Power the ecosystem.
ArcadeUnion Founder Nodes are planned as community-operated infrastructure: software that supports games, delivers useful services and qualifies for token and NFT rewards. What a licence must do to qualify is one thing throughout: hold a share of the network's content and serve it. The rules are published before they take effect.
Check what your licences have earned.
Connect a wallet to see the licences it holds, what they have accrued and what is claimable. Read-only — you will not be asked to sign anything.
Licence + operation + contribution.
A Founder Node licence gives a wallet the right to one reward-eligible node slot. That slot holds a share of the network's game content and serves it to players while the machine is on. There is no uptime requirement and no threshold to cross — a node is paid for what it holds and what it delivers.
Own an eligible licence
A Founder Node licence proves that a wallet may operate one node slot. The licence and the software are separate, so an operator can move the node between machines.
Run the node client
The client proves wallet control without exposing private keys, fetches the pieces of game content it has been assigned, and serves them to players who ask for them.
Earn contribution points
Points determine each operator's share of the daily node reward pool, and come from two things only: data held and proved, and bytes delivered and signed for.
Dynamic rewards, not a fixed promise.
The node pool can be divided by contribution rather than guaranteeing a fixed token amount per licence. As the network grows, rewards naturally respond to active participation.
Services nodes can provide.
The network can begin simply and add more meaningful workloads as ArcadeUnion's game portfolio expands.
Rewards fall as more licences sell.
The day’s node pool is a fixed amount of emission divided between the licences that exist. It does not grow when another licence is sold — the same pool is simply shared further. Every licence sold after yours makes your share smaller, and that is the design rather than a flaw in it: the people who commit while none of this is proven are the ones the schedule pays most. The figures below are the even split — the day’s pool divided by the licences counted. What any one licence actually earns is its share of the work done that day, so a licence delivering more than its neighbours sits above this line and one delivering less sits below it.
| Licences counted | ARCU per licence, per day | Per licence, per year | Share of the 20B cap |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 | 82,192 | 30,000,000 | 0.1500% |
| 500 | 16,438 | 6,000,000 | 0.0300% |
| 1,000 | 8,219 | 3,000,000 | 0.0150% |
| 3,000 | 2,740 | 1,000,000 | 0.0050% |
| 6,000 | 1,370 | 500,000 | 0.0025% |
| 11,500 | 715 | 260,870 | 0.0013% |
| 12,000 | 685 | 250,000 | 0.0013% |
Illustrative only, and not a promise of financial return. Figures use the proposed year-one node pool of 8,219,178 ARCU a day — 66.7% of that year’s emission. Emission tapers every year, so the same row falls again over time: by year five the daily pool is 2,465,753 and every number above is roughly a third of what it shows. ARCU has no price and none is implied here; these are token counts, not money.
The 500 reserved licences are excluded while the treasury holds them. They earn nothing and they do not shrink anyone else’s share — a prize or giveaway licence starts counting only when it reaches a real holder.
Contribution can be measurable.
| What earns | How it is proved | Illustrative |
|---|---|---|
| Data held | Random challenge — return a hash of the whole piece, salted with a number issued at the time | Per piece held and proved intact |
| Bytes delivered | Cumulative receipt signed by whoever received them | Per byte, counted from receipts only |
| Holding a licence | Nothing to prove | Earns nothing on its own |
Illustrative only. Uptime is not scored at all, in either direction: there is no bar to clear and no credit for being switched on. Hours online matter only because a machine that is on for longer delivers more, and delivery is what is counted. Final scoring will be published and testable before it begins.
Node owners can earn ecosystem rewards.
Token emissions are only one layer. Active operators can also qualify for NFTs, founder cosmetics, game assets, tournament tickets, launch drops and Node Chests tied to real participation.
Decided by the people who funded it.
This is not a DAO and there is no governance token to buy. It is something plainer: the people running nodes choose what gets built with what the network earns, and every transaction is visible on a public ledger while they decide.
A vote, then a build
Somebody loves a game and wants a version of it here. That question goes to the people who actually paid for the network rather than being settled in a room and announced afterwards. Whatever wins is what gets made.
Built to a budget, on purpose
Web3 gaming has a track record of raising enormous sums and shipping very little. The discipline here is the opposite way round: build what people asked for, at a cost proportionate to the size of the network, and account for every transaction publicly while doing it. Small and finished beats large and perpetually coming soon.
