A Working Paper — Design thesis and economic architecture for an open-economy game Sinjin David Jung sinjin@peekingduck.io June 30th, 2026

On the nature of this document. This is a working paper: a design thesis and economic architecture for an open-economy game, not a report on a completed result. It sets out the reasoning behind a system we are building and the mechanisms by which we intend it to hold. The core game went live on April 20, 2026 (as a public beta); the thesis advanced here is falsifiable and is now being tested in operation. Claims about how the system behaves should be read as the argument for a design under live validation, not as proven outcomes.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Autonomous Open Game Economy Protocol is architected as a gameplay-first, dual-token, double-deflationary token supply management system. $MAYG is a demand-bounded, hard-capped gameplay token minted only when real gameplay generates both revenue and rewards. $OYABUN is a fixed-supply ecosystem anchor required to access infrastructure, license games, and operate UGC businesses, absorbing market supply through long-term infrastructure scaling requirements. Token supply flow is managed across three continuous layers: (i) gameplay token utility controls, (ii) industrial-scale ecosystem gameplay sinks, and (iii) an autonomous algorithmic clearinghouse. The objective being the systematic token deflation toward equilibrium dictated by gameplay activity and scale.

Supply-Pressure Triage Constraint The system architecture enforces a continuous supply-pressure triage constraint:

Total Market Supply Pressure = L₁ (70%) + L₂ (20%) + L₃ (10%)

• L₁ (Gameplay Levers): Handles approximately 70% of total pressure via internal, client-side precursor-token destruction and win/payout telemetry modifications before circulation.

• L₂ (Ecosystem Sinks): Handles approximately 20% via macro clan-property consumption.

• L₃ (Algorithmic Clearinghouse): Handles only the remaining approximately 10% residual pressure.

The inseparability of economy and gameplay is at the heart of this protocol. As modeled, it realizes the Forever Game as crypto's killer app: an open, self-sustaining economic engine delivering persistent transactional velocity, real revenue anchors, and structural ownership at scale.

Technical Abstract & Reviewer Guidance

This document presents a multi-layer control architecture for supply management in an open game economy. It is designed from real-money competitive gameplay and player psychology rather than conventional web3 token models, and should be evaluated on the internal logic, integration, and priority ordering of its mechanisms — not against standard tokenomics templates such as emission schedules, staking, generic utility lists, or single-layer burns.

The architecture manages supply and demand across four continuous control layers: Layer I – Gameplay Regulation: Precursor tokens and dynamic levers control supply inside the client before circulation. Layer II – Ecosystem Absorption: Surpluses are absorbed into long-term macro sinks via clan-operated UGEEs, gated by 50/50 spent-and-locked $OYABUN. Layer III – Algorithmic Clearinghouse: Residual pressure routes through a conversion waterfall into AMM pools, prioritizing conversion into the ecosystem anchor. Layer IV – Parameter Tuning: AI tooling provides operational telemetry for clans in-game without modifying protocol rules.

The architecture treats player psychology as a primary input into the economic design rather than a secondary consideration.

Psychology-Derived Design Principles The winner-take-all format redefines the precursor layer’s economic role. Dynamic contraction at the gameplay level serves as the primary control. The free token functions mainly as a retention tool sustained by value-range stability.

Evaluation Criteria Reviewers should assess: Whether the priority ordering of the three control layers is coherent. Whether each structural condition in §4 is addressed by specific, interlocking mechanisms. The consistency of the behavioral regime assumptions and governor logic. Traceability from identified problems to designed controls.

Comparisons to prior projects that lacked layered, priority-ordered controls are unlikely to be diagnostic. This architecture was built by first identifying the structural failure modes of previous systems and then designing ordered controls to prevent them.

WHY GAMES ARE STILL THE KILLER APP FOR CRYPTO

Crypto spent a decade building sophisticated infrastructure for a house that does not exist. Layer-2 scaling, modularity, and DeFi protocols are impressive, but network velocity remains almost entirely dependent on zero-sum speculative rotation. When tokens rely on artificial emissions, the economy collapses the moment speculation cools. The ecosystem is starving for real, non-subsidized transactional volume and an engaging competitive game is one of the strongest candidates to supply it.

Attention as an asset: Games capture and monetize human attention more efficiently than any other medium. Anchoring a ledger to a high-retention game client shifts customer acquisition from mercenary liquidity loops to organic engagement.

Tokens as industrial commodities: In a natively competitive engine, virtual assets behave like scarce resources. Players consume, degrade, and cycle them to execute strategies, creating a persistent demand floor that buffers against macro shifts.

A playground for productive capital: Virtual assets already function as productive capital in MMO-style economies and UGC platforms, with in-game property and industrial-scale production. This is not speculative; it is observed and regardless of the failings of web3 gaming, this fact remains unchanged.

Video games do not need crypto to become marginally better. Crypto needs video games to make a case for real, non-speculative adoption. In this context, web3 game design has wrongly focused on a speculative market approach and did not address the real problems and corresponding solutions.

PART 1: THE CASE FOR AN OPEN ECONOMY GAME

INTRODUCTION: THE WRECKAGE OF FINANCIAL THEATER IN GAME DESIGN

Web3 gaming collapsed because it treated fundamental economic architecture as mere product features. Buzzwords like ownership, interoperability, and open economies are not plug-and-play mechanics, rather they are the most complex, unsolved macroeconomic challenges in modern game design. On top of that, token and game designs prioritized speculation and capital raises over sustainable revenue, retention, or organic growth. There has not been a single significant innovation since Axie Infinity in 2021. While superficial solutions failed immediately, iterative feature-level attempts were crushed by not addressing the actual scope of the problem. Due to the sector's gross failings, Web3 gave up on the narrative of mainstream adoption and became irrelevant to both crypto and gaming.** **To solve a problem that has invalidated the industry, we must discard five years of superficial, market-driven design and deconstruct game design back to its fundamental core principles.

1. FIRST PRINCIPLES THESIS

Our framework evaluates the live-ops multiplayer game through six structural competitive forces, and the innovation requirement they collectively imply.

PILLAR I: The "Forever Game": Moat & Ownership

The holy grail of gaming is a self-sustaining ecosystem that thrives for decades as seen in games such as: World of Warcraft, Counter-Strike, Dota 2, League of Legends, Fortnite, Minecraft, and Magic: The Gathering aka “Forever Games”. A blind spot in Web3 has been the blanket claim that all successful Web2 games fail their players. They do not. The centralized stewardship of these Forever Games is profitable, optimized, and deeply defended; built on massive player-to-player closed economies, robust UGC, or global esports, they hold deeply entrenched retention moats. Competing with them with existing competitive tools is a battle even the best funded and prepared teams have consistently lost.

Key Insights:

• Even 200m budgets from AAA web2 studios can’t crack existing forever games. Sufficient funding to build is a given, but it is not the prime strategic consideration to win. This is not a ‘shots on goal’ scenario if each shot follows the same playbook.

• Only when a game has the potential to be a forever game, does player ownership have any relevance. WOW items only mean something because the game has enough longevity to feel as though ownership matters.

PILLAR II: The “Hit-Driven Industry”: Infinite Saturation & Success Only Through Risk

The traditional video game market is saturated. With effectively infinite digital shelf space, simply "making a fun game" is no longer a meaningful differentiator. Top-tier franchises already deliver optimized engagement loops and world-class production values. The bar is set so high that matching gameplay and fidelity is merely table stakes, and the risk/reward calculation no longer holds for most new titles.

Hit indie games are outliers that have outperformed franchise titles at a fraction of the cost. In some ways this is the purest form of game development — success coming from new genres, creative risk, and the time to execute a clear vision. Only one hit indie game was multi-player and none were live-service games.

Key Insights:

• As a hit-driven industry, an exceptionally fun game always has a chance to break out. But the odds are far worse for multiplayer live-ops with a majority of hit games being single-player titles.

• If a project is not willing to take a major creative risk backed by exceptional execution, then the game is drawing dead.

PILLAR III: Residual Network Dominance Effects

The modern gaming ecosystem is dominated by either distribution monopolies that control the user graph, backend infrastructure, and payment rails, or legacy live-ops titles that rule entire genres. Direct head-to-head competition to dislodge such incumbents or establish a beachhead is non-viable for new titles. Even successful multiplayer live-ops projects that break through these network-effect barriers face two typical outcomes:

• Sustainable Microcosm: maintains a small, independent network (e.g., EVE Online, Escape from Tarkov).

• Incumbent Realignment: gains traction, but its innovations are copied by incumbents and momentum stalls (e.g., PUBG → Fortnite; Apex Legends → Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone).

Key Insight:

• This approach must counter incumbent advantages and deliver enough value to compete and scale. The implication points to the need for an entirely new game-design approach that provides an orthogonal solution.

