Raininomics — The Next Evolution 🦄

$RAINI is where it all started and has remained the foundation. $PHOTON was built to be the go-to currency for all things RTLOL. However — with a full launch and Season One right around the corner — what started as a new idea for our ecosystem has blossomed into a revolutionary shift to our tokenomics.

Raini Studios - Creators of RTLOL / $RST / $RAINI

9 min readAug 12, 2023

Community-submitted blast from the past. Beats the heck out of Monopoly money.

Update March 2024 — Please note that the $RAINI token is no longer supported by the Raini Studios Ecosystem, and has been replaced by $RST. The migration bridge has closed, as per this update. This medium will remain for historical purposes only, we strongly recommend reading this medium post with our updated, $RST-focused Tokenomics v2.

Original Medium Below.

Tokenomics.

This unmistakably crypto term — a portmanteau of the words “token” and “economics” — has been in use well before we started calling this space Web3. For those who traded on DEXs (like Uniswap) in the early, Wild West days of crypto, one of the very first things you wanted to know about a project was its tokenomics.

What’s the circulating supply? Fully-diluted valuation (FDV)? Vesting schedule?

This was, and is, critical information when assessing the value of a token — the forces of supply and demand, and the distribution of equity, have a major impact on price action.

Decisions on a project’s token ecosystem and mechanics are of critical importance, and should create an environment where the purpose and value of each component are crystal clear.

With this principle in mind, we share the following.

“Mo Money Mo Problems”

“Ten years from now we’ll still be on top
Yo, I thought I told you that we won’t stop”

Rapid growth brings new challenges — as Diddy discovered in 1996.

With Raini having evolved from its humble memecoin roots, to an NFT farming platform, to a top tier web5 game studio, the original tokenomic design became a constraint — well beyond the scope of intent for the original Raini token.

The team therefore spent months workshopping the optimal balance between $RAINI as the foundation token, and $PHOTON as a new addition, focused on our flagship game Raini: The Lords of Light.

As part of this process, our in-house AAA game and economy designers obtained input from a number of our key partners, including Merit Circle, Sanctor Capital and Kanpai Pandas/Ice Bagz.

Ultimately, we realized that all versions of the two-token system were simply more complex than necessary, and the solution was right in front of us the entire time.

Introducing…

$RST — the Raini Studios Token!

A combination of: [1] the $RAINI token, and [2] what was set to be the $PHOTON token — the Raini Studios Token ($RST) will be the sole token for our entire ecosystem.

Rather than diluting and dividing value accrual between two distinct tokens, launching a single, unified token — which is designed to underpin our whole ecosystem — will allow us to concentrate all efforts on maximizing its utility and demand for it.

$RST will be a brand new, Layer Zero-compatible token launching on Beam, an AVAX Subnet built by our friends at Merit Circle.

In a nutshell, $RST will retain all of the utility of the $RAINI token, but will also function as the long-term, top-tier currency for RTLOL & future Raini Studios games, and will be deflationary by design.

Ammo for all Lords of Light

Strap yourselves in — comprehensive details are laid out below (as a quick disclaimer: while we are quite confident in all of these details being final, they are subject to change):

$RST key points and utility:

Liquidity will be concentrated into one pool on Beam (but the token will be omnichain, thanks to Layer Zero)
Portals will be launched on both ETH and BNB chains to allow holders to exchange their $RAINI for $RST on a 1:1 basis. $RAINI held on FTM can be bridged to Ethereum before being exchanged for $RST
$RST will be stakeable and earn Rainbows, and $RST LP will be stakeable and earn Unicorns.
We’ll continue allocating packs from every RTLOL set release to Rainbow & Unicorn auctions and raffles — this means that holders who wish to continue holding and staking their tokens for passive rewards can continue to do so
$RST will be able to be spent on purchasing LUX (the premium in-game currency powering RTLOL) — with a bonus of up to 35% applied when compared with buying LUX with fiat
A number of purchases will be $RST exclusives; including the top-tier Raini Battle Pass, collector packs with the highest Mythic/Legendary odds, pre-sales on drops, and top-tier heroes
$RST will be usable in future Raini Studios games
$RST will have a tax imposed on sales of the token; this will be able to be changed up to a maximum of 2%, and is initially planned to be set at 1%, which is equivalent to selling $RAINI on Ethereum Uniswap v3 now.

And the big one:

$RST will be deflationary — with the contract set up with a function to automatically burn a portion of all $RST spent on all ecosystem purchases. This is initially planned to be set to a 25% burn rate, with the burn rate increasing to 50% after the closure of the $RAINI pool.

