How Headhunt works

Summary

Headhunt is a game about working at startups. You mint an operator — an NFT with a randomly rolled specialization — take a job at a company whose runway is publicly visible, and are paid in real tokenized equities.

The economic core is one sentence: wages are paid exclusively out of trading fees on $HUNT, converted into equities. Money from minting operators never reaches wages under any circumstance, and no game function moves value between the two pools that hold them.

The token

$HUNT has a fixed supply of 1,000,000,000, eighteen decimals, and no mint function after launch. Supply can only ever move in one direction: down, by burning. Launch is manual through pons.family, paired against native ETH.

Where wages come from

A trading fee on $HUNT is charged in ETH. It goes to a fee collector, which forwards it to a buyer that converts it into a basket of four tokenized equities — NVDA, AAPL, MSFT and GOOGL, weighted 30/25/25/20. The basket lands in the Wage Vault, which pays operators by hours actually worked, straight into each operator's ERC-6551 wallet.

Four names rather than one, because a single issuer failing should not take the payroll with it. Payment into the token-bound wallet rather than to an address, because that is what makes “whoever holds the NFT when it vests” automatic — there is no beneficiary field anywhere that could still point at a previous owner.

One practical constraint shapes this more than any design preference. On-chain equity liquidity on Robinhood Chain is extremely thin: measured on Uniswap V3, the deepest of these names has 26.6 WETH of depth, several have fractions of a WETH, and one has no WETH pool at all. Buying a basket on a schedule through pools like that either eats catastrophic slippage or simply reverts. Every ticker therefore settles from pre-funded inventory at the Chainlink price by default, and the swap path stays disabled per ticker until real depth exists. That inventory is a budgeted cost, not a configuration flag.

Where the buyback comes from

Everything a player spends in $HUNT is cut exactly in half: one half is burned, the other goes to the Token Vault. No per-item configuration and no exceptions. The rule covers minting an operator, the option strike, paying to choose a profile, buying into a round, rerolling a trait, the hiring fee, certification, a counter-offer on a poach, and the 5% Talent Market royalty.

A single rule beats an accurate table, because a player should be able to hold the economics in their head without looking anything up.

The mint price runs on a curve from 100,000 to 333,333 $HUNT across the 3,333 operators, rising with the live population. Burning an operator reduces the population, and so lowers the price for everyone still deciding.

The Token Vault holds $HUNT and buys operators back. It never converts to equities, and it is never funded by trading fees.

Payout smoothing

Fee income is spiky, so the Wage Vault does not distribute it as it arrives. It targets the average of the last seven days of payouts and buffers the difference. Above twice the daily target the surplus goes out as an extra round; below half the target, payouts are cut and the board carries a warning — an actual reduction, not a notice.

Smoothing stretches a downturn across days. It does not repeal one. A month with no trading is a month with thin wages at every profile and every Grit level, which is why the buffer figure is on screen at all times rather than in an update.

Operators

The collection is capped at 3,333. Each operator rolls one of five specializations — coder, designer, product, growth, ops — plus a hidden Grit trait. An operator can take any role; the profile match only sets the rate. On profile pays the full rate, an adjacent discipline pays 70%, an unrelated one pays 45%, and Grit absorbs part of the mismatch penalty. Working outside your profile also raises the review bar.

Two hundred hours worked outside your profile unlocks the right to certify it as a permanent second one. An operator with two profiles takes both categories at the full rate. This is the only way an operator is ever permanently improved, and it is the main driver of secondary price.

Staking $HUNT opens tiers of access — from cold applications through to stealth roles, a shortened cliff, and discounts on minting and strike. The tier belongs to the staker, not to the token, and does not transfer on a sale.

Randomness

There is no Chainlink VRF on this chain, and block hashes are not usable for this: a sequencer would see the outcome before deciding whether to include the transaction. The roll is therefore a commitment scheme. A hash chain is committed before launch and revealed one link per epoch, and an epoch's seed is that link combined with an accumulator of every player commitment made during it.

Neither side can steer the result. We cannot, because the chain was fixed before your commitment existed; you cannot, because your commitment is made against a chain that was already sealed. A missed reveal rolls forward to the next live epoch, and there is deliberately no computed fallback seed — a publicly derivable fallback is itself a way to select an outcome.