PILLAR IV: Network Effects on Playtime

For multiplayer live-ops games on PC and console, playtime is a zero-sum game: time spent in one title is taken from another. The concentration is stark and well-documented. According to Newzoo's 2024 data, 67% of PC player-hours went to games six or more years old, 25% to games two to five years old, and only 8% to new releases — figures drawn from a survey of 73,000 players and data on over 10,000 games. Valve's own Steam Replay 2024 found that games released in 2024 accounted for just 15% of total Steam playtime, with 47% spent on games from 2017–2023 and 37% on titles released before 2017. Newzoo's director of consulting summarized the dynamic bluntly: the battle for audience hours is "fierce and near zero sum," with playtime "concentrated in AAA and at times cannibalistic." The scale of institutional retreat tracks this: Sony planned a dozen live-service titles by 2025 and had cut that to six by 2024, with Helldivers 2 the lone clear success.

Key Insight:

• A player’s playtime is finite and unlike single-player games which replace each other, multiplayer games are constant blocks on a player’s time. Framed this way, it is not just one game you are competing against, but all the current market leaders are given time committed playtime slots by players.

PILLAR V: Game Balancing as a Product Requirement

Multiplayer games once released still require extensive balancing to optimize their competitive offering. Even a viral hit needs time to optimize into its final form.

Esports titles are the extreme case. The biggest esports games today began as mods — and as mods they underwent years of playtesting. Before Dota 2, the Warcraft III mod Dota-Allstars underwent roughly a decade of playtesting across 73 mainline releases. Dota 2 itself spent two years in beta and, since its late-2011 launch, has had 80 major patches and more than 350 gameplay-balance patches. Playtime is not just a performance metric for multiplayer live-ops; it is required for core development.

Key Insights:

• Legacy playtime monopolies further compound the inability for multiplayer games to get to their final form through insufficient time and scale for game balancing.

• The amount of time truly required to compete for multiplayer gameplay balance and optimization is grossly underestimated.

PILLAR VI: Defense of the Networks

The entire gaming space is under pressure for player attention from all forms of digital entertainment as attention spans shorten. Multiplayer titles that operate as UGC platforms — with extensive modding tools and an integrated social layer — appear to hold the strongest defensive position, but they do so by moving beyond the core gameplay product into other forms of interaction and content that address attention pressure. An internal creator economy widens attention scope by providing economic opportunity; a social layer adds stickiness that can translate into core-game retention. But competing at this level raises the table stakes at the infrastructure, hosting, and tooling level, presenting further barriers.

Key Insight:

• When even the current market leader “Forever Games” start to feel even more macro pressure to their own positions, then the scope to compete as a new entrant needs to take seriously that some type of platform play needs to be in pipeline.

PILLAR VII: The Innovation Requirement

The six structural forces above describe a landscape extremely few new entrants have beaten. Together they imply a single requirement:

If the Forever Game is already an S-tier entertainment product, Web3 cannot win by adding digital features on top or any half measure.

Web3 Acid Test: if a project can remove its crypto elements and ship as a standard Web2 title without adjusting or breaking its core loop or how the in-game economy functioned, the design was superficial.

Conversely, if the features strip the crypto elements to the point where they have no added value, then at best it brings the games to parity on a player’s UX experience, but gains no competitive advantage and holds all the negative perception baggage of even integrating crypto to begin with.

Key Insights:

• Industry narratives of seamless frictionless onboarding and wallet abstraction at best brought web3 offers to the same level of accessibility, doing nothing to improve the competitiveness of the core game as a game.

• A 10x product innovation can create its own distribution network. It is the killer app that makes the ecosystem. The reverse sounds reasonable, but it has never worked that way because the killer app dictates the infrastructure tooling and buildout for the network.

2. WHY AN OPEN ECONOMY GAME CAN ADDRESS THIS

The structural forces in §1 establish the problem, not the solution: the competitive barriers are real, and conventional approaches, no matter how well-funded or well-executed, could not clear them. It does not however, make a case that an open economy is the answer. If the case has been made that the competitive forces are primarily network effect based, then this approach at least is on that level.

An open economy game can address the competitive network effect forces of §1 in a way optimized features cannot. The argument has three parts: it is a paradigm-level solution that builds a counter-network rather than fighting the incumbents head-on (§2.1); it is a genuine 10x innovation for both gaming and crypto, not an incremental improvement (§2.2); and its central instrument, a floating token, is simultaneously its greatest advantage and its greatest liability (§2.3).

2.1. It is a paradigm level solution as a counter network

A paradigm-level solution does not patch existing problems. It supersedes the core constraints to the point of irrelevance, while creating exponential value beyond the prior system’s capabilities. An open economy exists at that level. For this protocol economic elements are not monetization overlays, but structural prerequisite built-in mechanisms enforcing aligned incentives and self-reinforcing loops.

By embedding economic architecture directly into the core gameplay loops, the protocol reaches a critical mass that throws off network effects without having to first go head-to-head with existing networks. It lets a player choose to engage as consumer, community member, or producer, and links acquisition and retention directly to open-market primitives within a single indivisible system.

2.2. It is a 10x solution for both gaming and crypto

A Forever Game as a product gives the justification and basis of digital ownership having value. It is the ideal vehicle for the innovation of crypto with crypto simultaneously being the instrument to achieve that. A Forever Game engineered as an autonomous economic engine would align incentives as a starting condition, rather than a linear progression as a self-reinforcing flywheel of real economic market activity. But that same flywheel is double-edged. The mechanisms that create player value can, ungoverned, destroy it. This has always been the unsolved problem of open game economies: elements that drive unbridled market transactions, but result in the exploitation and crash of the system. The paradigm is not the flywheel alone; it is the management system of a flywheel held in check.

2.3. Key offering is its biggest liability: floating token

Honesty about the paradigm requires naming its cost. This has never been accomplished at a sustainable scale with a floating token, and it carries an extremely high failure vector across every system. All monetary incentives carry the structural risk of destroying or paralyzing the economy, which demands real-time fraud, balancing, and anti-exploitation systems. The risk is brutally amplified by the inability to roll back state or set fixed exchange rates.

The deepest danger is specific and identifiable: the very mechanism of an accessible token incentive that makes an open-economy game retain players and push transaction volume is the same mechanism that, ungoverned, floods the economy with supply and collapses it. Every prior failure made the token the primary utility of the game, which is a Ponzi dynamic by construction i.e. emission with no demand positioned ahead of it. This is why the open-economy problem is, at its core, a token-supply-management problem.

The paradigm is reachable only by inverting the free-floating token from being used as incentive for acquisition to positioning it as incentive for player retention. As a retention tool, the token is held in check with the stability of its value range for the continued growth of an in-game player balance as a hedge against win rate variance (e.g. poker and bankroll management). Solved that way, a game economy stops being a game economy and becomes the basis for an actual market economy.

3. WHAT IS THE ROLE OF A FLOATING TOKEN IN A GAME?

§2.3 established the floating token's defensive role: position in the system as a retention tool held in check, defined by the stability of its value range. That is the near-term necessity and an obvious one as a stable pegged coin would simply fulfill that objective. Yet, the reason an open economy is worth the risk at all is the offensive capabilities granted to the system.

All closed economy games have a form of dollarization, fixed exchange rates or capital restrictions that prevent it from having a value based solely on the secondary market value. Games that utilize stablecoins have no functional difference than any other game that uses fiat for onboarding or for their own in-game economies. Meaning there is no competitive advantage and the same liabilities and limitations of what currently exists.

If we take seriously the value of an economy with a game as the economic engine, then the floating value token gives a level of flexibility in the same way a non-dollarized fiat currency would in having a monetary policy. In the simplest application, this allows a game to control supply without incurring direct exchange/acquisition liabilities.

The abuse of this attribute is well known with the hyperinflation effects in crypto for airdrops or incentive for play and network activity. But instead of using it only as an incentive for player acquisition, if it is primarily used for player retention, then it bolsters the game’s profit model by not only maintaining greater network activity but by lowering the rate of new player acquisition costs by systematically reducing player churn.

Beyond that typical value chain, the exponential value lies in the monetary flexibility as tool for scaling an actual economy. A market economy is not centrally planned, meaning economic activity is not a simple-sided process; every variable introduces minute nuances to tweak. But get it right, transactions build upon transactions along with new economic groupings and layers of productivity. The floating token is not for game revenue; it’s for the creation of an open game economy that can scale both horizontally and vertically.

The advantages are real, but the achievement requires a fully functioning sustainable economy. For this protocol to work, it must first work as a revenue positive product as the primary economic driver of productivity i.e. the output of the economic activity. Having that sets the initial foundation as a successful game that can then scale into a functioning economy. Working against this is the structural requirements of launching with fully functioning interconnected systems that in its infancy or isolation are highly exploitable.

