You mint a rat

0.002 ETH, or 100,000 $RATRACE burned to the dead address. 5,000 rats, ever. 5 mints per wallet, counted on mints, not on holdings, so you can pick up more on the secondary if someone sells. A fresh rat has zero hustle, zero races, zero podiums.

The rat is an ERC721 on Robinhood Chain. His look is drawn from his number and nothing else, so nobody can re-roll him. The mint price and the burn amount are parameters the owner can move, but only inside 0.25x to 4x of the launch values, and only after a 24 hour notice on chain.

You buy a ticket

A race leaves every ten minutes, on the clock: race id = block time / 600. While the doors are open, any rat that is not retired can enter the current race with 1 to 10 tickets: 0.0002 ETH each, or 10,000 $RATRACE burned each. You can top up while the doors are open, up to 10 total per rat per race.

Tickets are not refunded. If nobody shows up, the race leaves empty and nothing moves. If the keeper is asleep, the race still closes later and the tickets still count.

The draw

When the clock passes, anyone can close the race. Closing picks a seed block two Ethereum block ticks in the future and reserves the pot. Once that block exists, anyone can settle: its hash becomes the seed and the seed picks the winners. On Robinhood Chain the block number is the Ethereum block number, and the hash for it is the hash of the last block before the next Ethereum tick, set by the chain's sequencer. Not the owner, not the keeper, not the rat with the most tickets. The one party that could bias a draw is the operator of the chain itself, which is the trust you already place in it by holding its tokens. If the hash has expired (the chain forgets hashes after 256 ticks, about 51 minutes), anyone can reseed and try again. A race takes at most 1,000 rats.

The odds are honest: every ticket is one name in the hat, ten tickets is ten names. First place is drawn from all the names, then that rat's names come out and second is drawn, then third. Three places, three different rats. A rat with 1 ticket in a 37 ticket race has a 1 in 37 shot at first. That is the whole formula.

The cheese

The cheese is tokenized stock, real equities issued on Robinhood Chain. It rotates every race through the cheese list, which starts as SPY, GLD and NVDA, with TSLA, COST and GME to be added through the timelock. The pot is 5% of that stock's vault at 30 tickets or more, scaled down when the platform is quieter (10 tickets on the platform means a third of that slice). It is set aside when the race closes and split 50 / 30 / 20 between first, second and third. A place that is not filled stays in the vault. Because the pot is a slice of the vault it sizes itself: a fat vault pays fat, a thin vault pays thin, a quiet night pays small, and it never runs dry.

The cheese belongs to the rat, not the wallet. It sits in the contract as claimable until the rat's owner claims it. Sell the rat and the unclaimed stock goes with him. The vaults fill from the ETH the contract receives (creator fees on every $RATRACE trade, ETH mints, ETH tickets), which the keeper swaps into stock. That swap is the only thing ETH can ever become here.

Retirement

Podiums pay hustle: 3 for first, 2 for second, 1 for third. Hustle only counts when at least 5 rats are on the platform; places always pay, but a rat racing alone at 4 am earns cheese, not hustle. At 10 hustle the rat retires on the spot. He cannot enter another race. From then on he owns an equal share of every deposit into the retirement fund, which is tokenized SPY today. That share is credited pro rata to whoever is retired at the moment the fund is topped up, forever, claimable whenever.

There is a buffer. Everything that lands in the retirement fund before the first rat retires is frozen when he does, and the first five rats to retire split it, a fifth each, credited the moment each one retires. After the fifth it is shared the normal way.

What the owner cannot do

There is no withdraw function. None for ETH, none for stock, none for the token. ETH that reaches the contract can only leave as a swap into a vault stock, delivered to the contract's own address. The owner cannot rescue, sweep, pause or drain anything.

The owner can propose new prices, burn amounts, a new pot percentage (between 1.25% and 20%), the ticket count at which a race pays the full pot, the hourly harvest cap, the swap fee tiers, a new cheese list and a new retirement stock. Every proposal waits 24 hours on chain before it can be executed, lapses if nobody executes it within 7 days after that, and prices are bounded to 0.25x to 4x of launch. The owner can also lock prices, which kills the price, pot and fee proposals permanently; the cheese list and the retirement stock stay changeable, always with the 24 hour notice, so a frozen stock can be rotated out. The keeper closes, settles, reseeds and harvests at most 0.5 ETH per hour, and every one of those can be called by anyone, so the game runs with or without us.