The limitation, stated plainly: the chain is held by us. In an epoch where we hold the chain key and every commitment in that epoch is also ours, that epoch's outcomes are predictable to us. In practice that means a quiet epoch with no other minters. A five-party version removes this, at the cost of five independent key holders publishing on schedule; it was considered and not adopted.

Reveal lands roughly one to two hours after minting. Until then the operator shows as a background check pending.

Employment

Eight companies launch daily at 16:00 UTC. Each publishes its runway in hours, its burn rate, its stage and its headcount. Burn rate rises with every hire, so the runway you are looking at partly depends on who else takes the job. The board rebuilds every hour. Companies live between 5 and 21 days and end in an IPO, an acquisition, or at zero.

At hire you set one slider between salary and options. The cliff is 48 hours and vesting runs 14 days after it. Quitting or being fired burns whatever has not vested, and new funding rounds dilute the option. Unvested value belongs to whoever holds the NFT at the moment it vests, not to whoever signed the contract.

Exits

There are two ways out. The Exit Interview is a guaranteed buyback by the protocol, at any time, with no buyer and no queue. The NFT is burned, the contents of its wallet stay with you, and the payout comes from the Token Vault in $HUNT.

The rate is 45–75% of a base defined as the smaller of the current mint price and the price you paid. The cap at your own price closes the arbitrage of minting cheap and exiting into a risen curve; the floor at the current price keeps the payout honest about the market. Structurally, you cannot take more out of the reserve than you put in. An operator must be at least 48 hours old to be handed back.

The rate steps down as reserve coverage falls — 75% above six months of payouts, 65% from three to six, 55% from one to three, 45% below a month. Coverage and the resulting rate are shown on the button itself. In a sustained run the last people out get the worst rate. That is the mechanism working as intended: a fixed rate looks better and empties the reserve faster.

The other way out is the Talent Market. Selling to another player moves the profile, Grit, hours, exits, certifications and the live employment contract — seat, employer and unfinished vesting — to the buyer, with no employer consent required and no reset of vesting time. The Commitment tier and any profiles it granted do not travel. Listings are fixed-price or 24-hour auctions; a purchase verifies the wallet-contents hash atomically so the seller cannot drain between listing and sale; the employer's runway and stage appear on every card; and listing is blocked in the employer's final six hours.

Trust model

The protocol owner can withdraw the balance of every contract in this system, including both vaults, and can upgrade every contract behind its proxy. Administration is a single key, not a multisig.

This is a deliberate choice, not an oversight and not a temporary state pending a migration. It is written here because you are owed it before you decide to play. Treat anything you put into this game as money you have handed to a person, because mechanically that is what it is.

What code still guarantees regardless:

• $HUNT supply can never increase; there is no mint function after launch.
• No game, keeper or player action moves value between the two vaults.
• Every spend splits exactly 50/50, with no per-site override.
• The buyback base can never exceed what you paid to mint.
• Unvested value goes to whoever holds the NFT at vest time.

What it does not:

• That the vaults still hold funds tomorrow.
• That today's rules are next week's rules.
• That wages are worth minting for — that depends on trading volume.
• That a mint roll is unpredictable in an epoch you are alone in.
• That the collection sells out, or that a secondary buyer exists.

Risks

Wages are a function of trading volume, and trading volume is speculative and decays. This is a working economy for a game; it is not passive income, and we would rather say so here than let you find out on payday.

A guaranteed buyback puts a floor under the Talent Market, which is good for trust and means an operator with no biography does not sell on the secondary at all — it is simpler to hand back to the protocol. The secondary market will be narrow and premium rather than broad.

The Token Vault fills from spending and holds while spending continues. In a long decline everyone heads for the Exit Interview at once, and the stepped rate acts as an automatic brake rather than a solution: the last out receive 45%. That is priced in honestly and is printed on the button.

Wage payments are protocol trading fees redistributed between NFTs. They are not dividends and confer no equity, ownership or shareholder rights in any company, real or fictional. Swapping into tokenized equities is restricted in some jurisdictions, including for US residents. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal or tax advice.