The open economy is the final state that makes the game in-of-itself a network within a product-based network. The supply-management architecture of Part 2 is not a growth engine; it is the precondition for one. A market economy that genuinely functions scales on its own, the way any real economy does through participants transacting, specializing, and building on one another. The protocol's task is not to scale the economy but to ensure it can work; once it works, growth is internally driven by the game’s economy, not the operator's to manufacture.

4. OPEN-ECONOMY STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS

Five structural conditions must be addressed with the understanding that execution and operations are non-negotiable requirements for success. Each condition maps to a specific mechanism in upcoming Part 2 of this paper: Condition I (sovereign currency / supply scales with utility) → §6 gameplay supply control + §8 convergent deflation; Condition II (separation of accessibility from speculation) → dual-token split (§5) + 50/50 spent-and-locked $OYABUN access (§7); Condition III (sinks indivisibly part of the minting loop) → in-loop precursor and tournament as token management levers (§6); Condition IV (industrial absorption layer) → meta-game / clan sinks (§7); Condition V (real revenue anchor + the "fun" threshold) → hard-asset capture (§8) and the precursor retention layer (§6). Conditions I and V related to currency system confidence and real product revenue are executed at a gameplay level, while the supply-management inversion described in §2 for conditions II-IV is at a game structure level.

CONDITION I. The Sovereign Currency

An open game economy with a free-floating token faces the same core threats as real-world fiat currencies: (i) oversupply that destroys market confidence, leading to runaway hyperinflation and devaluation, and (ii) confidence that is heavily dependent on market reflexivity and strong fiscal infrastructure. Unlike a national currency, a game economy does not begin with diverse production, base utility of taxation, established economic roles, a large population, or pre-existing resources to buffer against value destruction. It is therefore far more vulnerable to instantaneous devaluation. The core revenue stream here acts as a system that drives the creation of economy-level utility that gives the token an anchor in real value, so that the rate of token supply can be dictated by demand rather than arbitrary emissions.

Structure:

• Token supply must progressively scale with the token’s economy-level utility that is created by game revenue.

CONDITION II. The Structural Separation of Accessibility and Market Momentum

When a game begins with a single economic production stream, a floating token's value is pressured by two conflicting forces: (i) ease of accessibility through gameplay, and (ii) potential future value driven by market momentum. When both are tied to the same token, the risks compound — easier access drives rapid supply growth from artificially induced incentive, while positive price momentum invites speculative value extraction. This dynamic has overwhelmed many previous launches through airdrop farming and/or pure extractive activity resulting in immediate dumping.

Structure:

• Token accessibility must be restricted through player progression rather than simple participation.

• Token must be decoupled from market speculation via a separate long-term value-sink asset.

CONDITION III. Game-Loop-Integrated Sinks

Token models have failed because the burns and sinks are not tied to the core gameplay where tokens are minted. No matter how many sinks exist, players are not forced to interact with them if they are not part of the loop that mints the token, while external sinks (even those that affect token generation rate) can even create more opportunities for exploitation. Supply pressure is only delayed when sinks take the form of (i) a tradeable wrapper for in-game currency, (ii) post-gameplay rewards such as battle passes or leaderboards, or (iii) mechanisms outside or unrelated to the gameplay, such as DeFi staking.

DeFi staking works against an open-economy game because (i) it is not structured like a bond whose issuance creates the money supply for market velocity or is reinvested to pay interest, and (ii) unlike Proof-of-Stake, the capital used to purchase the token does not secure the network or contributes to the core value of potential network yield i.e. TVL. If the only function is to delay selling pressure and create short-term confidence through reduced circulating supply, the added interest liability will eventually contribute to devaluation.

Structure:

• Token management must function inside the game loop that generates the token.

CONDITION IV. The Meta-Game Capital Absorption Layer (Macro-Economic UGC)

Because token supply must net inflate to function as an effective incentive (i.e. existence of net winning players), consumer-level activity alone will eventually generate surplus tokens even with direct gameplay utility. Horizontal game content expansion at the consumer level often results in greater net token generation rather than absorption (i.e., more miners). A meta-game layer lets players organize into long-term collective entities that consume tokens at an industrial scale through B2B-style resources and organization, creating a second loop where players act both as consumers and now as collectives, structurally absorbing consumer-level supply. Without proper design, this layer risks rent-seeking and even greater unstable flows. Effective system design takes the form of clear rules around ownership, competition, and capital constraints to prevent cartel formation and protect smaller participants.

Structure:

• A meta-game layer provides an industrial level of utility that self-coordinates consumer-level token surplus into a collective-level game progression and resulting macro sink.

CONDITION V. The Real Revenue Anchor and the "Fun" Threshold

An open game economy cannot survive on token mechanics alone. It requires real revenue in hard assets to anchor confidence in the token; platforms relying primarily on token emissions to operate will eventually face instability and insolvency. Yet, revenue gained through a purely extractive zero-sum interaction is bound to fail as there is no marginal value created for profit i.e. fun makes a margin for profit. This creates a harsh reality: even the strongest economic design fails if the underlying game cannot retain players through genuine gameplay engagement.

The obvious examples are games that are simply sub-par as entertainment and cannot retain players without a player incentive/reward. But even games like real money poker fail when the player ecology becomes predominately professional players (sharks) to recreational players (fish) because the gameplay becomes entirely extractive. This environment removes the primary fun incentive for recreational players, reducing their participation, increasing the professional players behavior towards extractive play. In real money poker the token supply never gets replenished, while in an open economy game the oversupply of the token effectively does the same thing by making the value worthless. Purely extractive gameplay not only leaves no surplus, but breaks the gameplay loop and the economy.

Structure:

• Game revenue must be driven by sufficient genuine fun gameplay engagement to create marginal utility value of the token above the financial incentive for a surplus and to prevent the slide into purely extractive player behavior that breaks the entire system.

Any one of these structural conditions is fantastically difficult game design or execution risks. Taken in aggregate, all conditions must be designed, executed and operated as functional interconnected systems or the system implodes. Yet the failing in the approach has been the inability to first define the problem comprehensively and to recognize a multi-system protocol level design is a requirement. Defining the actual conditions means that at least an attempt to design viable solutions are possible.

PART 2: OPEN ECONOMY GAME DESIGN SOLUTION

INTRODUCTION: AN EXECUTABLE BATTLE PLAN FOR THE OPEN ECONOMY

The implementation of this open-economy game design starts with the core game and a dual-token framework. The design began in September 2021 and, by May 2022, was applied to the core game development of the game title: MAYG. It was based on solving the failings of Axie Infinity, which showed the possibilities of how floating-value tokens and digital assets could work as an open economy.

Game design is a systems-driven process. It does not rely on the assumption that optimizing individual features through post-launch data will be sufficient. Instead, it treats the game as a framework of interconnected systems and a systems-driven open-economy design takes this to the extreme as a multi-system protocol. It starts with an exhaustive understanding of the problem and a rigorous envisioning of every worst-case scenario, then builds as a protocol designed to prevent catastrophic failure, surface the warning signs that precede it, and supply the tools to recover.

An open economy cannot be iterated in the way the industry assumes and the distinction is the heart of this protocol's design philosophy. There are two kinds of iteration, and conflating them is fatal. Reactive architectural iteration is changing the system's rules after a liability has materialized: patching the token model, resetting a peg, rolling back state. Every failed web3 gaming project attempted this, and it is impossible in an open economy, because the liabilities are irreversible and compounding. You cannot un-mint supply, un-sell a position, or un-set a price the market has already cleared. By the time the liability is visible, the only remaining tool is buying back and burning at a loss, which is not iteration but triage, and it makes the system less robust each time it is used.

Continuous process iteration within existing guardrail tooling is the opposite: the system adjusting its parameters, every cycle, before any liability crosses into crisis, inside an architecture that itself never changes. This is the only iteration available to an open economy, and it must be designed in completely at launch. Because the one capability you can never acquire after the fact is the ability to act before the liability compounds. The protocol is therefore complete-at-launch in its control surface and continuously tuned in its parameters. Iteration happens to the dials, forever; it never happens to the machine, mid-failure. The industry's fatal misperception is believing the machine can be rebuilt while it is failing. It cannot. The tools have to be in the cockpit before takeoff i.e. the flight-control corrections within a designed envelope, not redesigning the wing after the stall.

This document has no illusions about the immense execution and operational expertise this multi-system protocol requires. It took five years to finish the core game and its integrated systems as the first half of this protocol, with over 10,000 hours dedicated to the protocol design. This reflects both the original challenge from 2021 and every failure since. This paper is not written as an academic exercise. It is an executable battle plan.