What the money is not for
Not offices nobody visits, not cars, not sponsorships bought to look bigger than we are. Operating costs are capped and disclosed, and the cap is in the contract rather than in a promise. The celebration comes after it works — and when it does, you will be able to see that on the ledger too.
Points, not holdings.
Most token systems make influence proportional to how much you hold, which means the largest holder decides and everybody else watches. This is proposed to work the other way round: buying more never buys more say.
| Who | History on the network | Holds a licence | Points |
|---|---|---|---|
| A brand new wallet | No | No | 0 |
| A brand new wallet holding a licence | No | Yes | 0 |
| A player with a record | Yes | No | 1 |
| A player with a record, holding a licence | Yes | Yes | 2 |
| A player with a record, holding a hundred | Yes | Yes | 2 |
A licence is a bonus, not a multiplier
One point for being someone who actually plays here, one more for holding a licence. Whether that is a single licence or a hundred makes no difference — the last two rows of the table are the entire idea.
Why the first two rows are zero
A wallet is free and takes a second to make, so a vote per wallet is not a democracy, it is a scripting exercise. The point comes from a record the games signed for — which cannot be bought at any price, because the only input is time. Buying licences into empty wallets buys nothing at all.
What that costs, honestly
Somebody who joined today cannot vote today. They can play, hold a licence and earn like anyone else — the record gates voting only, and it fills in by playing. A gate always costs somebody, and this is the cost.
A majority under these rules means a majority of people who have actually been here, each of whom chose the same thing. There is no price for that, only persuasion — which is what a community vote is meant to be.
A fixed number, priced in steps.
The proposed licence supply is capped at 12,000. Of those, 11,500 would be offered and 500 held back for prizes, community giveaways and reserve. Ten of the reserved licences are allocated to the founder — around a tenth of one per cent of lifetime node rewards — and the founder pays the running costs on them like any other operator. The price is proposed to rise in steps as licences are taken up, so that both the number available and the price are published rather than discretionary.
| Licences | Price step | Proposed range |
|---|---|---|
| 1 – 1,000 | +$10 per 100 taken | $60 → $150 |
| 1,001 – 5,000 | +$50 per 100 taken | $200 → $2,150 |
| 5,001 – 11,500 | +$100 per 100 taken | $2,250 → $8,650 |
| Reserved | Not offered | 500 held back, incl. 10 founder |
What an operator needs
A licence is the right to one reward-eligible node slot. It is not a share and not an entitlement to revenue. Rewards depend on the node holding data and delivering bytes — a licence sitting idle, on any machine or none, earns nothing.
A node runs on a machine you already have — a PC, a laptop, a spare box. The proposal asks for around ten gigabytes of disk and whatever hours that machine is already switched on. A dedicated server is an option for anyone who wants to serve more, not a requirement.
A licence cannot be resold until the sale completes
Until all 11,500 offered licences are taken, a licence cannot be moved to another wallet. It is yours, it earns on exactly the same terms as any other, and it can be operated from the day you get it — but it cannot be sold on, moved to a different wallet of your own, or rescued to a new one if the wallet holding it is lost or compromised.
That is a real cost and it falls on the buyer. If the sale takes a long time to complete, it is a long time with no way out.
The lock lifts by itself the moment the last offered licence is sold. Nobody has to decide to lift it, and there is no window where the sale has finished but licences are still stuck.
Why it works that way
The price rises in steps. Without the lock, anyone buying early could resell below the current step and take the margin, while the sale that actually funds the network raises less.
There is one exception, and it only ever loosens things: if the sale stalls and never reaches 11,500, ArcadeUnion can release transfers early. Without that, a sale that stopped short would leave every licence permanently stuck. It is a one-way switch — nothing in the contract can put the lock back once it is off.
Both rules are written into the licence contract rather than left to good intentions, and can be read there before anyone buys.
USDC first, then compounding.
Licences would be bought with USDC, initially on Avalanche — the same network the token contract is already deployed on, and cheap enough that fees do not swallow a large share of an early licence. Support for other networks may follow once volume justifies building it properly.
The first 2,000 — USDC
Paid entirely in USDC. This is what funds the liquidity pool and the project's working costs, so it needs to be real money rather than the project's own token.
From 2,001 — half in $ARCU
Half the price payable in $ARCU, half in USDC. That lets operators compound rewards from nodes they already run back into more nodes, while the project keeps the dollar income it depends on.
