How it works

Three ways to be wrong

Visible heat is stale, parked money is not liquid, and a healthy headline can hide a dying company. The controls tell you their immediate cost; deciding which delayed cost you can survive is the game.

The Gap is the whole game

Every metric is a pair. The amber half of each bar is what the world sees; the teal half is what is still there when it stops believing you. Fundraising reads the headline; payroll reads what is real. You will open each gap deliberately, for a good reason — the points program, a parked treasury, a raise, the emissions dial — and pay for it several months later.

Timing: you always arrive late

A trend card is live each month. You see its name now, but only last month's heat, and a feature takes three months to build. Chasing the meta means arriving after it. The counters are to buy research — which lands next month and reads the meta four months out, the only horizon you can actually act on — or to build the unpopular thing and wait.

Chain state: everyone is exposed, nobody is in charge

Congestion and outages are drawn every month, and a hot meta congests the chain by itself. The same event helps one vertical and guts another: congestion is a bonus for a bot desk, a volume cut for a DEX, and churn for a consumer app.

Counterparty: solvency is hidden, forever

Four venues can hold your treasury. Yields are printed. Solvency never appears anywhere, and rumours are noisy in both directions — healthy venues get smeared, sick ones stay quiet — so you can never resolve one into a fact. You do not opt in: a round's proceeds wire to a venue, the way an investor's ops desk actually sends money.

A venue never halts out of nowhere

Withdrawals get slow first — the warning a real bank run gives you. Enough to act on, not enough to be sure. From then on that balance cannot quietly cover payroll, and pulling it out takes a month, and is lost if the halt lands first. Acting on the warning cuts your odds of being caught by roughly two-thirds. It does not remove them.

The gap is also a representation

Nobody sees what you would be charged with, and neither do you — but unlike a venue's solvency it is not luck. It is a running total of things you did, and every one of them is a number on your own screen while you do it: the farmed share of your user count, the points program that makes it, the emissions renting a TVL line, and above all a round closed against any of them. A reporter emails whether or not there is anything there, so a query never resolves into a fact — and it is the asking, not the truth, that brings the letter. Answer it and you restate the number, which costs the story and the month. Refuse and it goes formal: a monthly bill, a cred drip, and any round you sign until it closes is priced by it. An investigation takes two to four months to resolve, so a letter that lands late enough may never resolve at all — which is the only reason to refuse one.

Spending order is a trap

Payroll takes self-custody first, then sells your SOL, and only then touches a venue. Parked money is spent last — which means parked money is exactly what is still sitting there when a venue halts.

The controls

Your team gives you allocation points each month; a hire made now works next month. Orders accumulate into the preview at the bottom of the panel and nothing happens until you commit — an empty month is a valid pass, and Enter commits. Runs are deterministic: the same seed is the same twelve months, so the link you copy is the exact run you played.