Settlement & the honest rake

On day 21, trading freezes and the season pays out in one strict order. Nothing is distributed early, and nothing is distributed twice.

The waterfall

1. Reserve redemption. Every curve freezes and its reserve pot backs every holder’s token 1:1. This was always your money — the two-pot promise (§ curve & two pots) pays off exactly here.
2. Seed recoupment. The protocol’s seed grant is a senior claim: each surviving country repays its founding seed out of its own treasury before anything else moves. A conquered country’s seed was already lost into the game economy at the moment it fell — it became spoils, not a debt outstanding.
3. Treasury distribution. What’s left of each surviving country’s treasury — a whole season of taxes and war loot — splits 50/50 between its stakers and its holders, pro-rata.
4. Prize pool. A separate pot (built from the protocol’s own injection plus half of every season’s arms sales) pays the top-3 nations by Victory Points, 50/30/20 — to stakers, weighted by stake-epochs. Time-weighting means a day-one citizen outranks an epoch-41 tourist by math, not by rule.

That order matters: redemption and seed recoupment happen regardless of who won or lost the war; only what’s left over is a function of Victory Points. Terminal value isn’t a promise of price — it’s an accounting identity. The SOL was in the curves and treasuries the entire season; day 21 is just the day it all goes home.

The honest rake

The protocol’s take — the rake — is the φ_P fee slice, half of every arms-sales flow, and a share of the wartime sell toll. In aggregate, that’s about 1% of season deposits. Player-vs-player redistribution — sweeps, curve moves, refugee haircuts, escrow forfeits — is an order of magnitude larger than the rake itself.

This is poker with countries, not a fund. The house takes a transparent, visible rake and sweetens the pot with the prize injection; everything else that moves, moves from one player to another based on whose flag won. Nobody sells you “everyone profits.” Your outcome is your judgment about which nation wins — and the rake is small enough, and public enough, to check yourself.

For the rest of the adversarial assumptions — wash trading, snapshot timing, VRF receipts, agent containment — see fair play.