The $ARCU taken this way is burned, permanently removing it from supply rather than being held or resold.
Store some of it, serve it when you are on.
A node keeps a few gigabytes of real game content — builds, updates, assets — on a machine you already own, and serves it to players who ask for it while that machine happens to be online. Every byte it delivers is a byte ArcadeUnion did not have to pay a CDN for, which is what makes the work worth paying for rather than a gesture.
A few gigabytes, not a server
Content is split into pieces and spread across the network, so no single node carries much. A catalogue of 200 GB spread across four thousand nodes with sixteen copies of everything works out at under a gigabyte each. The proposal is to ask for ten, which leaves a great deal of room.
Whenever you are online
There is no schedule to keep and no window to hit. If the machine is on and a player wants a piece it holds, it serves it. If the machine is off, another node does, and failing that the request falls back to ArcadeUnion's own copy — so nothing breaks when you close your laptop.
The receiver signs for what arrived
A node saying it delivered ten gigabytes is a claim, and paying on claims would mean paying for the most convincing liar. So the game client signs for what it actually received, and the node is paid on signatures it cannot produce by itself. A node that stores nothing and serves nothing earns nothing, and no amount of claiming otherwise changes that.
For work done, not hours claimed.
Two things earn: the data a node holds and keeps intact, and the bytes it actually delivers. Neither can be faked by leaving something running.
Holding data
Nodes are asked at random to prove they still hold what they were assigned, by returning a hash of the whole piece salted with a number they could not have seen in advance. Answering requires the data to be there at that moment. A node that quietly deleted it cannot bluff.
Delivering bytes
Counted from receipts signed by whoever received them, never from the node's own account of itself. Receipts are cumulative, so a whole session of downloads is one signature rather than thousands, and an old receipt re-sent achieves nothing.
Nothing is spent until the token can be traded.
A licence is only worth what the token behind it is worth, and a token with nowhere to trade is worth nothing at all. So the money from licence sales is not being spent on anything else first.
Every dollar stays in one place
Licence money goes to a single USDC address and is spent on one thing: opening a trading pair for the token. Not wages, not marketing, not development, not referral payments — those all wait.
Here it is, so the balance can be watched going up and, more to the point, not going anywhere else:
0xd6ee2CCeA1D663af192683bdF9eEB258747034cA
Avalanche C-Chain. Check it against this page and nowhere else — we will never send you a different address, by direct message or otherwise, and anyone who does is not us.
At $50,000, the pair opens
Once the balance reaches $50,000 the intention is to open a USDC pair for $ARCU on Trader Joe, on Avalanche, and hold the position. One pair rather than two: the same money split across two pools makes both of them thin, and a thin pool is worse for whoever trades in it.
More can be added afterwards. It is a floor, not a target.
One thing to be straight about: this is a commitment rather than an escrow contract. The address can be watched by anyone, which proves what is in it — though not what could leave it. The clock starts at the first sale rather than today, so it does not run down while nothing is happening.
$10 for every licence you bring.
Share a link, and if somebody buys through it you earn $10 in USDC for every licence they take — not just their first one. No licence of your own is needed to refer somebody.
What it pays
$10 per licence, in USDC, on every purchase made through your link. At the opening price of $60 that is a sixth of the sale; later in the ladder it is a smaller share of a larger number.
When it is paid
After the pair opens, by hand, and not before. Referral rewards come out of the same money as the liquidity, so paying them first would be spending what is promised back to buyers.
Balances accrue in the meantime and nothing expires.
The limits, stated
Up to 500 licences credited to any one referrer. Past that a purchase still goes through and still counts for the buyer; it simply stops earning for the referrer.
You must be a member with a Discord account linked to your wallet to be paid, and it is one Discord account to one wallet. You cannot refer yourself.
A token reward on top of this is being considered for later, once the pair exists and there is a real price to convert against. It is not part of the offer today. Nothing here is a promise of financial return, and no licence is on sale yet.
What an owner actually does.
Four things to set up, once, and then it is left alone. None of it needs a server administrator and none of it needs you to be at the keyboard.
Hold a licence in your own wallet
Necessary, and on its own it earns nothing at all. There is no stage in which holding one pays.
Install the node on a machine you control
A five-dollar-a-month VPS is plenty, and so is a PC or laptop you already own. It does not have to be on all the time.
