Crownhood — Whitepaper

A play-to-own greenwood kingdom on Robinhood Chain.

Version 0.3. A living design document describing the world, characters, token economy, and systems of Crownhood. It is not an offer of securities or investment and not financial advice; token mechanics are for a game economy on a public blockchain and may change before mainnet. Figures are the values in the deployed contracts (testnet 46630) unless noted.

1. Overview

Crownhood is a fantasy world that is a decentralized economy. Every building in its greenwood valley is a working on-chain primitive dressed as a place you visit: the Marketplace is a DEX, the Gardens are a yield farm, the Bank and the Jeweler are staking vaults, the Forge is a crafting bench, and the heroes you recruit are NFTs whose labor drives the whole machine.

The lineage is DeFi Kingdoms — the proven "DeFi-as-a-game" structure — but the world, tone, characters, and several systems (rolling vesting, a fund-adaptive reward curve, a hardened commit-reveal RNG, an explicit sink stack) are our own, themed around Robin Hood folklore and built for a chain where gas is ETH rather than the game token.

Design pillars

• Ownership is the point. Heroes, gear, and balances live in your wallet. The protocol is non-custodial; the team ships the world and hands governance to the players who live in it.
• The economy must survive its own downcycle. Locked rewards vest on a rolling schedule (not one cliff), yields aren't denominated only in the emitted token, and a stack of sinks removes supply continuously.
• The game is the interface. You don't read a dashboard — you click buildings on a pixel-art map, an NPC greets you, and the DeFi action is dressed in-fiction.

2. The World

Crownhood is a hidden valley reawakening after a long winter — "the Frost of Kings." The player is its steward, rebuilding the realm: replanting the Gardens, relighting the Crown Mines, and welcoming heroes from the roads. At its heart stands the Great Oak, a hollow legend-tree through which new heroes are summoned.

Each location is an on-chain system:

3. Heroes

Heroes are the workforce and the collectible core of Crownhood. Each is an ERC-721 NFT whose entire appearance and character derive from two on-chain gene words.

3.1 Genes

Every hero carries stat genes and visual genes. Each gene is a set of trait slots, and each slot holds a dominant trait (the one expressed) plus hidden recessive traits (R1/R2/R3). Visual genes decode deterministically into the hero's 16×16 pixel sprite — hair, skin, eyes, headwear, appendages, and a rarity border are all read straight from the gene word. Stat genes drive class, element, profession affinity, and stat-growth tendencies.

Because recessives are inherited and can resurface generations later, breeding is a genuine trait hunt: a rare class or look can reappear from an ancestor that never expressed it.

3.2 Classes

Basic classes: Swordsman, Knight, Outlaw, Archer, Friar, Minstrel, Monk, Highwayman. Rarer gene combinations yield advanced classes — Champion, Blackguard, Ranger, Poacher, Huntsman, Loremaster — and the elite Black Knight. Class shapes a hero's stat growth and its value for both work and summoning.

3.3 Stats

Six core stats: STR (strength), AGI (agility), END (endurance), WIS (wisdom), VIT (vitality), LCK (luck). Stats determine profession output (e.g. Fishing scales with AGI + LCK, Mining with STR + END) and grow when a hero levels up. Equipment from the Forge adds stat bonuses on top of a hero's base — the effective stat a hero acts with is base + equipped bonuses, counted only while the gear and the hero share an owner.

3.4 Rarity & generations

Each hero has a rarity tier shown by its card border, from Common to the rarest. A hero's generation is its distance from a founding Gen0 ancestor; a child's generation is one higher than its highest-generation parent. Generation drives the CROWN cost to summon with a hero (higher generation = more expensive), while the number of times a hero can summon is set by its class rank (§4.3). Gen0s — unlimited summons and the cheapest to breed with — are the most prized founding stock.

3.5 Stamina, XP & profession skill

• Stamina caps at 25 and regenerates 1 point every 20 minutes. Working a profession spends it; a Stamina Potion or Draught refills it instantly.
• XP accrues from work. At level × 1000 XP a hero can level up at the Meditation Circle (which burns ACORN and raises stats).
• Profession skill is a separate, per-profession proficiency that rises each time a hero performs that job. Higher skill raises output and unlocks tiered content — e.g. a tier-1 foraging skill opens the Deep Wood for RUNE. A hero whose profession gene matches the task gets +20% output and builds skill fastest.

4. Summoning

New heroes are bred at the Great Oak from two parents.

