MANUAL GEARBOX
7 gears, clutch, stalls, launch slip. Lug it and it dies; redline it and the STRAIN lamp charges until the drivetrain gives out.
SOLANA DEVNET · IN YOUR BROWSER · NO DOWNLOAD · 5 FREE RIDES
The road never ends.
Your shift does.
Buy a 1, 4 or 8 hour shift. Drive every minute of it – manual gearbox, cold engine, traffic, night. The server keeps the clock and calls the finish. Finishers share one weekly pool.
IN THE POT THIS WEEK0.000SOL
ROUND CLOSES IN–Mon 00:00 UTC
ON THE ROAD0trucks right now
DRIVEN, ALL TIME0km · 0 shifts
CORE MECHANICS & THE LOOP
It is Desert Bus with money on the line: the only skill that pays is staying on the road, awake, for the whole shift.
- 1BUY A SHIFTFree test ride, or $5 / $15 / $50 in SOL at the live rate. The server checks the transfer on chain and books the entry into this week's pool.
- 2DRIVE ALL OF ITEngine off at the depot. Start it, release the parking brake, work the clutch, pull onto the highway. Speed is governed at 100 km/h, so time on the road is the only way to make distance.
- 3SERVER CALLS ITHeartbeats every 10 s carry time and distance. Full time and full distance: COMPLETED. Quit early: ABANDONED. Hull gone, head-on, dead signal: FAILED.
- 4SHARE THE POOLEvery paid entry grows one weekly pot. Finishers compete for the 50% draw and the top-20 distance prize. Monday 00:00 UTC it rolls over.
HULL & TRAFFIC
Poles, guardrails, cacti and other trucks are solid. Scratches and bumps eat hull; a direct hit ends the shift. IDM traffic, crossroads with lights, multi-lane merges.
WEATHER & ENGINE
A −22 °C Trans-Siberian start means a frosted screen, a cold engine with less power, and wear if you rev it. Heater, wipers, washer, battery – all real.
DAY & NIGHT
The clock runs. Headlights, lamp posts, dazzle from oncoming traffic, a cab light. Backgrounding the tab pauses the shift – it earns nothing.
HOLES, SIGNS, STRAIN
Five kinds of road damage with warning signs; straddle a pothole or lose hull and speed. Driving against the parking brake cooks the brakes.
FIVE ROUTES
Same rules, different roads and weather:
- Route 66 · USA
- Stuart Hwy · Australia
- Trans-Siberian · Russia
- Brenner Pass · Alps
- Pan-American · Atacama
REALTIME DAYTIME
The clock runs while you drive (×60 by default: a minute of driving is an hour of sky). Each route has its own sunrise, sunset and twilight – Trans-Siberian gets six hours of low sun, Atacama the brightest stars. At night the world is lit only by what has a lamp: your headlights, the lamp posts, oncoming traffic that dazzles you.
THE DASH · HOVER A CARD
BADGES THAT EXIST TODAY
First MileShift CompleteNight OwlCenturyClean RunCold StartTop 20 · after the first round closes
YOUR FREIGHTER
One truck exists today: the long-hood semi you drive. The garage is where Solana comes in – trucks, upgrades and interior as tokens you own and take from shift to shift. None of it is in this build. Read the rules at the bottom before you get excited.
PARTS CATALOGUE
FC-01 CONVENTIONALThe truck above. Everyone starts in it; it stays free.
IN THE GAMEFC-02 CABOVER NFTA different cockpit: flat nose, higher seat, more glass, worse mirrors. Same engine, same governor.
PLANNEDFC-03 ROAD TRAIN NFTTwo trailers in the mirrors, twice the swing in reverse. Stuart Highway native.
CONCEPTSPLITTER · 8TH GEARCloser ratios, one more shift. Comfort, not speed – the governor does not move.
PLANNEDBIG RADIATORWarms up faster on a −22 °C start, runs cooler at redline. Fewer COLD seconds.
PLANNEDHEAVY-DUTY BATTERYHeadlights, heater and radio for longer with the engine off. Starts in the cold.
PLANNEDWIDE HEADLIGHTSA broader cone at night. You still get dazzled.
CONCEPTGOLDEN WHEELInterior. The steering wheel, in gold. Does nothing. Everyone in your mirrors knows.
PLANNEDGAUGE FACESAmber, ice-blue or green backlight for the whole cluster. Night shifts look different.
PLANNEDDASH TRIM & DICEWalnut or carbon dash, dice colours, cab-lamp tint, a horn.
CONCEPTPAINT SHOPYour own trailer livery instead of the route's. Five exist in the game already.
PLANNEDBADGES → MINTSix badges exist (server-side). Click-to-mint for wallets with a paid ride is the next step – never auto-mint.
