a difficulty and a terrain rating.
• Proof. The hider posts photo proof at placement.
• Maintenance. The hider keeps the cache in place. Anyone can flag it. A hider who does not respond loses staked RON, once staking exists.
• First to find. The code stays at the spot for everyone, and the contract makes sure of it. A physical log book stays in the cache.
• Trackables. Objects that move between caches, each its own NFT. Later.

Nobody should ever be hurt looking for a riddle. This section is the first thing the DAO may not weaken.

12. Tokens

The full numbers, allocations, worked examples and the simulation are on Tokenomics. In short:

• RDLN is the game’s currency: one billion minted at genesis, 700 million of it the prize pool released to riddles over the hunt. Every game payment goes through the four-way split. The token can also burn 1% of ordinary transfers; the switch is off.
• RON is reputation: earned by finding, never transferable, the key to authorship.
• The grand prize wallet receives a quarter of every payment. On testnet it is the deployer’s address; on mainnet it is a contract nobody holds keys to.
• The liquidity reserve receives a quarter of every payment and is paired with the other side of a pool by the treasury on a schedule. On testnet it is 0xa9Cd5a6b1726436d144dF0FF583Ff72a7CF05abD.

13. What is deployed, and what changes before mainnet

Deployed on Polygon Amoy since 2026-09-27 and played at riddlen.com; addresses and the play guide are on Playing the hunt. The testnet map and prize are placeholders.

Before mainnet: the real map and prize commitment, made once offline and sealed with a successor; a keyless grand prize wallet; the release spacing set to the real cadence; a sealed reserve of riddles; verifiable randomness for the NFT count; a successor house; the mint price decision in section 7; legal review of placements and of pay-to-attempt in each jurisdiction; and a size diet for the RDLN contract, which is over the mainnet limit.

14. Open questions

• Whether seats on a riddle should be tradable inside the site or only on open markets.
• Whether the riddle NFT should pay its original finder a royalty on resale.
• Whether very long-standing riddles should have their pots topped up from the treasury.
• Several caches per riddle, with each NFT assigned to one by its index. Everyone with the answer can read every location, but each NFT can only claim at its own place, so every extra share costs an extra journey and a lost cache blocks only the NFTs assigned to it. One cache per riddle in genesis; the contract should leave room for a list.

15. Change log

• v6, 2026-09-27. The hunt. Replaces Stump the Machine and the seats design. Rank-based shares released by the next finder replace every form of settlement window. Four-way split with a liquidity reserve. No machines in the loop.
• v5.2, 2025. Stump the Machine: AI panel as payout gate, deadlines, commit-reveal. Retired.
• v5.1, 2025. The original: 1,000 riddles over 19 years, progressive burns, biennial halving, a grand prize wallet. Most of it is back.