Season 0The rules
All of it is fixed before the season opens. None of it promises you money.
You've probably watched one of these go wrong. Someone hints at what a point is worth, people work out how to farm it, and the payout goes to scripts instead of the people who turned up. Each rule below shuts one of those doors. We picked every number on this page in advance, and we're stuck with them now.
Season 0 opens with its social half only. What pays now is replying to the official X posts, turning up in the Telegram group and joining the Discord. We check at the source. Chain, knowledge and builder quests come later, and so does rule 4: your social points aren't held back yet, we pay them as you earn them.
- 01A point is a share, not a price. Each season has one fixed pot of PKL, and your points decide what slice you get. A point has no fixed value. We'll never tell you that one point equals so much PKL, because it doesn't: more people earning means every slice gets thinner.
- 02We publish the pot in PKL. Nobody sets the rate. What a point ends up worth is the result of the count, not a decision we make. We publish it at mainnet, once the season has closed and every account's points are in. Not in advance, not as a range, and not as a rough figure in any currency.
- 03Posting cannot win this on its own. Every kind of activity has its own budget, fixed before the season starts. Post on X and nothing else and you'll hit that budget's ceiling. The next post after that adds nothing.
- 04Social points need real use of the chain behind them. Until your wallet has 15 transactions, on 5 different days, across 3 different applications, points from posting are recorded and held back. Nothing's lost while you wait. Clear all three and everything releases at once, including what came before.
- 05Nobody walks off with more than 0.05% of the pot. However many points you gather, your share stops at 0.05% of the season pot. The overflow doesn't vanish, and we don't keep it. It goes back in and gets shared out among the accounts still under the cap.
- 06You get three weeks to argue with the result. Standings freeze on the season's last Sunday at 23:59 UTC and stay up, unchanged, for 21 days. You can see how many accounts were excluded and why. Two people redo the whole calculation separately, and it has to come out the same.
02 / Two kinds of points
Brine is your progress. Pickle Points are the reward.
Brine builds up and stays. It never resets, you can't send it and you can't spend it, and all it does is set your level, which sets your multiplier ceiling. Pickle Points are what the season pays out. You can't send those either. At mainnet they become PKL the way rule 1 describes.
| Level | Name | Brine needed | Multiplier ceiling | What it opens |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Seed | 0 | 1.00× | Daily quests |
| 1 | Sprout | 500 | 1.20× | Weekly quests, and you can invite people |
| 2 | Gherkin | 2,000 | 1.45× | Builder quests, and your held social points come through |
| 3 | Pickle | 6,000 | 1.70× | Mythic quests, and you can put a moderator forward |
| 4 | Barrel | 15,000 | 2.00× | Guide role, and you review what other people write |
| 5 | Brine Master | 40,000 | 2.25× | We invite you. 250 accounts at most |
03 / Who you are
One wallet, one X, one Discord, one Telegram. Tied once and for good.
Tie an X or Discord account to a wallet and it can never move to another one. Pick carefully. We won't move it later, and your tier pays nothing on its own: it only sets the ceiling. We did that on purpose, so running a farm of accounts costs more without earning more.
| Tier | What it takes | Multiplier ceiling | Points cap for the season |
|---|---|---|---|
| V0 | Just a wallet, with nothing tied to it yet | 1.00× | 15% of the season cap |
| V1 | An X and a Discord account tied to that wallet, both at least 90 days old | 2.25× | The full cap |
What else we look at
| What we notice | What happens |
|---|---|
| Lots of wallets funded from one address | A person looks at the funding pattern. If there's no reasonable explanation, we exclude the whole group |
| Wallets acting in lockstep, under two seconds apart with identical calls | We exclude them on the spot, and publish how many, never who |
| A referral tree gone wide: more than 50 invitees, fewer than one in ten of them active | Your referral points go to zero. The Brine you earned stays |
| Someone you invited has no X account, or one younger than 90 days | They don't count and neither of you gets paid, until an old enough account is tied to their wallet |
| An X or Discord account created after this season was announced | The account stays at V0 until it turns 90 days old. A Discord id carries its own creation date, so we don't have to ask you for it |
| Text you generated, copied, or ran through a translator | No points, and one warning. Do it twice and you're out |
04 / Budgets
We divide the pot into parts, and nothing moves between them.
We publish the split, so you can see how much of the pot each kind of activity gets before you start. If a category isn't used up, its leftover waits for a later season. The others don't get it.
- Each week
- 1,200 points per account. Anything past that we drop, and next week doesn't inherit it.
- Doing the same thing again
- The first retweet of the week pays 10 points, the fourth 5, the ninth 3.3. It keeps thinning from there. base × 1/sqrt(n), if you want the formula.
- When a post travels
- A post that reaches more people pays more. A thousand views doubles it. It stops at two and a half times the base, which you reach at about 31,600 views. base × (1 + log10(1 + views) / 3).
- Where we draw the line
- Empty one-line replies. Three of those and the category shuts for the rest of your week. Spam under other people's posts pays nothing, and if you buy engagement we exclude you.
05 / Multipliers
Multipliers stack. They stop at 3×.
Multipliers work on chain, social and content quests. Referrals get none, because a multiplier there would only pay you more for inviting accounts that aren't real. Mythic quests get none either: those are priced on their own. And the stop at 3× is why two people who both showed up every day finish close together instead of 50 times apart.
| What it is | How much | How it works |
|---|---|---|
| Your level | 1.00× to 2.25× | Earning Brine moves you up the table above |
| Your streak | up to +25% | 7 days in a row adds 5%, 30 days adds 15%, 90 days adds 25%. Miss a day and you drop one step, not to zero |
| Your tier | a ceiling, not a bonus | Your tier adds nothing. It caps how high your level multiplier can go |
| Showing up early | ×1.30 in weeks 1 and 2, ×1.15 in weeks 3 and 4, ×1.00 after that | The same work pays more the earlier you do it |
| Testnet launch boost | ×2 in weeks 3 and 4 | For everyone, on every point, after the 3× stop rather than under it. No weekly or season cap during those two weeks, and what you earn there never counts against a cap later. Referral payouts are left out |
Once the standings are frozen, here's the arithmetic. Your eligible points divided by everyone's eligible points, times the season pot, then capped at 0.05% of the pot, and whatever the cap cuts off goes back to the accounts under it.