Help deliver the games.
A node is a computer that keeps part of our games on it and sends them to players who want to play. Do that reliably, and you earn a share of what the network pays out.
Games are big. Someone has to send them.
When a studio’s game does well, its hosting bill arrives at exactly the wrong moment. The usual answer is to pay a cloud company more. Ours is to let players carry the files instead, and pay them for it.
You are paid for work, not for waiting. A node earns by holding a slice of a game’s content and actually delivering it to someone who asked. A machine that sits switched on and serves nothing earns nothing. That is the single rule everything else here follows from.
Hold a slice
Not the whole library — a share of it. The network decides which pieces you hold, so nobody can pick the popular files and ignore the rest.
Serve it on request
When a player needs that piece, your machine sends it. That delivery is the work, and it is what gets counted.
Prove both
The network checks you still hold what you claim, and the player’s client signs for what it received. Neither half can be produced by your machine alone.
Why you cannot simply claim it.
Any reward worth having is worth faking, so the design assumes somebody will try.
That the data is held
At random moments the network asks a question about your slice that can only be answered by having the actual bytes. Keeping an index, a hash list or a promise does not answer it. Get it wrong and the whole period scores nothing — there is no partial credit, because partial credit is an invitation to keep a partial copy.
That the bytes arrived
Whoever received the data signs a receipt for it. Your node cannot write its own receipts, because the signature has to come from the other end. Delivery you cannot evidence is delivery that does not count.
Read more — the gap this does not close
A receipt proves something received the bytes. It does not yet prove that something was a real player rather than a second machine the same operator is running. Closing it properly means the game client signing for what it receives, tied to a real session. That is the direction and it is not built, so it is listed as unsolved rather than quietly assumed.
A share of a pool, not a fixed wage.
What one licence earns depends on what everyone else does — so here is the shape of it rather than a number to hold us to.
The daily pool is a share of token emission, and it is divided between the licences that actually did the work. Earlier operators earn more per licence, and that is deliberate — but the pool itself grows with participation, so a nearly-empty network cannot quietly take a full network’s worth of tokens for very little work.
Per licence, per day, as the network fills
Year-one figures, assuming a licence is doing the work. Hover a point for the number.
About 2,880 ARCU a day per licence at 100 licences, 1,443 at a thousand, and 685 at a full network of twelve thousand. Every curve lands on the same figure at full participation, so nothing is promised early that cannot be paid later. Emission that no work was done for is never created at all.
Read more — why not simply split the pool evenly
Because a fixed daily pool shared between whoever turned up pays a nearly-empty network the same total as a full one. Fifty nodes would take an entire day’s emission between them at roughly a hundred and twenty times the rate a full network pays. That is not a reward for early support, it is an accident of the arithmetic, and it mints tokens no work was done for.
Scaling the pool with participation fixes the total while still paying early operators more per licence. The unminted remainder is simply never created.
A fixed number, priced in steps.
Twelve thousand five hundred in total, and the price rises as they go.
The supply is split into three pools that cannot borrow from each other: 11,500 offered for sale, 500 held in reserve, and 500 for giveaways. The sale pool is sold in batches of a hundred, and each batch costs more than the last.
The price ladder
From $60 for the first hundred to $8,650 for the last. Hover a step for its price.
Three bands: rising $10 per hundred to the first thousand, $50 per hundred to five thousand, $100 per hundred beyond. Across all 11,500 that totals $40,230,000 — a figure from the model, not a target anyone is chasing.
The step is in the contract rather than in a spreadsheet, and the position is read from how many have actually sold. Nobody can reset it or reopen a cheaper rung.
Who would be able to buy.
No sale is open. When one is, this is who would be able to buy and what we would check first.
Read more — the eligibility checks
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 →
The things that could put you off.
Collected here rather than scattered, because they are the part worth reading twice.
No promises about money
- There is no guaranteed payout and no fixed return. The pool is shared, so what one licence earns depends on what everyone else does.
- Please do not treat a licence as an investment. It is permission to do work, and payment follows the work.
- No refund terms are offered. A licence agreement would be published before any sale.
- Nothing here has been security audited. Quotes have been requested.
Practical limits
- Transfers would be locked until the sale completes. The price rises as it goes, so a secondary market during the sale would undercut it. That means no exit, and no moving a licence to a different wallet, until then.
- Rewards accrue before they unlock, and a portion vests rather than arriving at once.
- The reward rules are published before a period starts, not after it ends — but they can change between periods.
- You need a machine that is on, connected and has disk to spare. It is not a mobile app.
Already hold a licence? Open your dashboard to see what it has accrued. Want to be told when this opens? Tell us — there is no list to join and nothing to pay.