4.1 The two-step ritual

Summoning is a commit-reveal process for fair, ungameable genes:

1. Commit (startSummon): pick two parents, pay the fee, and the contract commits your request against a future L2 block plus accumulated caller entropy. You cannot know the outcome yet.
2. Reveal (completeSummon): a few blocks later, the committed block's hash is combined with your entropy into the seed, and the child's genes are mixed and minted.

This defeats "simulate-then-submit" gaming. On Robinhood Chain, where Chainlink VRF isn't yet available and prevrandao is constant, the RNG is a hardened ArbSys-aware blockhash scheme with a bounded recovery path (see §12); VRF is the planned upgrade at mainnet.

4.2 Cost & fees

• CROWN fee per parent scales with use and generation: cost = 6 + 2·summonsUsed + 10·generation CROWN, capped at 30 for a Gen0.
• ACORN: a flat 10 ACORN burned per summon (the "Gaia's Tears" analog).

The CROWN fee is split 20% Treasury / 15% Bank / 8% burn / 57% Quest Reward Fund — a real burn sink plus funding for the buyback vault and the quest economy.

4.3 Limits, cooldown & hiring

Each hero has a limited number of summons: Gen0 heroes summon without limit, while every other hero's cap is set by its class rank — Basic 10 / Advanced 5 / Elite 3 / Exalted 1. A cooldown applies between summons. You don't need to own both parents: you can hire a hero listed at the Tavern as the second parent — its owner is paid, the hero stays put, and the child is yours.

4.4 Gene inheritance & mutation

The child mixes gene slots from both parents — usually a parent's dominant trait, sometimes a hidden recessive. Certain class pairings can mutate into advanced classes at defined probabilities (e.g. Warrior + Knight → Paladin), so deliberate breeding lines can chase elite classes over generations.

5. Professions & Quests

Heroes earn resources by working. Each job spends stamina and grants XP + skill; a matching profession gene adds +20%.

• Fishing (Docks) → ACORN, scales with AGI + LCK.
• Foraging (Sherwood) → ACORN, scales with AGI + WIS.
• Deep-Wood foraging (Sherwood) → RUNE, the rare Forge reagent. Requires a tier-1 foraging skill and 5+ stamina — build the skill by foraging the shallows first.
• Mining (Crown Mines) → unlocks vested CROWN early (STR + END). This doesn't mint new CROWN; it accelerates the release of CROWN already locked in your Vault.
• Training (Training Grounds) → GOLD, scales with STR + LCK.
• Gardening (the Gardens) → bonus CROWN for tending a pool you've staked in. It uses a fund-adaptive curve: the rate scales down as the Quest Reward Fund thins (with a floor), so the fund can't be drained and always pays something. Per-hero cooldown; the stake must be at least a day old.
• Meditation (Standing Stones) → level up a hero that has reached level×1000 XP, burning ACORN and raising stats.
• Guild Hall → a weekly CROWN bounty per hero, paid from the Quest Reward Fund (rolling seven-day cooldown, requires stamina).

Quest drops are deterministic (no in-tx jackpot RNG) so that on-chain randomness can't be gamed by simulate-then-submit; only summoning uses RNG.

6. Tokens & Resources

CROWN is the power token — earned by farming and mining, spent on summoning, staked at the Bank and Jeweler. ACORN, GOLD, RUNE are game resources designed to be earned and spent in-game, not cashed out — the protocol backs only the ETH/CROWN market, so grinding a resource can never mint new CROWN. xCROWN and cCROWN are positions you hold, not currencies you farm.

6.1 Distribution — 250M CROWN

No VCs, no private sale. The 24% team allocation is the entire insider bag, and it is long-locked; players get 70% — more than double Hyperliquid's 31% genesis share.

Players still hold 70% — the 2% genesis airdrop is user-share paid upfront to bootstrap players and liquidity (a points campaign that converts to a vested claim at launch) rather than entirely through farm emissions. Genesis mints 80M once (team → vesting, POL → burned LP, ecosystem → timelock, airdrop → a Merkle distributor + Genesis-LP program); the farm mints the other 170M over five years. The team is funded only by the vested 60M — no protocol fee is skimmed for payroll, so every fee stays on the Brazier buyback-and-burn. The 6-month cliff releases ~10% at month 6 then vests linearly to year 5 — the team is fully liquid exactly when emissions end, and because the bag is locked, circulating supply starts near 15M (plus the airdrop as it vests over its first 60 days) and the team cannot dump.

