⚗ The Experiment

Can you get paid to play RuneScape — decentrally?
❓ THE QUESTION

In 2004, millions of people spent thousands of hours chopping yews, mining coal, and fishing lobsters. All that effort produced GP — a currency that existed at the pleasure of one company, on one database, sellable only against the rules.

Twenty years later the tools exist to ask: what if the grind itself could mint a real bearer asset? Not company scrip. Not a database row. A token on Bitcoin L1 that you hold, stake, trade, or bridge — and that no game admin can take out of your wallet.

This server is that experiment, running live on a 2004-era RuneScape world.

🔁 THE LOOP — HOW WORK BECOMES TOKENS
1
Play. Chop trees, mine ores, fish, slay — the same grind as 2004, in your browser.
2
Sell. Bring resources to the merchant. Your sales earn GP, and the game tracks it as pending RST.
3
Convert. GP converts to RST at the game's conversion rate — an economic mechanism baked into the world itself (see below).
4
Claim. When you claim, the game signs a one-time voucher. You submit the transaction from your own wallet — the contract mints directly to you.
5
Own. RST in your wallet is yours: stake it for sRST yield, trade it on MotoSwap, spend it at the in-game broker, or just hold.
🏗 THE MACHINE — THREE MOVING PARTS
🖥
The Game World
A faithful 2004 RuneScape engine running on a dedicated server. It is the referee: it watches the work happen — every log chopped, every kill — and keeps score in GP. Anti-cheat guards watch for impossible earning patterns.
₿
Bitcoin L1 (OPNet)
The RST token is an OP20 smart contract on Bitcoin via OPNet — calldata in Tapscript, not inscriptions. Claims mint from a fixed player pool. A second contract, sRST, handles on-chain staking with hard time-locks.
Ξ
Ethereum (wRST)
Prefer ETH? Register an Ethereum wallet instead and the same gameplay pays out wRST, an ERC-20 twin with a Uniswap pool. One character, one wallet, one chain — locked at registration.

The claim is self-custodial by design: the server signs a voucher proving you earned it, but only your wallet can turn that voucher into tokens. The server never holds your RST and cannot claw it back.

⚖ THE CONVERSION — WHY RST STAYS SCARCE

GP→RST conversion is a mechanism baked into the game's economy, the same way XP curves and drop rates are. It exists to answer a hard problem: a world built for thousands of players must not hyperinflate the token when they arrive.

Think of it as the game's difficulty curve applied to money. The conversion is tuned to the state of the world economy — as Gielinor fills up and more adventurers compete to extract its resources, each RST is designed to get harder to earn, preserving scarcity for everyone already holding it. On top of that, a 10% claim fee perpetually refuels the community grant pool and pays sRST stakers, and every LP swap burns 1%.

The current conversion is always public:

… GP = 1 RST
🔍 HONEST LIMITS — WHAT'S DECENTRALIZED AND WHAT ISN'T
  • ✓ Decentralized: the token. RST lives on Bitcoin, wRST on Ethereum. Minted supply is yours — tradeable, stakeable, permissionless.
  • ✓ Decentralized: the claim. Self-custodial vouchers; the contract mints to your keys, not to an exchange balance.
  • ✓ Decentralized: the market. The price of an hour of grinding is set by open liquidity pools, not by us.
  • ✗ Centralized (for now): the world. One game server is the oracle that says the work happened. If it lies or dies, no new RST is earned — though everything already minted stays yours forever.

That last point is the experiment. The roadmap pushes the oracle itself toward autonomy — an AI game-master with its own wallet, and eventually community multisig control. See the Roadmap.

🧪 WHY BOTHER?

Because "play-to-earn" died as a slogan but was never honestly tested as a question. Most attempts minted a token first and bolted a game on after. This runs the opposite direction: start with a game people genuinely grinded for two decades ago, change nothing about the gameplay, and route the value of the grind on-chain.

If it works, an hour spent fishing lobsters in a 2004 MMO produces a few cents — or someday more — of an asset nobody can confiscate. If it fails, we learn exactly where the model breaks. Either result is worth having.

Currently live on Bitcoin testnet & Ethereum Sepolia. Mainnet target: June 2026.

⚔️ Try the Experiment ₿ Read the Tokenomics