CORE ASSUMPTIONS AND DEPENDENCIES

This protocol is a design thesis, and like any system it depends on conditions outside its own mechanisms. The following are stated explicitly rather than left implicit: each is load-bearing, and the validity of the design is conditional on them holding. They are the assumptions that the protocol is held accountable to.

1. Player behavior in a non-speculative regime

The stability mechanisms assume that, once $MAYG holds a credible value range, players treat it as money i.e. denominating winnings in value rather than token count. In risk/reward structure the player responds to value-preserving supply adjustments rather than dumping. This is the central behavioral dependency. It is grounded in the economics of risk/reward competitive peer-to-peer gaming, where players already reason in currency terms, rather than in the play-to-earn pattern where the token is the speculative object. The design's task is to keep the economy in the regime where this behavior holds; the assumption is not that players are rational in the abstract, but that a stable, utility-anchored currency elicits currency-like behavior. This is the assumption most directly tested by live operation.

2. Regulatory treatment of in-game balances

Several structural claims to be made: the closed-loop capital constraint, the clan firewall, the treatment of the genesis seed are dependent on the distinction that (i) in-game $MAYG game server balance is not circulating, (ii) is not funded in-game with a same $MAYG equivalent value deposit ($MAYG cannot be directly deposited into the game), and (iii) only enters secondary market circulation when withdrawn to an external crypto wallet. This is a reasoned position, consistent with how custodial in-game balances are generally treated, but its application here is novel and jurisdiction-dependent. The design assumes this distinction holds; confirming it is a matter for legal review in each operating jurisdiction, and the architecture is built to be adjustable if a given jurisdiction treats the boundary differently.

3. Emergent rather than engineered scaling

The protocol does not contain a growth engine and does not assume one is needed. It assumes that a market economy which genuinely functions will scale on its own through participants transacting, specializing, and building on one another as real economies do. The design's responsibility ends at making the economy work through the economic framework, roles and tooling; growth is treated as an emergent property of a functioning market, not an outcome the operator manufactures. If a functioning open economy does not produce organic growth, that is a failure of the thesis, not of execution.

4. The game succeeds as a game

Every economic mechanism is downstream of genuine engagement. If the core game does not retain players on its own merits, no supply architecture can compensate — minting without underlying utility is the failure mode the entire system is built to avoid. The economic design assumes, and cannot substitute for, a game players choose to play. This risk lies solely as the inherent product risk of making a game which the attempt to address was done by first developing and completing the core game and all its integrated system pathways with extensive playtesting over its five-year development cycle.

Each of these is subject to failure, and live operation is the test. The design is constructed so that the mechanisms within the protocol's control hold the system stable long enough for these external conditions to prove out.

5. DUAL-TOKEN ARCHITECTURE SEGREGATION

The protocol uses a dual-token model to separate high-velocity gameplay incentives from long-term ecosystem infrastructure.

5.1 Tokens

$MAYG — Gameplay Revenue Incentive Token

$MAYG is the high-velocity token used for in-game rewards, peer-to-peer transactions, and micro-fees. It has a hard-capped maximum supply of 1,000,000,000 (1B) tokens. New $MAYG is minted only when real gameplay activity generates both revenue and rewards, creating a direct link between issuance and actual player engagement and making supply expansion predictable and tied to genuine usage. A single one-time genesis allocation (≈0.17% of the cap, described in §6) is pre-minted to seed initial liquidity; otherwise $MAYG remains non-circulating until unlocked through gameplay progression and withdrawn by players to an external on-chain wallet, so the gameplay-gated nature of circulation holds for all supply.

$OYABUN — Ecosystem Industrial Protocol Token

$OYABUN is a fixed-supply token, hard-capped at 100,000,000 (100M), designed as the core system resource for the platform. It cannot be earned through normal gameplay. Instead, it is required by clans, developers, and operators to access infrastructure, license games, and run User-Generated Content (UGC) businesses, where access is gated by a 50/50 split of spent and locked $OYABUN (detailed in §7). $OYABUN functions as a long-term balancing and access token, keeping high-value ecosystem operations separate from day-to-day gameplay transactions.

5.2 System Overview

The diagram below shows how the two token loops, the three supply-control layers, the conversion waterfall, and the hard-asset on-ramp connect into a single machine. Supply originates at the core game and is governed continuously across all three layers in priority order; the conversion waterfall is the layer-3 clearinghouse, and hard-asset capture sits downstream of it.

5.3 Token Supply Management Process

Supply originates at the core game and flows outward through three layers in priority order. Once running, all three operate continuously rather than in discrete phases i.e. supply does not pass through one layer and stop; the layers absorb in priority order while all remain active at once.

The first layer minimizes excess $MAYG emissions through in-game utility controls. The second absorbs supply at an industrial rate at the ecosystem level via clan-operated games and macro sinks. Only the residual pressure not absorbed by the two utility layers reaches the algorithmic clearinghouse for balancing. Without this priority structure, raw emissions from gameplay would overwhelm the open market. This has been the primary failure mode of every previous algorithmic-stablecoin and floating-token model. The presence of real, gameplay-generated revenue further anchors the entire system.

6. UTILITY-DRIVEN SUPPLY CONTROL AT THE GAMEPLAY LEVEL

6.1 $MAYG Behavioral Telemetry & Precursor Token Sequence

The protocol's core game is built around a continuous peer-to-peer tournament system with entry-fee risk/reward mechanics. This generates skill-based engagement and transactional velocity modeled on a turn-based, transaction-gated format. Real-money and social card games (poker, go-stop, dou dizhu) demonstrate the principle: they sustain high incentive and transaction rates at relatively lower player counts or higher per-player revenue because of strong risk/reward alignment and replayability.

Because the format relies on frequent entry-fee transactions, supply-stabilization parameters are handled sequentially within the client's core $MAYG entry and payout amounts across a structured 3-Stage Tournament Matrix. Two non-transferable, high-abundance precursor tokens serve as hard entry constraints before earning $MAYG rewards.

The rate of in-game minting is a product of gameplay activity and entry-fee structure. The entry fee is tiered by stakes (with maximum rates of 45% at low stakes, 28.33% at mid, and 20% at high, blending to roughly 28% under the expected player mix) and is a variable lever applied at the platform's discretion rather than a fixed charge — these are maxima, reduced when the system would otherwise over-drain. The primary levers are this entry-fee cost and the reward issued per unit of entry fee; adjusting either raises or lowers the mint rate, with precursor-token calibration as the first-line control before entry/payout adjustments engage. A portion of fee revenue may optionally seed the monthly leaderboard prize pool and player bonuses, and in edge cases the fee may be waived or burned entirely; the structure is deliberately fluid.

• Primary intervention (precursor calibration): adjusts accumulation and conversion mechanics of the two precursor tokens, clearing gluts at the tournament gate.

• Secondary intervention (liquid-asset regulation): if needed, raises $MAYG entry fees or reduces reward payouts.

This intervention works because of how players relate to a non-speculative reward. When $MAYG is held in a credible value range, players denominate their winnings in value, not token count, in line with how a competitive risk/reward player values currency. This holds even greater conceptual positioning as competitive risk/reward players calculate their total game balance as not just winnings, but a personal treasury to ensure enough liquidity to support in-game player progression or as a variance win rate buffer. A reduction in raw reward quantity that preserves per-token value is therefore behaviorally neutral: the player's expected value is unchanged, so there is nothing to resist. Rational players favor the structural defense of their balance's value over its nominal size provided the token has both present and future gameplay utility.

This is the decisive difference between a stable game currency and a speculative one. A volatile floating token turns every reward into a position: if the token is rising, players extract as fast as possible before it falls, and a downward move triggers a self-reinforcing rush for the exit. The token becomes an instrument to escape, not a reward to hold. For a Forever Game, the reward must instead behave like money the player can keep, holding its value not only as stakes to win more, but as a balance worth retaining for long-term player progression. The premise is not that players won't dump in a crisis; by then the system has already failed and only the loss-making backstop remains. The premise is that range stability keeps the economy out of the speculative regime in the first place, which is where this behavior holds.

This architecture treats player psychology as a primary design input rather than a secondary consideration. In competitive environments with meaningful rewards, players respond to risk/reward structures and value stability differently than in speculative or emission-driven systems. The design therefore prioritizes mechanisms that support long-term progression and asset accumulation while reducing churn among losing players, instead of maximizing short-term token acquisition. This grounding directly shapes the precursor layer, the tournament matrix, and the positioning of the free token as a retention tool maintained by value-range stability. The fundamental error in earlier crypto game designs was optimizing for trader extraction behavior instead of reinforcing the psychology of competitive play and progression.

