How Tugwar works
Two ends of a rope take the same stake on one memecoin. For five minutes nobody buys or sells anything: the token's own pool moves the knot. How much of the losing end crosses the rope is decided by one number, how far the price moved against how far it usually does.
Ropes run right now on live prices from our indexer, staked in paper ETH: a play balance shown as crypto money. Nothing moves on chain and nothing you stake is real. You sign one message with your wallet, no gas, and start with 1.000000 ETH on paper. Stakes use the rung table below exactly. Results, your history and the leaderboard are shown in ETH with a USD equivalent from the live ETH price, and every surface is labelled paper. The 2% fee is burned from the paper supply. A wallet under 0.002 ETH can refill to 1 ETH once a day. While the player base is small, an end left empty at the close of the window is filled by the rope, the house, whose seats show as the address "rope", and the round is marked "practice against the rope". The house never appears on the leaderboard.
01What a round is
Every token on the board can host a rope. A rope has two ends, UP and DOWN, with the same number of seats on each end. Every seat costs the same stake in ETH, paper ETH today. You pick an end and take a seat; that is the whole decision.
A round lasts five minutes. The start price p0 and the end price p1 are eight-block TWAPs read from the token's own pool. Nothing is bought or sold at any point. Sigma, the token's typical five-minute move, is frozen when the round starts and does not change under your feet.
02Collecting, and why it starts symmetric
A rope collects for fifteen minutes. It starts as soon as both ends have seated their minimum and the window closes. Surplus seats on the heavier end are refunded last in, first out, so the round always starts with the same number of seats on each end and the same stake behind each seat.
If either end never reaches the minimum, the rope is cancelled and every stake returns whole. Nobody is charged for a rope that never pulled.
03The pull, which is the whole game
At the end of the round the rope measures how far the price moved, in units of how far this token usually moves in five minutes. That ratio is the pull. The pull decides what fraction of the losing end's stakes crosses the rope to the winners:
A one-sigma move sends 63% across, a three-sigma move 95%, a flat round almost nothing. Winners split what crosses equally. Losers keep the rest. A tie, p1 equal to p0 after rounding to the pool's tick, crosses nothing at all.
04Fee and burn
The protocol takes 2% of what crosses, and only when something crosses. Half of the fee buys and burns TUG. A flat round pays no fee, a cancelled rope pays no fee, a voided round pays no fee. There is no fee on your stake, only on the part of the losing end that moved.
05Tension classes
Everything on the board wears a tension class from 1 to 5. It is one number: sigma, how far the token typically moves in a five-minute bar, measured from our own trade stream over the last three hours. It is the same number the pull is divided by.
| Class | Moves per 5 minutes | What it means | Can host a rope |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1Slack | under 0.35% | barely moves, the rope would hang level | No |
| 2Taut | 0.35 to 0.70% | moves a little | Yes |
| 3Live | 0.70 to 1.40% | moves enough to matter | Yes |
| 4Strained | 1.40 to 3.00% | moves fast | Yes |
| 5Snapping | over 3.00% | moves violently | Yes |
Class 2 and up can host a rope, because no profit has to cover a penalty and nothing has to be traded. A higher class is not better odds. The pull is measured in sigmas, so a class 5 token and a class 2 token send the same share across for the same size of move relative to their own habit. What a higher class changes is how often the price snaps far past its habit in five minutes.
06Stake rungs
Which rung a token gets is not a choice. A token gets the richest rung whose full rope, both ends fully seated, is at most 1/50 of pool depth. Nothing trades, so the depth rule only guards the price read, not execution: a pool fifty times the rope is one that a single stake cannot cheaply push around.
| Stake a seat | Seats an end | Starts at | Full rope | Depth needed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.002 ETH | 3 | 3 | 0.012 ETH | 0.6 ETH |
| 0.005 ETH | 3 | 3 | 0.03 ETH | 1.5 ETH |
| 0.01 ETH | 5 | 4 | 0.1 ETH | 5 ETH |
| 0.025 ETH | 5 | 4 | 0.25 ETH | 12.5 ETH |
| 0.05 ETH | 7 | 5 | 0.7 ETH | 35 ETH |
| 0.1 ETH | 7 | 5 | 1.4 ETH | 70 ETH |
"Starts at" is the minimum seated on each end for the rope to start when the window closes. Depth is read from the pool in dollars and compared against the full rope at the ETH price of the moment.
07Guards, and what you are paid
The rope reads a price, so the guards are about the read:
- TWAP at both ends.
- p0 and p1 are eight-block time-weighted averages, not a single block's print, so one trade at the bell moves the read by a fraction of itself.
- History and a live pool.
- A token needs at least one hour of price history and a live pool before it can host a rope.
- Depth.
- A rope cannot open when the pool holds under 50 times the full rope.
- A silent pool voids.
- If the pool has no trade in the final two minutes there is no honest price to read, so settlement voids: every stake returns whole and no fee is charged.
Nothing is pushed to you. When a round settles, your payout sits in the rope until you claim it; the rope's screen tells you what is claimable and offers the button. Cancelled ropes and voided rounds return every stake whole, and are claimed the same way.
08What can go wrong, and the token
- Your end lost.
- The price moved the other way. A one-sigma move takes 63% of your stake across, a three-sigma move 95%. You can lose most of a stake in one round and there is no mechanism that prevents it.
- Nothing happened.
- A flat round crosses nothing and pays no fee. You get your stake back and five minutes older.
- The rope never filled.
- An end fell short of its minimum when the window closed. The rope is cancelled and every stake returns whole.
- The pool went quiet.
- No trade in the final two minutes, so the round voids. Every stake returns, no fee.
- The pool thinned.
- A rope cannot open on a pool that no longer holds 50 times the full rope. Wait for depth, or find a token that has it.
TUG on the Pons launchpad is planned, as are seasons with prizes. Its intended utility is the fee share and the burn above: half of every fee buys and burns TUG. This site never states a contract address until one exists. If you see one attributed to Tugwar before then, it is not ours.