7. CROWN Emissions & Inflation

CROWN's supply discipline reduces to one fact, verifiable on-chain: the farm is the only contract that mints CROWN. The Bank buys CROWN back with fees, the Quest Reward Fund pays from a pre-funded pot, and Mining only unlocks already-minted CROWN. So controlling inflation is controlling one schedule.

7.1 The schedule

Emissions are time-based (Robinhood Chain blocks are ~100ms and variable, so block-rate emission would be unstable), decaying over 7-day epochs and stopping entirely after epoch 260 (~5 years). The curve is deliberately not front-loaded: month 1 runs at 4.5× the tail rate — a real liquidity bootstrap — then decays smoothly to a flat tail that sustains LP rewards for the full five years. Week 1 is ~1.1% of the lifetime budget (the old DFK-style 256→4 curve put ~20% in week 1):

_(Emitted column shown at the prior 175M rate; the rescaled per-unit rate scales every row ×170/175 to a ~170M total — the 2% carved to the genesis airdrop.)_

Lifetime issuance = 80M genesis mint + ~170M farm = 250M CROWN = the 250M cap, fully allocated. Because the cap is instantaneous, deflationary burns free head-room the farm keeps emitting into on schedule.

7.2 Anti-dump lock

Each harvest is split liquid/locked by a decaying lock percentage — 95% locked in epoch 1, −2% per epoch, floored at 5%. Locked CROWN goes to the Vesting Vault and releases on a rolling schedule; Mining accelerates it. Combined with the de-spiked curve, this means early emissions are both smaller and mostly locked — no day-one dump, just a steady vest into the economy.

7.3 Sinks & the cap

The 250M cap is a maximum circulating supply, and it is fully allocated (80M genesis + 170M farm). Continuous sinks — the Brazier buyback-and-burn (§8, fed by 100% of protocol fees), the 8% summon burn, the Forge/CrownSink equipment burns, and the Jeweler early-exit penalty — remove CROWN and are deflationary. Because the cap is instantaneous, each burn frees head-room the farm re-mints to schedule; and because the farm hard-stops at epoch 260 while the Brazier runs forever, circulating supply peaks around year 5 and then declines.

7.4 Compared to DeFi Kingdoms

Crownhood's lineage is DeFi Kingdoms, so its supply design is deliberately measured against JEWEL's — more conservative on cap, issuance, and emission end, with a deliberately larger but long-locked team allocation and no VCs:

Crownhood's team allocation (24%) is larger than DFK's ~14% premine — a deliberate tradeoff, defensible for three reasons DFK's wasn't: (1) zero VCs, so the 24% is the entire insider bag with no private-sale unlock beside it; (2) a long lock — nothing before a 6-month cliff, fully liquid only at year 5, so no early insider dump; and (3) players still get 70%, more than double Hyperliquid's 31% genesis share. Everywhere else Crownhood is more conservative: half the cap (250M vs 500M) and a hard emission end date DFK never had.

The one place DFK is stronger is its flagship sink: on DFK Chain JEWEL is the gas token, so every transaction burns it. Crownhood runs on a chain where gas is ETH, so it can't use that sink. It compensates by routing 100% of protocol fees into the Brazier buyback-and-burn, plus an explicit burn stack (8% summon burn, equipment enhancement, Jeweler early-exit), and it leans on the levers DFK didn't: a half-size cap and a defined end to inflation.

(DFK later relaunched Serendale on Klaytn with a reduced 125M JEWEL cap; the comparison above is to the original 500M design Crownhood's mechanics descend from.)

8. The Economy

8.1 The Bank (xCROWN)

Deposit CROWN, receive xCROWN shares. Protocol fees are used to market-buy CROWN back into the vault, so each xCROWN redeems for more CROWN over time — a SushiBar-style single-sided stake. Withdraw any time by returning xCROWN. The vault locks a minimum dead-share on first deposit to defeat share-inflation attacks.

8.2 The Jeweler (cCROWN & governance)

Lock CROWN for 7 to 1,095 days to receive cCROWN, a non-transferable weight equal to amount × days ÷ 1095 (max lock = 1:1). cCROWN earns a pro-rata share of protocol fees via a reward accumulator and is the governance weight. Withdrawing before the unlock date burns a time-scaled slice of principal (a deflationary sink and a commitment device); at or after unlock you withdraw full principal plus accrued rewards.

