The FOMO jackpot
The FOMO jackpot is a last-buyer-wins game. A pot of money sits on a clock, anyone can buy tickets, and every buy pushes the clock out a little. When it finally reaches zero, whoever bought last takes the largest share, and everyone who ever bought a ticket in that round takes a share too.
The whole pot is held in USDG, so a winner is paid in dollars rather than in whatever ETH happened to be worth that day.
Network and addresses says which networks the jackpot runs on.
How a round works
- A round opens with money already in it. Round one is seeded by Honkfun. Every round after that opens with the previous round's carryover, plus any launchpad profit moved in.
- Anyone buys tickets, paying in USDG or in ETH. An ETH payment is swapped to USDG on the spot, so the pot is only ever one asset.
- The first buy starts the clock, at 24 hours. There is no target to hit and no opening stage. Whoever buys first is the last buyer until somebody outbids them.
- Every later buy adds 30 seconds, and the deadline is never allowed to sit more than 24 hours ahead of now.
- When the clock reaches zero, anyone can settle it. The pot splits five ways and the next round opens in the same transaction.
What a ticket costs
The ticket price follows the pot. It starts at 1 USDG when the pot is still just the seed and climbs as the pot grows, so the same money buys fewer tickets the later it arrives.
| Pot, against the seed | One ticket costs |
|---|---|
| 1x, the opening | 1.00 USDG |
| 2x | 4.90 USDG |
| 3x | 12.40 USDG |
| 5x | 40.00 USDG |
| 10x | 195.90 USDG |
The smallest buy is 1 USDG. A large buy is priced along the curve as it goes rather than at one fixed price, so you pay the real average for the tickets you take, not the price at the moment you pressed the button.
How the pot splits
| Share | Goes to |
|---|---|
| 50% | The last buyer |
| 30% | Everyone holding tickets, in proportion to how many they hold |
| 10% | The platform |
| 10% | The next round's seed |
| 0% | Buying and burning $HONK, once a burner address is set |
Why ticket holders are paid at all. A round cannot start until somebody puts real money in with nothing yet to show for it. If only the last buyer earned, the sensible move would be to wait for someone else to fill the pot and only play the ending, so nobody would fill it and no round would ever start. The ticket share pays for getting a round off the ground, and the rising price aims it at whoever took that risk earliest.
The seed earns nothing. Honkfun's seed and every later carryover buy no tickets. They count in the pot and take no share of it.
Claiming
Settling a round does not push money to anybody. Each winner and each ticket holder claims their own share, and pays their own gas. A claim always pays the wallet it belongs to, whoever submits it.
Things worth knowing before you play
- A round cannot fail or expire. There is no target to miss, so there is no refund and none is needed. A round nobody buys into simply sits open with its seed intact, costing nobody anything, until somebody buys.
- Every buy names the round it is paying into. This chain produces about ten blocks a second, so a buy signed just before someone settles the round could otherwise land in the next round, which is a different bet at a different price. A buy that arrives in the wrong round is refused before any money moves.
- Being the last buyer is not safe. Anyone can take that position from you for the price of one ticket, right up until the clock runs out.
- The price rises steeply. At five times the seed a ticket costs forty times what it did at the opening. Late tickets win the same share per ticket as early ones, and cost far more.
- An ETH payment is checked against an independent price before it fills. If the swap would land more than 2% away from it, the buy is refused rather than filled at a bad rate.
Who can start a round
Only Honkfun can open the very first round, and only once. After that each round opens automatically inside the settlement of the one before it, so the game keeps itself going without anyone being in charge of it.
Nothing settles a round on its own, though. Someone has to call for it once the clock has run out, and the incentive to do so is that no prize can be claimed until they do.