6.2 Addressing Operational Cold Start and Track Record Risk

One bootstrap caveat: this credibility is earned, not assumed. At launch, before the range has a track record, players may still price $MAYG speculatively. This is a cold-start problem of requiring a track-record to produce the stability that produces the history. The protocol addresses this with a one-time genesis seed allocation of 1,679,200 $MAYG (roughly 0.17% of the 1B supply cap). This total splits into two portions: an in-game portion of 1,279,200 $MAYG (76%) credited to playtesters' in-game balances, and a treasury/pool portion of 400,000 $MAYG (24%) that, paired with platform-supplied USDT, serves as the capital reserve for the $MAYG/USDT pool. The treasury portion is allocated entirely to pool support but is not necessarily deployed all at once; it is supplied into the AMM as the protocol requires, sized to hold the pool within the token's incentive range at launch. This allocation is pre-minted rather than gameplay-minted, but it does not reach circulation freely.

The genesis tokens land in players' in-game wallets, where, consistent with the in-game-versus-circulating distinction in §7, they are not yet part of the secondary-market circulating supply. Converting them to be circulating $MAYG requires player progression: a player's level gates how much they may withdraw to an external wallet, and the withdrawal tiers are metered so cumulative withdrawals cannot overwhelm the cold-start pool. This turns the seed from a liability into a retention and supply-management instrument. To realize the value of the allocation, a player must play extensively, which routes it through the same entry-fee risk/reward system that governs all other supply, folding its liability into the existing machinery rather than releasing it onto the market.

The mechanism is structurally identical to a risk/reward industry requirement of a playthrough bonus. A playthrough requirement gates the allocation, and the play itself forces engagement for every new player entering the system. This is precisely what distinguishes the genesis seed from the airdrop farm-and-dump dynamic §4 (Condition II) warns against: that failure mode is ungated free supply that can be farmed and immediately sold, whereas this allocation is progression-gated and pool-metered i.e. it cannot be farmed, and it cannot reach the market faster than the system can absorb it. From genesis onward, all $MAYG enters circulation only through the result of gameplay (player rewards and revenue share), whether freshly minted or unlocked from the seed.

Validation, ultimately, is empirical and inseparable from the game itself: the system's merit depends on the core game succeeding as a game, which is simultaneously the test of whether it generates enough genuine utility to serve as the engine of the economy. The economic architecture cannot be proven in the abstract, only by a game players choose to play. While this core game model went live on April 20, 2026 with over 3 years of playtesting, it still is a phase of discovery to validate its viability as a game sufficient enough to be the economic engine.

6.3 The Precursor Layer: Zero-Capital Retention as a Governed Liability

The two precursor tokens are the protocol's most important gameplay-economic mechanism and its most dangerous. They are a zero-capital, risk-free path to earning $MAYG: a player can grind from nothing, and a player who loses their entire $MAYG balance can grind back to a playable in-game balance without a forced or required deposit and without waiting for promotional bonuses e.g. like a scheduled freeroll tournament in poker. The cost is temporal, not monetary: rebuilding a withdrawable balance through precursors is deliberately slow, a route back to serious play rather than a faucet, with a mechanism that penalizes attempts to farm it. Even that time is not lost: precursor play earns player progression that accrues to the tradable NFT character, so the grind itself builds a sellable asset.

This solves the structural retention leak fatal to real-money formats. In a conventional entry-fee game, a player who depletes their online balance is finished i.e. they redeposit or they quit, and most quit. The precursor layer closes that exit: losing players are retained, not shed. This is the gameplay-side source of the baseline, development-driven demand the economic governor (§9) relies on but cannot itself create. The governor defends $MAYG's value, but the precursor loop generates the players whose activity gives that value something to defend.

But the same property that retains players is the supply-side liability that has destroyed every prior open-economy game. A free, zero-capital token faucet is a double-edged sword: ungoverned, it floods the economy with supply that has no demand behind it, collapsing the token's value and the incentive to hold it. Again, this is not an incidental risk, it is the failure mode. The fatal design error repeated across the sector was making the free token the point of the game: the entire loop existed to extract a free token as fast as possible, which guarantees oversupply, collapse, and the speculative death spiral. That structure is a Ponzi dynamic by construction, regardless of intent, because it has no mechanism positioning demand ahead of emission.

This protocol uses the same double-edged mechanism, inverted. The free token is not the point of the game, but is a retention tool held in check. The actual retention driver is not the acquisition of a free token but the stability of its value range: players stay because their balance reliably holds value, not because they can farm more of it. This is why the entire architecture is, first and foremost, a token-supply-management system. Every mechanism in §5 through §8 (the precursor calibration, the tournament-matrix levers, the ecosystem sinks, the conversion waterfall, the convergent deflation) exists to keep this free incentive subordinate: present enough to retain, never abundant enough to become the game's purpose. The precursor layer is what makes the game worth staying in; the supply management is what stops that same layer from destroying the economy it retains players for. Prior projects had the first half and not the second.

To prevent latent server-side supply from overwhelming the market, the conversion rate from precursor tokens to locked $MAYG is dynamically adjusted through a real-time Telemetry Valve. When the aggregate balance of locked $MAYG grows too quickly relative to macro-sink absorption capacity, the system automatically reduces precursor conversion efficiency and increases match difficulty. This ensures that server-held tokens cannot enter circulation faster than the blended entry-fee sink can remove them. These mechanisms cannot be stripped out to leave a working Web2 game i.e. they are not additions to the game but only function because of the attributes of crypto. This is what makes the protocol inseparable from its economy, and why it clears the Acid Test (§1) as a matter of construction rather than claim.

7. UTILITY-DRIVEN SUPPLY CONTROL AT THE ECOSYSTEM LEVEL: META-GAME ABSORPTION

7.1 $OYABUN Macro-Industrial B2B Ecosystem-Level Token Value Sink

$OYABUN is the medium for the platform’s User-Generated Content (UGC) infrastructure access where the ecosystem-level gameplay exists. Traditional gaming networks introduce systemic fragility by forcing a single token to act simultaneously as consumer cash and industrial asset equity. $OYABUN keeps the open economy stable by managing supply at an ecosystem scale rather than per match.

7.2 UGC Product and Licensing Structure

At a UGC product level, the UGC is defined specifically as User-Generated Economic Engines (UGEE). The UGEE represent a macro gameplay of competing businesses run by collectives of players, clans. The running and operating of these in-game businesses provide: (i) gaming content for all players to spend their core game balance in and, (ii) clans to operate as UGC properties on a revenue share basis with the protocol. Unlike typical UGC platforms, development of the UGEE content is made by 3rd party developers and/or clans but is operated turn-key only by Clans. Development of the UGEE content is constrained by available virtual land/property and by a licensing regime set by the protocol. UGEE developers go through a bid process for the right to build the UGEE gaming content, while Clans who wish to operate a UGEE business must acquire both the land and a license to operate the UGEE business.

Both the land and the license go through an open bidding process. Once in operation, the UGEE functions as a licensed operator with annual fees, a negotiated term of operation and renewal license fees. The UGEE businesses are capped per genre to create scarcity for the businesses. Clans can create consortiums to contribute land, UGEE licenses and in-game capital or operational commitments. This licensing regime is modelled on how a gaming commission works in the distribution of licenses and fees. Non-protocol players can play in UGEE content in a separate web2 onboarding process and will be monetized accordingly.

7.3 Access & License Fees

Access to ecosystem tiers is gated by a 50/50 split of spent and locked $OYABUN. The locked half is a non-interest-bearing hold of funds that qualifies the operator. The spent half is consumed on access, creating direct $OYABUN utility burn pressure. Recurring operational fees are paid in $MAYG (i.e. the flow demand, the consumable medium). Splitting access between a locked hold of funds and a spent portion balances anchor-side hold pressure against active burn pressure, while keeping recurring operational flow on $MAYG so the anchor is never the day-to-day medium of exchange.

Commercial UGC properties are capped in type and quantity. Property acquisition is executed exclusively through programmatic auction or peer-to-peer secondary-market transactions. This layer demands a robust white-label platform capable of integrating production-quality, turn-key competitive mobile games. Third-party developers submit proven titles that clans operate as capital-intensive ecosystem businesses through reskinning, backend integration, and live-ops management. These ecosystem games are tightly integrated as the immediate next value chain after the core loops, creating a second competitive layer where clans compete on performance metrics to attract and retain players while absorbing tokens at a product scale. This layer carries material operational risk around clan performance and player migration between the PC core and mobile ecosystem games; it is engineered to serve as the primary macro-level sink for excess token supply.

7.4 Antitrust Protocol

The ecosystem operates on two lease tiers. A main license is held by the landlord (an Oyabun, or clan head) and is the unit governed by the antitrust breaker. Beneath it sit sub-leases held by creator-operators who run their built businesses under that landlord, protected by a 6-month contractual floor. The breaker rotates the landlord layer; it never destroys creator labor.