8.3 The Gardens (LP farming) & the Vault

Add CROWN + ETH liquidity to receive LP tokens, then plant (stake) them to earn CROWN on the emission schedule. Part of each harvest is time-locked in the Vesting Vault (per §7.2) and vests on a rolling schedule; you claim what has vested, or send a hero to the Crown Mines to unlock it faster.

9. Marketplace & Trading

9.1 Gen0 recruitment

The founding bloodline is a fixed set of 2,000 Gen0 heroes, sold at the Marketplace for ETH. Gen0s have the most summons and are the root of every future line — the scarcest tier.

9.2 The DEX

A vendored Uniswap-V2 market. The protocol seeds and backs the ETH/CROWN pair (the "real money" market); external Robinhood-ecosystem tokens (e.g. CASHCAT) are integrated via their own liquidity. Resources trade only on thin liquidity by design — the market layer and the internal resource economy are deliberately separated so resource grinding never becomes a CROWN faucet.

9.3 The Tavern

List a hero for sale (for CROWN) or for hire (as a summon parent), and buy or hire heroes other players have listed. A 3.75% fee applies; buying pays exactly the listed price with a price-move guard.

10. Items & Crafting

• The Forge turns RUNE + ACORN + GOLD into Equipment (Weapon, Armor, Accessory, Relic) that adds stat bonuses to a hero. Recipes show exactly what they cost and grant; reagents are burned on craft.
• Enhancement (CrownSink) spends CROWN to further boost a piece of gear — a direct CROWN sink that is also a real stat upgrade.
• Consumables (General Store) are ERC-1155 items bought with GOLD: a Stamina Potion (full refill), a Stamina Draught (+5), and an XP Scroll (+100 XP). The Vendor burns the GOLD paid.

Gear is an NFT: it stays yours, can move between heroes, and only contributes its bonus while it and the hero share an owner (so a hero sold without its gear loses the bonus immediately).

11. Governance & Roadmap

Governance weight is cCROWN from the Jeweler — the longer and larger your lock, the more say you'll have in on-chain proposals over the kingdom's parameters and treasury. The intended arc is for the team to ship the world and progressively hand control to committed, long-locked players.

Roadmap (post-mainnet): land ownership, expeditions/PvE, and full on-chain governance. The current testnet is the complete core loop — heroes, professions, summoning, farming, the Bank/Jeweler economy, crafting, and trading.

12. Architecture & Security

12.1 Anchor / satellite design

Core contracts (HeroCore, the four tokens, the Vesting Vault, the Bank, Profiles) are anchors: immutable, non-upgradeable, and frozen after launch — no proxy, no delegatecall, no selfdestruct anywhere. Features evolve only by deploying new satellites (quests, the portal, items, the RNG) and regranting roles, never by editing an anchor. This gives players a permanent guarantee on the pieces that hold their assets while keeping the game extensible.

12.2 Deliberate deviations from DFK

1. Locked rewards live in a Vault, not inside the ERC-20 — DFK's transferAll() moved locked balances between wallets and enabled the May-2022 unlock-amplification exploit; here the Vault buckets are per-user and non-transferable, so that exploit class cannot exist.
2. Rolling vesting rather than a single readable unlock cliff.
3. Per-second emissions (chain blocks are sub-second and variable).
4. Deterministic quest drops; only summoning uses RNG.
5. A burn-sink stack — DFK's strongest sink (gas token) isn't available since gas is ETH, so Crownhood compensates with the summon burn, enhancement, and early-exit penalties.

12.3 RNG & audits

Summoning uses a hardened commit-reveal RNG (ArbSys-aware, entropy-accumulating, with a bounded recovery path that can't be turned into a rejection-sampling oracle). The contracts passed a multi-cluster internal audit; Chainlink VRF and a full external audit are the planned mainnet hardening. The one standing pre-mainnet item is migrating admin from a single key to a multisig.

13. Chain & Technical

Crownhood runs on Robinhood Chain — an Arbitrum Orbit L2 — currently on testnet (chain id 46630), with mainnet (4663) the launch target. Gas is ETH. The client is a non-custodial web app (Vite + React + viem) that talks directly to the deployed contracts; it never holds keys, requests only exact token approvals, and is locked to the game's chain. Testnet ETH and tokens are valueless and free from the faucet — a risk-free place to learn every system.

Crownhood is a game and an economy. Everything above is enforced by contracts on a public chain — read them, break them on testnet, and help shape what ships.