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, pick-up-and-play 3D racer that runs in any modern browser with nothing to install and no wallet required. The blockchain layer is opt-in — it exists to do the one thing blockchains are genuinely good at: holding the pot in the open and paying the winner automatically.

Play free. 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 that comes as two games. MoonRaces V1 races four worlds under Earth gravity plus the lower-gravity Moon; MoonRaces V2 races ten circuits through a neon city plus its own lunar circuit. Races are short — three laps, capped at 15 minutes of racing — which keeps staked matches snappy.

• No install: a Unity WebGL game that runs in your browser on desktop or mobile (touch controls). The browser downloads the game once — about 80 to 110 MB — and nothing is installed.
• Three modes: Free Play — solo against bots, nothing required, no tokens in and no tokens out. Quick Match (V2) — free online races against real players on a dedicated server, with bots filling any empty seats; no stake and no tokens. Staked Racing (V1 and V2) — 2 to 4 players racing for real $MOONXR, either in a public race anyone can join from the lobby or in a private race joined by invite link. 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.
• Circuits: V1 races five worlds — Rural, Arctic, Desert and Urban under Earth gravity, plus the lower-gravity Moon. V2 races eleven circuits: ten through one neon city — The Strip, Downtown, Tower Loop, The Grid, Grand Circuit, Neon Mile, The Sweep, The Gauntlet, Skyline Run and Midnight Mile — and the Moon, V2's finale and its only circuit outside the city: a 1,375 m lap across open lunar terrain at low gravity. Online, V2's Grand Circuit also runs at Moon gravity. In staked racing the host picks the game and the circuit for everyone.
• A ten-car garage (V2): NOVA, BRUTE, BLAZE, SIREN, SHADOW, REAPER, PHANTOM, TITAN, APEX and VENOM. NOVA is free and yours from the first race; the other nine cost $10 to $100, paid in real $MOONXR, and are on sale from your first race — price is the only gate.
• Racer identity: usernames, avatars, and leaderboards — separate V1 staked and V2 staked boards built from settled races and ranked by wins, then $MOONXR won, plus a V1 free-play board.

Prices are set in US dollars and paid in $MOONXR. The token amount is worked out at the moment you buy, from a rate we publish every few minutes as the median of three independent price sources — never a live spot price, because $MOONXR trades in one pool and a live figure could be pushed by whoever wanted a cheap garage. The rate is clamped so no single update can move it more than 25%, and the amount you are quoted is frozen for that purchase: if the market moves while you are approving it in your wallet, you still pay what you were shown. If we are not confident in the rate, the shop stops selling until we are — racing and staking are unaffected.

Cars are not win-gated. Every car in the garage is for sale from your first race; the only thing standing between you and VENOM is its price. Wins gate tracks, and nothing else — they are free progression you earn by racing, and we keep them well away from anything you pay for. Telling someone who has the tokens in hand to go and grind before they may spend them is not a difficulty curve, it is a refused sale.

03Free Play, Career & the Garage

Free play and staked racing pay out differently. Single player pays zero $MOONXR — not a reduced payout, zero — and so does V2's free Quick Match. Staked racing is the only way to win tokens, and every token won there came out of another racer's stake, not ours.

• Wins are the free currency. Only an outright 1st place counts — second place earns nothing. Wins in free play and wins in online races both count; they are cumulative across your career and can never be spent, sold, or transferred. They are progress attached to your save, not your leaderboard standing.
• Eleven tracks, opened by wins. V2's eleven circuits unlock in order on cumulative career wins of 0, 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, 28, 36, 45 and 55. The Strip is open to a brand-new player; the Moon is the finale, and clearing every gate takes 55 wins. It races on open lunar terrain at low gravity, in free play and staked alike.
• Cars are not on that ladder. Wins gate tracks and nothing else. Every car is for sale from your first race and the only thing standing between you and VENOM is its price (see the ladder in 02).
• Performance upgrades — engine, speed and brake, four tiers each. Prices are computed from the car, not from a flat table: taking one car from stock to fully maxed costs that car's own value (engine 40%, speed 40%, brake 20%), so maxing a car never costs more than buying the car above it. Each tier shows its own price before purchase. NOVA is free to buy but is priced for upgrades off a $10 floor, so a fully upgraded NOVA costs $10 — the price of BRUTE, the cheapest bought car.
• Cosmetics — spoilers ($1 / $1.50 / $2), wheel sets (50c up to $1.30), neon (80c up to $1.80) and paint ($1 for each colour and finish), paid in $MOONXR. The stock part of each kind, and each car's stock paint, is free. Cosmetics are flat-priced on purpose: a spoiler does not go faster on an expensive car.
• Damage and repairs — single player only. In single player, damage costs you top speed — up to 10% on a totalled car — and it does not heal on its own: it carries over until you hit REPAIR in the garage, which costs nothing and takes one click. It also lands on your next race rather than the one you crashed in. Online races do not use damage. A recurring token sink with no way to earn tokens back in single player is a treadmill you could only feed by buying more $MOONXR — that is pay-to-play with extra steps, and we are not shipping it.
• Where the garage meets staked racing. In a V2 staked race you race the car you own, with the upgrades you bought. Garage spending never pays out tokens, but a faster car is an advantage in a race for real $MOONXR, so the two do touch — know that before you stake. V1 staked races work differently: all five V1 cars are open to every racer, and nothing in V1 is for sale.