A Continuous Rolling HHI Breaker monitors concentration. If consolidation pushes the global Herfindahl-Hirschman Index past 2,500 or the top 4 beneficial owners exceed 75% concentration, the system triggers non-discretionary revocation of the breaching main license at the next renewal cycle. The sequence: Landlord A breaches the ceiling → A's main license is revoked at next renewal → A's creator sub-lessees are grandfathered "as is" for 6 months → those sub-leases are re-pooled by lottery to new bidding landlords (B, C, D).

Concentration breaks at the landlord layer while creators keep operating their businesses uninterrupted: an immediate anchor tenant for the incoming landlord and continuity for the creator. The lottery is selected through Active Verification On-Chain Wallet Mapping, which is specifically what prevents the revoked landlord from re-concentrating through proxy wallets in the new bidding pool. Without this sybil-resistance the breaker would be trivially defeatable; the wallet mapping is what gives revocation real teeth.

7.5 Clans as Ecosystem-Level Players

Macro asset landlords serve as Oyabun (Clan Heads); non-owners are recruited as Oneechan (Clan Mates). Note the distinction in notation throughout this document: Oyabun (no symbol) is the clan-head role, while $OYABUN is the token that role holds.

Clan formation is governed by the Oneechan Clan System, the protocol's business-entity-formation mechanism. An Oyabun recruits Oneechan to form a clan, and recruitment capacity scales with the Oyabun's player-progression level: the further the Oyabun advances through gameplay, the more Oneechan they may recruit. Tying clan size to the clan head's own gameplay progression keeps business formation anchored to genuine game activity rather than capital, and acts as a soft anti-concentration lever complementing the HHI breaker i.e. a clan cannot grow arbitrarily large without the gameplay progression to support it.

The constraint on clan capital follows one governing principle: external capital may pay the platform, but it may not fund a player's competitive war-chest. Working capital that competes inside the economy must be earned through gameplay, so Clan funding stays tied to genuine activity and external money cannot buy competitive advantage. Payments that flow out of player competition and into the treasury: licenses, annual fees, property auctions may be accepted external on-chain funds as they do not distort the internal gameplay economy.

The restriction on external capital funding internal match budgets is intentional. It preserves competitive integrity by preventing pay-to-win dynamics within the core tournament economy. Rather than limiting institutional participation, the rule directs large-scale capital toward Layer 2 infrastructure, including land acquisition, UGEE licensing, and white-label operations. This allows guilds and organizations to scale the broader ecosystem while tournament outcomes remain determined by player skill.

This also functions as a default regulatory firewall, not only an economic one, as the primary token utility is always part of gameplay. In-game $MAYG is not treated as circulating until withdrawn to a player's on-chain personal wallet; while held in the game balance it is not a part of the on-chain circulating supply as there are no direct player-to-player transfers permitted. Clans funded only by internal in-game winnings and platform revenues are therefore not taking external deposits, which keeps the structure clear of money-transmitter and deposit-taker territory. Additionally, in-game clan pool holdings are via contribution by in-game activity, not by direct transfer by players (except in the seeding of the pool by the Oyabun with in-game funds). Players must play the core game to earn their first working capital, so every clan business scales with genuine game activity rather than injected capital.

7.6 AI Agent for Ecosystem-Level Coordination

The system operates across two distinct control planes. The protocol plane is code-driven and non-custodial: mint rate, burns, clearinghouse logic, and supply rules that no agent and no operator can alter. The operator plane is the individual clan head's own ecosystem in-game business: their payouts, drawdowns, and registrations, within their own operation. The AI Accountant Dashboard acts only on the operator plane of macro gameplay financial strategy, under authority the clan head explicitly delegates. The AI manages an operator's in-game business; it never touches the protocol. Within that scope it offers a Dual-Mode Operational Toggle:

• Advisory Mode (human-in-the-loop): analytics engine providing recommendations and warnings based on the data of the operator’s current in-game operations.

• Smart Auto-Pilot Mode (programmatic in-game platform execution): the operator delegates conditional authority for the agent to adjust their own payouts, drawdowns, and registrations when thresholds are breached.

To be clear, the function is meant to be a replacement for a typical backend management dashboard. In a game resource dashboard, a player may see all the information and options, but their strategies or checklist of what to optimize and in what process may be inefficient. Here, the AI accountant is able to systematically provide an overview and present to the player data, insight or suggest strategies that normally would take months of operations to intuitively look for. Additionally, since this portfolio is not an investment one, rather an active roster of players, and UGEE properties, the focus is not on balancing books or trading, but rather direct business management i.e. running a corporation or a sports team-based organization. Since there are a limited number of same businesses (due to the scarcity of licenses), very few clans, if any will have the exact same UGEE properties and businesses in their portfolio.

One risk is inherent to operator-plane automation: if many operators run similar auto-pilot logic, correlated adjustments at shared triggers can aggregate local decisions into system-level flows. Because the operator plane is each clan head's own responsibility, mitigation rests with the operator; the protocol notes the risk rather than managing it on their behalf, especially in area where performance is more based on the human roster component of the clan and their performance. The system risk is further mitigated because all in-game token withdraws to on-chain are limited by the clan’s in-game progression and must pass game platform audit controls.

8. THE ALGORITHMIC BACKSTOP: SYSTEMIC LIQUIDITY & CLEARINGHOUSE EQUILIBRIUM

The protocol implements a dual-token, double-deflationary architecture that structurally separates high-velocity consumer play from long-term ecosystem capitalization. Its deflation is convergent: the system deflates both tokens on the path to equilibrium, then holds itself there.

8.1 The Conversion Waterfall

Platform $MAYG revenue — generated by entry fees — is routed first into $OYABUN. This is the default rule, and the ordering is deliberate:

Converting entry-fee $MAYG into $OYABUN first, rather than selling $MAYG directly for hard assets, builds defensive reserves without placing sell-pressure on the token the system is working to hold in its incentive range. It also concentrates appreciation potential in $OYABUN, which carries more price headroom and its own hard-asset (USDT) pool, making it the more efficient vehicle both for holding reserves and for acquiring hard assets. A fixed protocol-defined portion of each $OYABUN purchase is permanently burned, establishing a continuous, predictable deflationary track record; the remainder is held as reserve. When trade values reverse — $OYABUN's value as a long-term anchor exceeding its value as a sink — a portion of that reserve is traded back into $MAYG and the $MAYG is burned. The system thus directs deflation onto whichever token it can most afford to consume at the time, protecting $OYABUN's anchor role precisely when it is becoming most valuable.

The existence and ordering of these burns are structural and fixed at launch; their magnitudes are governed parameters tuned continuously within the architecture, consistent with the protocol's process-iteration design.

8.2 Reflexive Death Spiral

To prevent reflexive death spirals between the two tokens, the reverse-trade defense is capped. The protocol cannot liquidate more than a pre-defined maximum percentage of the $OYABUN reserve pool in any single governance epoch. Additionally, $OYABUN’s value floor is supported by recurring, non-speculative USDT inflows from B2B licensing auctions and property transaction fees. The strength of this support scales with the ecosystem: it is modest at launch and grows as licensing and property activity build out. This is deliberate — the regime in which $OYABUN carries enough value to be worth attacking is the same regime in which these structural inflows are largest, so the floor hardens precisely as the incentive to test it rises. This structure decouples $OYABUN’s price from short-term $MAYG market sentiment.

8.3 Hard-Asset Capture (Downstream)

Hard revenue is captured downstream of this routing, through two channels. The primary channel is $OYABUN reserves acquiring USDT through their own pool; capture without touching the $MAYG incentive range at all. The conditional channel fires only when $MAYG trades above its incentive range: at that point a portion of revenue $MAYG is sold into the $MAYG/USDT pool, an action that simultaneously captures hard assets and returns the price toward range. This exception is bounded by the range threshold; below range it never fires, so hard-asset capture never comes at the cost of defending the play incentive. Net USDT enters the pools in the first place because ecosystem participants who lack sufficient in-game $MAYG must buy it to participate — ecosystem-access demand is the source of the hard inflow the platform harvests.

8.4 Velocity Sterilization & Convergence to Equilibrium

The autonomous, non-custodial clearinghouse routes these flows through public AMM pools, with swaps executed via a Stochastic TWAP Execution Vault that randomizes windows over 24–72 hours to reduce front-running. The 24–72 hour Stochastic TWAP window is not intended to counter high-frequency panic selling. Upstream Layer 1 and Layer 2 mechanisms are designed to absorb volatility before it reaches the clearinghouse. Because all $MAYG enters circulation through progression-gated withdrawals rather than direct on-chain minting, rapid large-scale bank runs are structurally limited. The clearinghouse lag allows the protocol to filter market noise and execute macro-level rebalancing.