— — —

You’ll be able to earn $RST via:

Staking $RST LP (in addition to earning Unicorns)
Play-and-earn — playing and winning RTLOL games with decks of Collectible cards
Collect-and-earn — staking collectible RTLOL cards whose Soulbound versions are heavily featured in winning ladder games over each month
Win-and-earn — topping the RTLOL leaderboards
“Renting” cards to other players via our Faded Card mechanic
Burning (i.e. permanently locking) your xPHOTON on Ethereum or BNB Chain

Finally, we’ll also now be launching a $RAINI Pool — we will be initially allocating 25% of all RST spent on ecosystem purchases into a “$RAINI Pool”.

This will continue until a total of 75 million RST in total has been accumulated into the pool (being an amount equal to the private sale allocation, less what is being put into LP).

From this point, the RST tokens will be distributed to wallets based on the proportion of $RAINI that they locked to release $RST out of the total amount of $RAINI locked in this way.

$RST — Allocations & Token Unlock Schedules

Allocation and token unlock terms for the total 1 billion $RST supply are as follows:

Circulating Raini: 500 million (50%) || All immediately available
Adoption Incentives: 275 million (27.5%) || All subject to a 5-year linear token unlock
Private Sale & Advisory ($PHOTON): 125 million (12.5%) || All subject to a 0 to 2-year linear token unlock (tokens that are paired with MC and put into liquidity will be immediately unlocked, advisory tokens are locked for one year, standard private sale unlock schedule is 2 years).
Treasury: 50 million (5%) || 25 million immediately unlocked || 25 million subject to a 1-year linear token unlock
Team: 50 million (5%) || All subject to a 3-year linear token unlock

Note that the Treasury allocation will be pivotal to power key studio activities; including liquidity (e.g. the CEX listings that ya’ll have wanted for so long!), marketing efforts (“wen marketing?”), development (e.g. RTLOL mobile), and strategic expansion.

Magnifiers:

Magnifier shards will be earned as engagement rewards (alongside $RST)
Multiple magnifier shards can be combined into a Common Magnifier
Magnifiers will be able to be burned / permanently locked in the $RST LP staking pool to temporarily boost the earning of your existing staked LP
There will be a number of tiers of magnifiers, with each progressive tier being stronger than the last
You’ll be able to burn 5 copies of a magnifier tier to craft a magnifier of the next tier (similar to the Gold & Chroma NFT creation process)
Each magnifier tier will have a corresponding LP requirement; you’ll need to have the listed number of $RST LP tokens staked in order to stake a magnifier
Once a magnifier is staked (activated) it will count as a number of additional staked LP tokens (based on its strength/rarity)
Magnifiers will last for one month at a time, and you can only have one magnifier deployed at any time
If you withdraw your LP tokens after a Magnifier is activated, it will be destroyed — otherwise, a Magnifier will be destroyed after it runs out of durability

Infused Airdrops:

As a once-off, all Gold & Chroma NFT holders will be airdropped a number of magnifier shards (based on the stamina and tier of the NFT). The qualification snapshot for this airdrop will be taken shortly before the launch of the $RST LP staking pool.
We’ll also be airdropping the 3 outstanding “Infused” NFTs (which will now function as purely cosmetic collectibles), in addition to a number of magnifier shards for each airdropped infused NFT — with the number airdropped being based on the relative rarity/power level of the corresponding Infused NFT.

—

Timing:

To kick us off, during the last week of August 2023, we’re aiming to launch the following:

The new $RST token
The $RAINI > $RST migration bridges
Some $RST purchaseable items (e.g. Battle Pass, conversion to Lux with bonus rate, enabling packs to be purchased with $RST)
The new $RST staking pool, where you can earn Rainbows

During Season 1, we’re aiming to ensure that all outstanding xPHOTON airdrops are completed, further xPHOTON earning is discontinued, and all Infused NFT and magnifier shard airdrops are completed. We’re also aiming to progressively introduce:

The remaining $RST purchaseable items
The xPHOTON > $RST redemption bridge
The Collect-and-Earn staking pool with $RST rewards
Play-and-Earn $RST rewards
Leaderboard $RST rewards
The new $RST LP staking pool, where you can earn $RST and Unicorns
Magnifiers to supercharge LP staking pool earnings
Heroes (which will variably boost play-and-earn rewards)
The Faded/Collectible Card rental system

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Whew.

What a massive Medium — if you managed to read this entire Rainipedia entry…

We do hope this answers most of your questions on tokenomics (at the very least, it should cover “Wen Medium?”), and we hope you‘re all as pumped as we are to finally get this all launched and bring RTLOL on-chain. Join us for our regular weekly AMA at 10am AEST Tuesday to go over any remaining questions!

We’re rapidly approaching the culmination of two-and-a-half years of hard work by the team, along with ongoing support from our amazing community —and we are primed and ready to put Raini on the map in a big way, competing directly with web2 giants like Hearthstone and MTG.