One thing the contract cannot do: overrule Robinhood. Prizes are Robinhood-issued stock tokens. Robinhood can pause, block or burn them, and the contract cannot undo that. A frozen stock stays frozen until Robinhood lifts it, the rest of the cheese keeps paying, and the cheese list and the retirement token can be rotated after a 24 hour notice. We harvest often and keep the pot slice high so the contract never sits on more than a day or two of prizes.

When things go wrong

The keeper is asleep

Races keep taking tickets on the clock. Close, settle and reseed are public functions; anyone can call them from Blockscout and the race settles late instead of never. Harvests wait, so the vaults stop growing until it is back.

The seed block hash expired

If nobody settled within about 51 minutes of the close, the hash is gone. Anyone calls reseed, the contract picks a new seed block two ticks ahead, and the race settles from that one. Tickets and the reserved pot are untouched.

Robinhood pauses a stock token

Payouts in that stock revert while it is paused. The stock stays reserved for the rat that won it; claimAll skips the frozen token and pays the rest. If it stays frozen the list is rotated after a 24 hour notice.

The RPC is down

The site says so and retries every few seconds. The contract does not care; it lives on the chain, not on this page.

Fewer than 5 rats on the platform

The race still runs and still pays cheese. No hustle is awarded, so nobody retires off an empty board.

Fees arrive faster than 0.5 ETH an hour

The cap holds. The keeper drains the backlog over the following hours; nothing is lost, it is just slower to become stock.

Questions people ask

Is this gambling?

A ticket is one name in a hat drawn from a block hash, and the prize is a slice of a vault. Read the odds on this page and decide for yourself. Play with what you can afford to lose.

Can the team take the money?

No. There is no withdraw function. ETH becomes stock inside the contract's own vaults and nothing else. That is checkable on Blockscout, not a promise.

What does $RATRACE actually do?

It buys rats and tickets by burning, and every trade of it pays a 1% creator fee that is forwarded to the game and becomes cheese. See the holders page for the exact answer to "what do I get for holding it".

Do I have to be online when my rat wins?

No. Winnings sit in the contract as claimable until you claim them, and they follow the rat if you sell him.

Can I buy more than 5 rats?

You can mint 5 per wallet. You can buy as many as people will sell you on the secondary. The cap is on mints, not on ownership.

My rat has been racing for a week and has 2 hustle. Is he bad at this?

He is average at this. The middle of the pack pays rent, not dividends. More tickets is more names in the hat; nothing else helps him.

What happens to my rat after he retires?

He never races again. He collects an equal share of every deposit into the retirement fund, in SPY, for as long as the fund is topped up, and claims whenever his owner likes. He has earned the deck chair.

Why every ten minutes?

Because 144 results a day is a receipt every ten minutes, and because a race you can wait for is a race you will watch. Also the keeper does not sleep, which is more than can be said for us.

Which stocks are the cheese?

SPY, GLD and NVDA at launch. TSLA, COST and GME join through the 24 hour timelock once the vaults have something in them. The retirement fund is SPY.

Roadmap, with honest states

• Done Contract v1.1: 55 tests green, adversarial audit, end to end runs on a local chain and on a fork of Robinhood Chain.
• Done This site, mock preview mode, the tokenURI service for the rats.
• Written, not running The keeper that closes, settles, reseeds and harvests. It starts the day the contract is deployed.
• Not started Contract deployment on Robinhood Chain and source verification on Blockscout.
• Not started $RATRACE launch on Pons, quoted in SPY.
• Not started The domain ratrace.family.
• Not started TSLA, COST and GME added to the cheese list through the timelock.
• Not started An indexer for deep race history. Until then the results feed reads the last few hundred thousand blocks straight from the chain.
• Not started WalletConnect. Injected wallets only for now: MetaMask, Rabby.