As established in §5, the three control layers run continuously, with layer 1 carrying the majority of supply control and the clearinghouse handling only the genuine residual. Their relative share is itself the system's primary health signal. In normal operation the system targets approximately 70% of supply-pressure control at layer 1 (in-game precursor and entry/payout levers, acting on the first supply bulge at the tournament gate), 20% at layer 2 (clan property acquisition, buildout, and operation — fewer relative transactions, but far larger total absorption), and 10% at layer 3 (the algorithmic clearinghouse, running continuously on the genuine residual). These figures are design targets, not derived constants: they express the intended distribution of supply control across the layers, and are tuning parameters adjusted within the architecture as live operation reveals the true distribution. What is structural is the ordering of layer 1 first to layer 3 last and the principle that the clearinghouse handles only the residual; the specific percentages are calibration to be refined, consistent with the process-iteration design.

Layer 3's target share is therefore a monitored band, not a fixed constant, functioning as both a calibration target and an alarm threshold. Layers 1 and 2 absorb supply through utility- and demand-based mechanisms; layer 3 clears only what genuinely remains after them. The diagnostic is directional rather than dependent on the exact figure: if layer 3's share rises materially above its target band, that is the leading indicator that the upstream layers are failing; that the system is drifting toward the regime in which an algorithmic mechanism is forced to clear large flows it was never sized to handle. That regime is precisely where prior algorithmic models broke. The internal supply-tracking systems, built from the core game, exist specifically to keep large flows from ever reaching layer 3; the clearinghouse handling outsized flows is not a contingency the system survives, rather it is the definition of the system having already failed.

Over time the architecture converges. The passive transaction-fee sink (0.5% of daily fee flows) continuously removes $MAYG from the recyclable pool, shrinking it and forcing compensating reward reductions. As $MAYG tightens, $OYABUN appreciates against it, allowing the protocol to buy $MAYG back cheaply, at which point, rather than burning it, the protocol returns it to the reward pool. That return is not an inflationary leak; it is the signature of equilibrium reached. Both tokens deflate on the path to that point. The recycling holds the system at equilibrium; it does not contradict the deflation that got it there. The mint-rate governor (§9) is the necessary counterweight ensuring this convergence settles into a stable range rather than over-tightening into undersupply.

9. THE OPEN ECONOMY PARADIGM FLYWHEEL

The open economy is a reinforcing system, paired with a stabilizing governor that holds $MAYG inside its incentive range, so the system is structurally prevented from entering a reverse spiral rather than merely hoping to avoid one.

A reinforcing loop, left ungoverned, runs in both directions — the same chain that compounds growth can compound a decline. Two distinct forces can pull gameplay velocity down, and the governor addresses each differently.

The first is endogenous: oversupply depresses $MAYG below its incentive range, weakening the reason to play. This is the failure mode the supply controls are built for — when $MAYG drifts below range, the system reduces the mint rate (precursor calibration first, then entry/payout adjustment), tightening supply to defend the value floor before a decline can compound. When $MAYG drifts above range, the platform sells $MAYG revenue into the $MAYG/USDT pool, which simultaneously captures hard revenue and returns the price toward range. The same action that funds operations defends the corridor; range maintenance is the system's normal operating mode in both directions.

The second force is exogenous: players leave because attention moves elsewhere, independent of token value. No supply lever fixes this. Here the protocol rests on a structural assumption that is also its core thesis: baseline demand is sustained by continued game development, which is decoupled from market sentiment. A game can keep generating reasons to play through new content and competitive balancing regardless of token price — and this is precisely why a game can anchor a token economy where purely financial systems cannot. We do not claim activity never dips; we claim the system targets a maintained-or-growing baseline driven by development rather than emissions, and degrades gracefully when activity falls, because reduced velocity also reduces minting.

Because growth and participation strengthen the economic primitives directly, the system can sustain and expand at a materially smaller active-user base than emission-subsidized live-service titles require. Its resilience comes from decoupling: $OYABUN carries direct market exposure and absorbs speculative volatility, while $MAYG is held in range by gameplay utility and insulated from it. A shock to $OYABUN's market price does not transmit to the $MAYG play incentive. This is robustness through separation — not a system that benefits from volatility, but one engineered so volatility lands on the layer built to absorb it.

10. THE FOREVER GAME: REALIZING CRYPTO'S KILLER APP

Crypto has spent over a decade building infrastructure with no house to live in: scaling, modularity, and DeFi primitives whose velocity still depends on speculative rotation rather than real demand. The Forever Game is that house — a system whose transactional velocity comes from gamers playing something they love, not from users and traders chasing an emission. From the birth of Bitcoin to the launch of Ethereum, crypto has been on a trajectory as a socio-economic counter-network force. None of that was easy; it was borderline impossible. What has been easy is to take that same technology and infrastructure, point it at speculative market gains, and mistake that for progress. The result has been five years of spectacular failures in web3 gaming, and a culture of degen extraction that killed itself.

This working paper has zero illusions: this open game protocol is a moon shot in every dimension of design, execution, and operations, across the product development of the game, token, and economy. But that is exactly what the scale of a fat protocol demands: an equally fat app to realize its capabilities in real utility. The fat-protocol thesis was always that value and capability accrue at the protocol layer; what was never built was the app heavy enough to start the feedback loop. That scale is structural, complex, and ambitious by necessity. The industry likes to picture itself as being in the arena, and the trenches, but the real battle ground is the cold vacuum of space. We are alone to face the true scale of this void, where any error in resources, build, or trajectory can be instantly catastrophic.

We know hit games successfully use tokens. We also know that even closed-economy games have to stay closed, or they implode. The approach is not to make an economy inside a game, but to make an economic engine out of a game. Every crypto app to this point focused on how to acquire a token and each was destroyed by its own supply. This protocol inverts that. The entire multi-system architecture acts to make the token retentive over incentive: the opposing forces of stability and volatility are split into distinct value vectors, and channeled into the economic agency of each player.

It was never a matter of adding crypto features to a game; it was first accepting a paradigm — that a sustainable open game economy is crypto's killer app. If we accept that, then we have to accept that the impossible scale is the starting condition. What may result is a true Forever Game: infinitely expandable in content and IP, self-sustaining at any scale, as a new form of economic agency.

APPENDIX A: FORMAL STABILITY MODEL (IN PROGRESS)

Status. This appendix presents a structural simulation of the protocol's supply-and-price dynamics, developed to formalize the central stability claim. It is a conceptual-flow model under explicitly idealized assumptions, not a calibrated prediction. Its purpose is to convert the assertion "the system holds its value range" into a testable statement: under what conditions does it hold, and which levers move it there. Several inputs remain placeholders pending live data; these are flagged. The model is a framework for live validation, consistent with this document's status as a working paper.

A.1 What the Model Formalizes

The claim under test (§8–§9): the $MAYG price holds the 0.20–0.30 USD band — target 0.25, monthly-average goal 0.24–0.26 — and the governor prevents a downward death spiral. In control-systems terms this is the claim that the system has a stable operating region and converges into it rather than collapsing or diverging. The model makes that question concrete by simulating the interacting mechanisms month over month and observing whether price stays in band.

The stabilization techniques used here — AMM-based buyback-and-burn, dual-token separation, control-governed supply adjustment, and agent/parameter-based simulation — have precedent in the financial token-economy literature. What distinguishes this model is not the machinery but what it stabilizes: the demand it governs is gameplay-driven and structurally non-correlated to crypto market cycles. Existing models stabilize tokens whose demand is market-dependent — speculation, yield, and capital rotation — and therefore inherit the very reflexivity they try to control. Here the transactional velocity originates in a competitive game that players engage with for its own sake, generating revenue that does not depend on market sentiment. This is the difference that lets a game serve as the economic anchor a purely financial system cannot provide, and it is why this model is, to the author's knowledge, the first to formalize token-band stability for an integrated open-economy game rather than for a financial protocol.

A.2 Structure: State Variables and Three Pools

The model tracks: the $MAYG/$USDT pool reserves (where the band is defended), a revenue pool (unconverted entry-fee $MAYG), the $OYABUN reserve (floor-defense firepower), the in-game $MAYG balance (latent, non-circulating supply), locked playthrough-gated bonus $MAYG, and the active player base.

Three constant-product (x·y=k) AMM pools form the price system:

• $MAYG/$USDT — defines the band price; defended here. Seeded at launch with ~$32k on each side (10% of the genesis in-game balance).

• $MAYG/$OYABUN — where revenue $MAYG converts to $OYABUN and where floor defense executes as a reverse trade. Seeded ~$1M each side.

• $OYABUN/$USDT — $OYABUN price discovery. Seeded ~$2M each side.