Sign one line to link the two
A plain-text authorisation, signed in your wallet on your own device, that ties that machine to that licence. Your wallet key never goes on the machine — the node makes its own throwaway key that holds nothing and can be replaced whenever you like.
Leave it running, an hour a day or more
An hour a day is the opening ask and the only one to begin with. After that it downloads the pieces it is assigned, hands them to players who are downloading a game, and answers proof requests when they come. That is the whole job.
What earns nothing
- Owning a licence and running nothing.
- Running a node that stores nothing.
- Sitting online around the clock while serving nobody, once the network is carrying real data — that earns the share for holding it, and nothing for delivering it.
- Answering one proof request wrongly. That forfeits the whole period, both halves.
What you can and cannot control
Which pieces you are given is decided by a hash of the piece against the list of nodes — not by us, and not by you. How many other licences are running is not yours to control either. The one lever you have is how much you actually serve, which mostly means how many hours the machine is switched on.
What has to exist first.
This is the design, not a description of something operating today. Three things have to be in place before any of it pays anybody, and they are stated here rather than discovered later.
There has to be something to serve
Game builds and assets published and split into pieces. Until there is real content and real demand for it, there is no work to do and nothing to measure.
Assignment and checking
Deciding which node holds what, asking for proof, and settling receipts. The assignment is computed from published data, so anyone can recalculate who should hold which piece and check the answer.
The game client has to sign
Nothing is paid for delivery until the software receiving the bytes signs for them. This is the piece the whole model rests on, and it is the one that needs building into the games themselves.
Who would be able to buy.
No sale is open, so nothing below leads to a purchase today. This is the check that would run before one, published now so it can be read and argued with rather than appearing on the day.
1 — Where you are
Some places would be excluded from any sale. The final list has to be settled with legal advice before a sale opens, and it will be published here rather than applied quietly.
2 — What you would be agreeing to
A licence is a right to operate node software and to qualify for rewards by contributing to the network. It is not shares in ArcadeUnion, not a loan, not a dividend, and not a promise of income or of any future token value.
It also cannot be transferred or resold until the sale completes — not sold on, not moved between your own wallets, and not recovered if the wallet holding it is lost. Why, and when that lifts →
How a wrong decision gets put right.
Reward scoring is a calculation, and calculations have bugs. An operator who is wrongly marked down needs a route back that is not asking us nicely and hoping. This is that route, published in advance so it exists before anyone needs it.
The evidence is published first
Each period's full allocation data — and the evidence behind any exclusion — is published within a day of the period closing. Evidence exists before any dispute rather than being produced in response to one.
To raise an appeal
Appeals are filed publicly, stating the period, the node, what the operator believes happened, and their own evidence. Operators have logs and should expect to produce them. After 14 days the period is final — without a deadline the books never close.
For us to answer
A determination, with the evidence it relied on. That deadline binds us as much as the first one binds the operator: an appeal that can sit unanswered indefinitely is a refusal with extra steps.
Every outcome, including refusals
Appeals and their results are published either way, with reasons. A process that only publicises the appeals it upholds is marketing rather than accountability.
Put right in the next period
An upheld appeal is corrected in the following period's figures, and the operator claims the shortfall. Where a fault affected many nodes at once, the whole period is recalculated and the correction announced before the new figures are published, not after.
What cannot be undone
If the calculation pays somebody too much and they claim it, it is gone. Corrections can add, but they cannot take back.
That asymmetry is why the calculation is designed to err on the low side when it is uncertain. Being paid slightly late through an appeal is recoverable. Being overpaid is not.
Who decides, plainly
At the start, appeals are determined by ArcadeUnion — the same people who produced the figure being disputed. That is weak, and saying otherwise would be worse than admitting it.
What makes it better than nothing: the evidence is published in advance and can be recalculated by anyone, outcomes are published whichever way they go, and both sides are on a clock. Independent review through community governance is the obvious next step, and it is not built.
Rewards accrue before they unlock.
Node rewards are proposed to build up as a claimable allowance rather than being paid out nightly. Under the current design that allowance would begin unlocking three months after liquidity is provided, then release gradually across the following six months rather than all at once.
Built for PCs, VPSs and dedicated servers.
The first client is intended to be simple to deploy and non-custodial. Operators prove wallet ownership without ever sharing private keys with ArcadeUnion.