Everything you buy in the garage is bought with real $MOONXR leaving your wallet, and 100% of it goes to the project treasury. That is real revenue and it is disclosed in 09 · Fees & Sustainability. Purchases settle on-chain and are final — see the Disclaimer.

04How a Staked Race Works

How the winner is decided:

• The first racer across the line after the final lap wins.
• If nobody finishes within the 15-minute cap, the racer with the most track progress wins.
• If nobody gets past the start line, or every racer forfeits, there is no winner and every stake is refunded.
• Disconnecting mid-race is a forfeit once a short grace period runs out. The last racer still in the race wins.
• If a staked player never connects, the race server shuts down and every stake is refunded once the 1-hour settle deadline passes.

05Escrow: Where Your Stake Lives

Every race gets its own escrow vault — a program-derived token account controlled only by the Moon Races escrow program, XKbs8PyM8xe1RXeDDr1LNSGEuvJbaoutm3AYac3tpTg. No person holds the vault's keys, because it has none. The program has exactly three ways for a stake to leave a vault:

• Settle — the winner is paid 97% and 3% of the pot is burned. The burn rate comes from the program's settings (300 basis points, or 3%, today) and is fixed for each race when the race is created. The program refuses any burn above 10% and never pays the burn to anyone. Protocol revenue is the separate SOL entry fee (09).
• Cancel — while a race is still open, its creator can cancel it, and every stake already in the vault is returned in full. SOL entry fees are not returned.
• Refund all — once a race that never filled passes its 60-minute join window, or a filled race passes its 1-hour settle window without settling, anyone can trigger a full refund of every stake. Our refund service does this automatically, but the instruction is permissionless by design: even if every Moon Races server disappeared, anyone could still send every stake home.

Deadlines are enforced on-chain: races that don't fill expire after the join window (60 minutes), and filled races that don't settle become refundable after 1 hour. When a vault closes, any leftover token dust in it is burned rather than paid to anyone.

Escrow covers stakes. A garage purchase is not escrowed and has no refund path — it is a direct transfer to the project treasury in exchange for an item granted to the wallet that paid.

06Fair 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. Each ticket carries a single-use nonce and expires after 15 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 — the program will not let it redirect funds elsewhere, change the fee, or drain a vault.
• Server-granted items: the garage works the same way round. The client only ever requests a purchase; the chain moves the tokens and the server grants the item into an inventory the game cannot write. What a modified client can do is overstate its own single-player win count, because a solo race runs entirely in your browser with no referee to sign the result. That can open circuits early. It never grants an item or a token, and everything in the garage is still paid for in full on-chain.

07Architecture

Five pieces, each doing one job:

• Game clients — V1 and V2, both Unity WebGL, served from moonraces.com and playable in 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 issues the signed launch tickets.
• Settlement service — verifies each signed result and submits the settle transaction, and sweeps expired races into refunds.
• On-chain program — the Solana escrow holding every stake in per-race vaults, with settle / cancel / refund-all as the only exits.

08$MOONXR

What destroys supply: the 3% burn on settled staked pots, leftover dust the escrow burns when it closes a vault, and any holder burning their own tokens. Of the roughly 3.13 million burned so far, about 3,600 came from race burns; the rest came from those other burns. Tokens you spend in the garage are not burned: they move to the project treasury and still exist.

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

• Staked races: $MOONXR in, $MOONXR out — stakes from 50,000 to 1,000,000, winner takes 97%, in V1 and V2.
• Cars: nine of the ten cars in the V2 garage are bought with $MOONXR, priced from $10 to $100. Shipped today, not planned.
• Performance upgrades: engine, speed and brake tiers on every V2 car; maxing one costs the car's own value. Shipped today.
• Cosmetics: spoilers, wheel sets, neon and paint, 50c to $2 depending on the part. Shipped today.
• Tournaments & seasons: an idea on the roadmap — not built and not scheduled.
• Racer rewards: an idea on the roadmap — not built and not scheduled. Any prize pool could only ever be funded from entries or from the treasury, because no new $MOONXR can be created.

$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.

09Fees & Sustainability

Here is everything that leaves a player's wallet in Moon Races, and where it goes. Two items are revenue for the project; the burn is destroyed and reaches nobody; the last is the cost of using Solana.

