How Spicie works

A sealer seals coin into an opaque purse — between 50 and 250,000 credits, and nobody can see how much is inside until it opens. A drawer pays the draw price, opens one purse chosen at random, and receives its entire contents. Selection weight is inverse to size: a fat purse is drawn rarely, a thin purse often.

Let the purses open to you hold x₁…xₙ and let S = Σ(1/xᵢ). Purse i is taken with probability (1/xᵢ)/S, so the expected contents of a draw are exactly n/S — the harmonic mean H of the open amounts. The price is P = H × (1 + 6%). You pay fair value plus the edge and nothing else: no charge to seal, no spread, no cut taken out of what you draw.

You are never quoted a price over your own purses. Yours are removed from the set and H is recomputed over what is left, so you cannot draw your own coin back.

A drawer pays 6% over fair value. That is the entire cost of drawing, and the only reason the other side is paid anything.

A sealer expects to earn 4% of whatever they sealed, as carry, before their purse is drawn. The arithmetic: every open purse's expected outflow per draw is H/n whatever its size, so every open purse is paid an equal share of every draw price. A purse survives n·x/H draws on average, and 4% of the coin passing through in that time is 4% of x.

Expected outflow per purse per draw is identical for a thin purse and a fat one. A small purse is taken often for small change; a large one sits a long time and then empties in a single stroke. Same expected return, different shape. No size beats another, and nothing on this site will tell you otherwise.

A purse cannot be unsealed. Coin goes in and comes back out only when somebody draws it; carry accrues to the purse and is paid to you at that moment. If nobody draws for a week, your coin waits a week. That is the sealer's real risk and it is not hedged.

Of the 6% edge, 4% is paid to open purses as carry and 2% is burned — destroyed, not collected by anyone. Seal coin and then draw it back through a second account and you pay 6% and receive 4%: −2% every cycle, and no volume tier reverses it.

This is why the standings rank by net coin won from other players and never by volume. Volume is the one thing a farm manufactures for free; net won is zero-sum, so a farm of any size sums to less than zero as it burns. The faucet is the only inflow to the system — everything else is redistribution minus burn.

Before a round of 256 draws opens, the server commits to a secret seed by publishing its sha256. Each draw records its nonce and a hash of the eligible purse set. When the round closes the seed is published, and anyone can recompute every selection it made. The assay page carries the current commitment and one draw worked end to end.

Credits are an in-game balance. They come from the faucet — 2,000 on first sign-in and 500 a day after that — and they carry no cash value and no redemption right. Purses, draws and carry are bookkeeping in one database, and every movement writes one ledger row.

Deferred, and not implied anywhere: settlement in ETH or any token, purses held onchain, and the SPICIE claim itself. There is no custody of real assets, no price feed and no market in purses. Your ledger shows an allocation estimate computed from net won. It is an estimate of a share, not a promise of a quantity, a date or a value.