Document GP-DOC-20: Launch

Launch Phases

GENOPOOL launches in three phases. The framing rule, fixed before anything else: founder access is an early-access window, never a permanent wall. A free public opening follows, and it is announced from the very start, before the pre-sale even opens.

Phase A: the Genesis pre-sale

The founder pack is a known bundle at a known price. It contains, in full:

1. Early access to the Phase B window.
2. Numbered Genesis cage rights (GENESIS #NNN), see below. Each right is minted as a tradeable on-chain asset: the right follows whoever holds it, and a spent right stays on record but can no longer be listed.
3. An exclusive founder foil applied to the specimen sheet of creatures caged with a Genesis right, never re-issued, plus a founder badge on sheet and profile.
4. 5 invitation codes to distribute.
5. A Genesis land: a 12-stall, all-biome recovery parcel (see the Lands chapter), reserved to the pre-sale and never re-issued through the shop.

Payment is in USDC (crypto-only rails, as everywhere in GENOPOOL). Pre-sale pricing is early-bird: two known price points, pre-sale below public, never a price lottery. Edition cap and exact prices: to be announced. The cap is hard and Genesis editions are never re-issued.

A cage right, never a blind specimen

The pack never contains a creature. Selling a pack with a random-genome specimen inside would be selling a draw, which is structurally excluded from GENOPOOL. Instead:

• The pack holds numbered Genesis cage rights.
• In Phase B, the founder hunts like everyone else, scans wild spawns free and in full (standard post-reveal flow), and chooses which specimen to cage with a Genesis right. The mint carries the serial number and the founder foil.
• Nothing random is sold: every item in the pack (access, cage rights, foil, badge, codes) is known before payment.

Genesis is prestige, not power

Genesis specimens are standard wild spawns from the normal genome distribution, with zero stat boost of any kind. The rarity lives in the registry (the numbers, the foil), not in the genes. Likewise, a founder's competition grade starts at the bottom and is raced like everyone else's: what the pack buys is timing (being first into the world, first on the market, first up the ladder) plus status and a collectible. Never performance, never rank, never permanent exclusivity.

Phase B: founder early access (14 days)

• Reserved for founder-pack holders and their invitees, for a fixed 14-day window. The switch to Phase C at day 14 moves only for a narrowly defined major incident (prolonged infrastructure outage, or a fault touching funds or certification integrity), never to extend exclusivity.
• Founders do in B exactly what everyone does in C: capture, cages (including Genesis), breeding, races, market. No special rules, only timing.
• Phase B doubles as the live soft-launch: committed players stress the real economy and surface issues before the public influx. Operational parameters (spawn caps, queues, the invitation-code faucet) can be adjusted live; anything that affects a race outcome exists only compiled under a versioned balance snapshot and never moves mid-flight. See The Balancing Protocol.

Invitation codes

• 5 single-use codes per founder pack, released in waves at an operator-controlled rate.
• Every account created through a code is sponsored by an existing account, forming a traceable sponsor → invitee chain; veteran invitees can later receive codes of their own.
• The chain is the anti-bot layer: a sponsor whose invitees pattern as a bot farm has their codes frozen and their chain audited. Scarce invitations regulate growth without imposing identity checks at the door.
• Founders have a structural interest in populating the game: their market, their matchmaking queues and the value of their lineages all depend on population. The code is the acquisition channel; its scarcity is the appeal.

Phase C: free public opening

Free accounts open to everyone, announced from before the pre-sale. Onboarding is identical for founders, invitees and the public, see Getting started:

1. Free account (Sign-In-With-Solana + handle).
2. Free first capture at the tutorial: temporary custody, mints nothing on-chain, non-tradeable, released if not caged within 14 days.
3. Free placement races in T0: no ticket, no stake, no USDC prize. Pure free play: of the three elements that define a wager (a prize, a stake, chance), all three are absent.

A player pays only when choosing to make something permanent: caging a capture (3 USDC, fixed, post-reveal) or entering prize races (T1+). The free loop is a real game, not a demo: capture, T0 racing, exploration and the Scrip economy are fully playable at zero cost, indefinitely.

What the launch never creates

• No permanent paywall: founder access is early and temporary; the free opening is announced from the start.
• No pay-to-win, no pay-to-rank: Genesis is foil, number and badge over a fair-distribution genome; grades are raced.
• No wager: onboarding is free with nothing at stake; the pack sells known goods at known prices; the cage stays post-reveal; no randomness is ever sold.