• The SOL entry fee — revenue. The escrow program charges it to every player, on create and on join, and pays it in SOL to the escrow fee wallet HdBCiM1MGrExrjucocnorSSn7qqa2fiWf5rN7LKYAAbK. It is taken outside the pot, so it never touches the $MOONXR being raced for, and it is non-refundable: it is not returned when a race is cancelled, refunded or times out. The tiers below are set in the program's settings, and only that wallet can change or remove them.
• The 3% burn on every staked pot — not revenue. Those $MOONXR are destroyed on-chain at settle and nobody receives them: not the winner, not us. The program caps the burn at 10%, so it cannot be quietly raised into a fee.
• $MOONXR spent in the garage — revenue. Cars, performance upgrades and cosmetics are paid for with real tokens, and 100% of every purchase goes to the project treasury at FSyqV5AZyHxY6DV1jSbZVwFxxgfms6pXE6sYtbRG5P6x, which you can watch on any explorer. It is not burned, it is not split with other players, and it does not come back. If you buy VENOM, the treasury receives every token you paid for it.
• Solana network costs — not our fee, but real. The race host pays about 0.0019 SOL of rent for the race's match account, which is not returned, and about 0.0015 SOL of rent for the vault, which comes back to the host only if the host cancels; otherwise it goes to our settlement service when it settles or refunds the race. Everyone also pays ordinary Solana network fees (about 0.00008 SOL).

SOL entry fee, per player, by stake:

Free play costs no tokens at all: no entry cost, no repair bills, no energy timers. There are no deposit fees, no withdrawal fees, and no subscription. We earn the SOL entry fee on every staked race entered, win or lose, plus whatever players choose to spend in the garage. We never take a losing stake: it goes to the racer who beat you, less the 3% burn.

10The Two Games: V1 and V2

Moon Races ships as two playable games that share one wallet and one token. They are not the same game at different quality settings: they progress on different rules, and the difference matters most in the garage.

MoonRaces V1 — the arcade original

• Five worlds — Rural, Arctic, Desert and Urban under Earth gravity, and the lower-gravity Moon.
• Three ways to play — the career, a one-player Quick Race, and a two-player Quick Race.
• Levels open in order, and each is scored out of three stars.
• Five cars, earned in free play. Two are yours from the first race; the other three are unlocked by finishing levels 1, 2 and 3. Nothing in V1 is for sale — there is no garage and no price tag. In free play a locked car stays locked, in the career and both Quick Races alike.
• Staked races are supported, and in them all five V1 cars are open to every racer — what you have unlocked in free play does not matter there.

MoonRaces V2 — the garage game

• Eleven circuits, opened by wins. They unlock on cumulative career wins of 0, 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, 28, 36, 45 and 55, and wins in free play and online races both count. The first is open to a brand-new player; the Moon is the finale.
• A ten-car garage, bought not won. One free starter car, and nine that cost $MOONXR. Wins open tracks; money opens cars, and the two are kept deliberately apart — no amount of racing will hand you a car, and no purchase will skip a circuit.
• Upgrades — engine, speed and brakes, four tiers each. They are priced as a share of the car rather than from a flat table: maxing a car costs the car's own value (engine 40%, speed 40%, brakes 20%), and never more than buying the car above it.
• Paint and parts — spoilers, wheel sets, neon and paint, from 50c to $2.
• Real multiplayer. Free Quick Match races (bots fill empty seats, no tokens) and staked races both run on a dedicated server that is the sole referee: seats are admitted by signed ticket, the server simulates the race, and it decides the result. The outcome is signed before settlement, so a browser can submit inputs but cannot declare itself the winner.
• Staked races use your garage. You race the car you own, with the upgrades you bought.
• Free play pays no $MOONXR — it pays career wins, which are what open the circuits. Damage and free repairs apply in single player only.

What both games share

• One wallet. Connect it and your progress is saved against it — stars, levels and cars in V1, career progress and the garage with its upgrades in V2.
• Without a wallet you can still play, and everything you earn stays in that browser. It will not follow you to another device and it will not appear on the leaderboard.
• Staked racing on the same escrow, with the same token, the same 97% / 3% split and the same SOL entry fee.
• Leaderboards: separate V1 staked and V2 staked boards built from settled races, plus a V1 free-play board ranked on stars, levels and cars unlocked.

11What's Next

Ideas we would like to build — boosters, tournaments, seasons, spectator mode and a battle mode — are listed on the Roadmap. None of them is scheduled, so don't buy, hold or stake $MOONXR on the expectation that any of them will ship. Moon Races is part of the CrypTok family of products.

12Contact

Questions, corrections, or a race that went wrong: email [email protected], or find us on X at @moonracesgame and on Telegram at t.me/moonraces. To dispute a staked race result, email us within 7 days of the race (see the Terms).