Moon Races Whitepaper

01Vision

Crypto gaming is full of promises and short on games you can actually play. Moon Races starts from the opposite end: a fast, fun, pick-up-and-play 3D racer that runs in any modern browser with zero downloads and zero wallet required. The blockchain layer is opt-in — it exists to do the one thing blockchains are genuinely great at: holding the pot fairly and paying the winner instantly.

Play free forever. Or connect a wallet, put a stake on the line, and race real people for a real pot. That's the whole pitch.

02The Game

Moon Races is a physics-driven 3D drift racer set on the lunar surface — low gravity, long slides, and momentum that rewards clean lines. Races are short (3 laps, capped at 15 minutes of racing), which keeps staked matches snappy and spectator-friendly.

• Instant play: Unity WebGL client, streamed compressed to your browser — desktop or mobile touch controls.
• Two modes: Free Play (solo vs bots, nothing required) and Staked Racing (1v1 up to 4 players of real online multiplayer, real $MOONXR). In staked racing the host may add up to two AI pacer cars — pure dummy traffic that never holds a seat, never stakes, and can never finish, win, or touch the pot; every stake and every payout is strictly human.
• Five worlds: Rural, Arctic, Desert and Urban under Earth gravity, plus the low-gravity Moon classic. In staked racing the host picks the circuit for everyone.
• A garage of lunar machines: five cars — METEOR SS, LUNAR GT, MOON ROVER, COMET GT, ECLIPSE RS — each with its own rim style, and more on the roadmap.
• Racer identity: usernames, avatars, and a global on-chain leaderboard ranked by wins and $MOONXR won.

03How a Staked Race Works

04Escrow: Your Funds Can Never Get Stuck

Every race gets its own escrow vault — a program-derived account controlled only by the Moon Races on-chain program. No person holds its keys, because it has none. The program exposes exactly three ways for funds to leave a vault:

• Settle — winner is paid 97%, and 3% of the pot is burned forever. Nothing else is possible: the program caps the burn on-chain. Protocol revenue is a separate, small SOL entry fee taken at stake time.
• Cancel — a race that never fills refunds its creator in full.
• Refund all — if a filled race somehow never settles, anyone can trigger a full refund of every stake after the settle deadline passes. This is permissionless by design: even if every Moon Races server disappeared, your stake walks itself home.

Deadlines are enforced on-chain: races that don't fill expire after the join window (15 minutes), and filled races that don't settle become refundable after 1 hour. There is no code path in which a stake is trapped.

05Fair Play: the Referee Model

Staked races run on dedicated, server-authoritative game servers. Your browser renders the race, but the server simulates it — positions, laps, and the finish order are computed server-side, so a modified client can't teleport, skip laps, or lie about winning.

• Signed seats: you enter a race with a cryptographically signed ticket bound to your wallet and seat. Tickets are single-use and expire in minutes.
• Signed results: the race server signs the final result with its own key. The settlement service verifies the signature and the roster before any payout moves.
• Least-privilege referee: even a fully compromised referee could only choose which racer in the match gets the winner's share — it can never redirect funds elsewhere, inflate the fee, or drain a vault. The program enforces that on-chain.

06Architecture

Four pieces, each doing one job:

• Game client — Unity WebGL, served from moonraces.com, playable on desktop and mobile browsers.
• Match servers — headless Unity instances spawned per race by an orchestrator; they simulate the race and referee the result.
• Matchmaker — verifies wallet ownership (signed challenge), assigns seats from the on-chain roster, and mints the signed launch tickets.
• On-chain program — Solana escrow holding every stake in per-race vaults, with settle / cancel / refund-all as the only exits.

07$MOONXR

$MOONXR is the fuel of the Moon Races ecosystem — a utility token, planned around playing, not parking:

• Race entries: $MOONXR-staked races and token-gated leagues.
• Cosmetics & boosters: skins, rim styles, trails, and (later) boosters purchasable with $MOONXR.
• Tournaments & seasons: entry and prize pools for scheduled competitive events.
• Racer rewards: seasonal rewards for leaderboard performance and participation.

$MOONXR is a utility token for use inside Moon Races. It is not an investment, carries no promise of profit, and nobody — including us — can guarantee it will hold any particular value. Read the Disclaimer before participating.

08Fees & Sustainability

Moon Races takes a small stake-tiered SOL entry fee per player, and burns 3% of each pot on settle. Free play is free forever. No deposit fees, no withdrawal fees, no subscription — if nobody races, we earn nothing, which keeps our incentives exactly where they should be: making a game people want to race in.

09What's Next

More cars, more tracks, skins, boosters, tournaments, and a battle mode — the full plan lives on the Roadmap. Moon Races is part of the CrypTok family of products, built by a team that ships.