Cross-pool arbitrage is modeled as idealized — instantaneous and complete realignment across pools. This is optimistic: real arbitrage is frictional, lagged, and partial, so genuine defense effectiveness will be weaker than the model shows. The model is therefore an upper bound on stability, not a forecast. The conceptual framework in practice would be to understand the working model as a triage funnel to minimize loads to be adequately addressed.

A.3 Governing Rules

• The entry-fee sink. The game is a winner-take-all tournament format, and the entry fee is the primary supply sink. The fee is tiered by stakes and is a variable, actively-managed lever rather than a fixed rate: the published rates are maxima, applied at the platform's discretion and reduced when conditions warrant. The maximum rates are 45% at low stakes, 28.33% at mid, and 20% at high; under the expected player distribution (30% low / 50% mid / 20% high) the blended effective fee is approximately 28% — the 45% figure is the low-stakes maximum only, not the system-wide rate. An additional 5% may optionally be taken from the fee (3% to seed the monthly leaderboard prize pool, 2% for targeted player bonuses), and in edge cases the platform may take less, take none, burn the entire fee, or redirect it to player promotions. The fee floats downward when the system would otherwise over-drain — when net winners disappear or player activity is suppressed — so the design expects players to accumulate $MAYG holdings through the system, but only to a degree the macro-game and secondary-market mechanisms can absorb. Within these bounds, gameplay is net balance-destructive: cycling $MAYG through the fee-bearing rounds steadily removes it, bounding the supply that can become sell pressure. This variability is structural, not incidental; the model treats the fee as a steerable parameter, and the system is explicitly not locked to any single rate.

• The precursor funnel. Before the fee-bearing rounds, players access energy-gated precursor play: a daily allotment of game lives (extendable through the free-to-play economy) spent on precursor rounds that cost no entry fee. Winning precursor play earns a non-transferable precursor token, converted to $MAYG at a fixed rate; this $MAYG is locked and cannot be withdrawn until it is cycled through a paid final round. Precursor participation is higher at lower stakes (roughly 70% of low-stakes players, 30% mid, 10% high). The funnel retains losing players who would otherwise exit, and routes the $MAYG it mints through the same fee sink as all other supply before any of it can reach circulation.

• The range-constrained waterfall. Revenue $MAYG converts to $OYABUN only to the extent the band has headroom; 20% of $OYABUN bought is burned, 80% held as reserve. Unconverted revenue waits in the revenue pool.

• Reverse-trade floor defense. When $MAYG approaches 0.20, held $OYABUN is traded back to buy and burn $MAYG, lifting the price.

• Absolute range priority. Defending the band always takes precedence; no revenue is deployed if doing so would risk breaking the range. A broken range destroys the play incentive, so range integrity is the master constraint.

• The LP Dilemma. The hard corridor does not suppress LP yields. It stabilizes them. Liquidity providers receive playthrough-gated in-game $MAYG credits paired with platform-matched USDT bonuses. Because these yields are generated from tournament entry-fee consumption rather than token inflation, they function as a utility-based return for active participants instead of relying on speculative price appreciation.

• Co-scaling pool depth. Liquidity provision to the $MAYG/$USDT pool is incentivized through a flexible return mechanism: a provider's return may be allocated as playthrough-gated in-game $MAYG (credited with a bonus) or taken as a return on the provision itself, at a variable rate. This dual-allocation flexibility draws liquidity into the pool from both player and non-player capital, which is the mechanism by which pool depth co-scales with activity. Where the return is taken as in-game credit, that credit is playthrough-gated — it must be cycled through the fee-bearing rounds (and is thus largely consumed by the tiered sink) before any remainder becomes withdrawable. The pool therefore deepens with real USDT while most of the associated $MAYG is destroyed before it can become sell pressure, and the hard funds backing the pool give the governor additional margin to cover $MAYG minted in excess of pool depth.

A.4 The Central Finding

The decisive variable is not the launch pool size but the depth-to-pressure ratio — pool depth relative to monthly withdrawal flow. Because the pool co-scales with activity (rule 5) while gameplay simultaneously destroys most accumulating supply (rule 1), the ratio stays bounded as the player base grows: in the reference run the $MAYG/$USDT pool deepens from ~$32k at launch toward ~$1.7M as players scale from 1,000 to 10,000, and the band holds throughout. The mechanism that prevents collapse is this co-scaling, not the absolute launch depth. Stability is governed by parameters the protocol can steer through gameplay design: win rate (set by payout structure), bankroll retention (how many buy-ins players hold back before withdrawing, shaped by buy-in and progression design), and the tiered entry fee itself (a variable lever, not a constant). The figure below maps the operating region across the two behavioral dials and, separately, the effect of the fee lever.

Panel (a) maps monthly-average price across the two behavioral dials at the tiered fee maximum: a reachable in-band region (green, bounded by the dashed band edges). Panel (b) shows the entry fee acting as a steerable lever — holding win rate and bankroll fixed and varying only the blended fee. At the tiered maximum (~28%) the price settles inside the band; as the fee is dialed down, the sink weakens and price drifts upward toward the benign over-deflation regime rather than collapsing. The lever therefore moves the system in the correctable direction, which is the direction the platform would use it: easing the fee when deflation needs to be relaxed to sustain player motivation.

A.5 Limitations and Live Validation

This model is a conceptual demonstration, not proof. Its honest limits:

• Idealized arbitrage overstates defense effectiveness; frictional arbitrage is the first thing to measure live.

• Placeholder parameters — games played per active player, per-period conversion fractions, the exact LP-coupling rate, and the precursor-funnel participation split — are reasonable estimates, not measured values. Results shift with them. The tiered fee rates and player-distribution mix are design targets; the blended effective fee (~28%) follows from them and from the platform's discretionary use of the fee lever.

• Player behavior is the load-bearing assumption. Win rate and bankroll retention are the dials that determine stability; the model's value is showing that these are steerable by design rather than free-floating, but their real values are unknown until observed. This is the quantitative form of the player-behavior dependency named in Core Assumptions.

• The model addresses price-band stability, not the full economy (it does not model ecosystem-game dynamics, clan behavior, or $OYABUN's own market depth under stress). The appropriate reading: the architecture can hold the band under stated assumptions, the mechanism that makes it hold is the co-scaling pool combined with the entry-fee sink, and the system is steerable into the stable region through its design levers — the two behavioral dials and the variable entry fee. Confirming this against live operation — replacing idealized arbitrage with measured friction and placeholder parameters with observed values — is the validation work this framework is built to support.

A.6 Example of Triage Funnel by State

In practice the system operates not through a single fixed model but through a set of tools that route token supply into manageable flows, each handled by the part of the protocol best suited to it. The table below illustrates how the protocol responds to three extreme states — a macro market crash, an endogenous minting surge, and sustained user churn — naming the shock point, the defensive action, and the resulting safeguard posture in each case:

A.7 Relation to Existing Approaches

None of the individual components modeled here are new. AMM-based buyback-and-burn, dual-token separation, control-governed supply adjustment, and gameplay-driven token demand are all established — and the use of a game as the economy's revenue engine is precisely what the sector has repeatedly attempted. The components being established is, in fact, a precondition for attempting a system of this complexity. What this model represents is not a novel proposition but a structured solution to one that has consistently failed in execution: the distinguishing feature is the interaction across all layers — gameplay sinks, ecosystem absorption, the conversion waterfall, and the governor — operating together as a single supply-management system. The difficulty was never the idea that a game could drive a token economy; it was making the layered supply management hold together well enough for that economy to survive its own incentives. That integration is what the model exists to demonstrate.

APPENDIX B: MULTI-SYSTEM SUMMARY FOR AUDITORS

For an audit-oriented reading, the table below summarizes the protocol as a multi-system control framework. Each row maps a control target to the metric that monitors it, the latent loophole it is audited against, and the safeguard that has been verified to close that loophole — a compact view of where the system is attacked and how each attack is answered:

About the Author

Sinjin David Jung is the founder and lead game designer of Peeking Duck Studios and the creator of My Angry Yakuza Girlfriend (MAYG), the open-economy game this protocol documents. He has worked in competitive gaming and esports since 1998, beginning with the Samsung-backed World Cyber Games, and served as an executive advisor to Team Liquid. From 2007 to 2010 he was regional director for Asia at PokerStars, where he opened multiple markets, ran live and online poker operations, and was a primary force in introducing Texas Hold'em across Asia and legalizing poker in Macau — direct operating experience with the winner-take-all, real-money tournament economics at the core of this protocol's design. He subsequently worked in fintech and microfinance, including as vice chairman of TrueMoney in the Philippines, before moving into Web3. He studied public policy and developmental economics at the Harvard Kennedy School and holds a master's in international commerce from Korea University. MAYG launched on April 20, 2026 as a public beta.