The Arena
Put a turtle in the pit and it fights another holder's turtle for their shares.
Win and you take them. Lose and yours drops back to base.
That is the whole of it, and it is as brutal as it sounds, so read the rest of this page before you enrol anything you care about.
You do not pick your opponent
The pit draws one for you when the fight settles, out of the turtles enrolled at that moment, and it only ever draws somebody in your weight class.
A candidate has to be carrying between 50% and 200% of your share to be drawn at all. No whale is farming your 3.00 share turtle and no minnow is taking a free swing at your 12.00.
The draw also refuses any turtle owned by the same wallet as the challenger, so nobody fights themselves to move shares around.
Nobody decides the outcome
The result comes from drand, a public randomness beacon run by an independent league of organisations. It publishes a new number on a fixed schedule and nobody can predict it.
When you open a fight, the contract pins it to a drand round that has not happened yet. When that round publishes, anybody can hand the signature to the contract, which verifies the cryptographic proof on chain before it will accept it.
We cannot steer a fight. The other holder cannot steer a fight. Neither of us can know the number when the challenge is signed. Read randomSource() on the arena and verify the beacon yourself.
What you actually put at risk
Two things.
Your shares. Lose and you fall back to 1.00, which means every week of growth goes to whoever beat you.
Your fees. A turtle in the pit has its pending earnings locked, and those earnings are part of the stake. They keep piling up while it fights, you cannot withdraw them until it leaves, and every defeat hands the whole balance to the winner.
Enrolling also freezes the turtle. It cannot be sold or sent anywhere while it is in the pit. That is deliberate. Nobody gets to dodge a fight they are losing by dumping the turtle halfway through.
Reach your ceiling and you become shielded
This is the payoff for the climb, and it is the most important rule in the arena.
A turtle standing on the ceiling of its own path never loses shares again and can never be burned. It keeps everything it built, permanently, however many fights it goes on to lose.
Its fees are still on the table, so a shielded turtle can still lose money. What it cannot lose is itself.
Two exceptions:
A Legendary is always shielded, from the moment it arrives, whatever its share. The seven can never be stripped and can never be burned.
A Forged turtle is never shielded, at any share, even sitting on 9.00. It took the fast road and it lives with the risk.
Three lives
Every turtle gets three.
Lose three fights in a row and an unshielded turtle is burned. Gone from the collection, permanently, and its id never exists again.
A shielded turtle is not burned. It is blocked from attacking. It keeps its shares, it keeps earning, it can still be challenged by others, but it cannot go picking fights until it gets its lives back.
Win a single fight and the streak resets to zero. That is the cheap way back.
Rescue
The other way back is to burn one of your own.
Feed another turtle you own to a blocked one and it gets its three lives back immediately. A real cost for a real second chance, paid in something that mattered to you.
It works the same for shielded and unshielded turtles. Nobody is ever permanently locked out, and nobody gets out free.
A turtle carrying losses cannot go through the forge. The contract sends you to rescue instead, so a sacrifice is never spent on a turtle that is still blocked.
Becoming a Champion
When 90% of the shares your turtle is carrying were won in the arena rather than grown or merged, it stops being whatever it was and becomes a Champion, and its ceiling rises to 13.00.
It is measured against the share the turtle holds after the win, so it moves with you. A turtle that fought its way up, lost some, and fought back up is judged on where it stands now.
Because 13.00 is a ceiling like any other, a Champion that reaches it is shielded like any other. Untouchable, and it fought for it.
Leaving
A turtle walks out of the pit when it reaches the ceiling of its path, or if it is a Legendary or a Champion.
Anything else is in until it gets there. That is the deal you take when you enrol.
The slower rules
Two hours between challenges. Read it off challengeCooldown().
A fight that is never settled can be voided by anyone after three days, and the shield rules apply to a void exactly as they apply to a defeat. Nobody strips a shielded turtle by walking away from a fight.
While any fight is open, enrolled turtles cannot leave, forge or rescue. It closes the door on a challenger reading the beacon and moving their turtle out of reach before the result lands.