IN THE GAMERules of the garage: cosmetics and comfort, never the clock and never the speed. The governor, the minimum time and the distance bar are the same for a golden wheel and a stock one, so a paid part is never pay-to-win. Anything that changes physics (the splitter, the radiator) has to live in the server simulation before it can be sold – that is the replay core on the roadmap, not a client flag. Trucks and parts would be ordinary Solana tokens you can trade; the game only reads what you hold.
ECONOMY & WHAT THE SERVER CHECKS
One pot per UTC week, every tier together. Integer lamports, floored shares, the remainder to fees. Accounted on this build; the draw and payouts come next.
Loading the pool…
SHIFTS
| Loading… |
WHAT THE SERVER CHECKS
Driven seconds come from heartbeats, capped by wall time. Honest pauses earn nothing. A gap over 150 s fails the ride.
Reported distance may grow at most 28 m/s × 1.2 between beats. Faster than the truck can go = FAILED, not a high score.
A System transfer to the treasury of at least the quoted lamports, with the ride id as memo, from your wallet, confirmed. The signature is the primary key – no double credit.
Completed / abandoned / failed is decided server-side and shown on the result screen. The client only reports.
Said plainly: this is server-timed telemetry, not proof. A modified client can still lie inside the speed bound. Night, hull and route are client-asserted and only unlock badges – they never move lamports. Next is a fixed-tick, fixed-point replay of the input log, so a paid finish is re-simulated, not reported. The 50% grand prize is a draw and the 20% top-20 is a skill prize; the draw is not live and prizes are not paid in this build.
ROADMAP
Written the way a driver writes a trip sheet: legs, stops, a tick when it is behind us, a stamp when it got cut. Dates only where we have them.
FREIGHT CHAIN · TRIP SHEETDRIVER: solo · UNIT: FC-01 · DISPATCH: Colosseum Crypto World's Fair · DUE: Oct 12 2026, 11:59 PT
| LEG 1 · DEPOT Oct 6–7 | DONE | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| ☑ | The driving sim – truck, roads, routes, climate, traffic | pre-existing, disclosed | |
| ☑ | Repo split, NestJS server, Sign-In With Solana | Day 0 | |
| ☑ | Server-timed rides: heartbeats, speed bound, verdict | Day 0 | |
| ☑ | SOL/USD quotes, on-chain payment check, weekly pool accounting, demo clock | Day 1 | |
| ☑ | Lobby: new ride · live · leaderboard · profile; persisted badges | Day 2 | |
| ☑ | This page | Day 2 | |
| LEG 2 · ON THE ROAD Oct 8–12 | ROLLING | ||
| ☐ | Deploy to a public URL; a stranger finishes a free ride | host TBD | |
| ☐ | First real devnet payment into the treasury; pool number moves | faucet | |
| ☐ | Gameplay loop + ≤ 3 min demo video, 2–3 min pitch | Oct 11 | |
| ☐ | Five playtests outside the team – the only demand number | Oct 10 | |
| ☐ | Submission: form, videos, deck, disclosure | Oct 12 noon PT | |
| LEG 3 · NEXT FUEL STOP after the fair | BOOKED | ||
| ☐ | The draw and the payouts – commit-and-reveal or a VRF, keys outside the repo | prizes paid | |
| ☐ | Deterministic replay core: fixed 60 Hz tick, fixed-point maths, 7-byte input log, server re-simulates a paid finish | anti-cheat | |
| ☐ | Share page per ride (/r/:id), click-to-mint badges for paid wallets | distribution | |
| LEG 4 · LONG HAUL | BOOKED | ||
| ☐ | The garage: trucks, upgrades, interior as Solana tokens (chapter 03) | after replay | |
| ☐ | Mainnet with published rules; gambling question answered per region | ||
| ☐ | Spectator sabotage from the live feed: fog, wind, a pothole for the driver you are watching | Desert Bus 3.0 | |
| ☐ | Telegram Mini App | ||
| LEFT AT THE DEPOT cut on purpose | CUT | ||
| ☒ | Anchor escrow program – a memo-checked System transfer does the job this week | toolchain | |
| ☒ | Truck upgrades and mint-on-unlock in the hackathon build | pay-to-win risk | |
| ☒ | A second chain, a React rewrite, the 8-hour spec ride | focus | |
Signed: the driverOdometer at filing: – km, all riders
GO TO MARKET
Read it like a load board at the depot: every lane is a way a driver finds us, RATE is what it costs, FILL is live wherever the server knows the number. No lane carries a number we made up.
FREIGHT CHAIN DISPATCH · LOAD BOARD LIVE · --:--:-- UTC
| LANE | CARGO | RATE | FILL | STATUS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FREE RIDES | 5 at signup, +1 every UTC day. The habit; its own leaderboard and badges. | $0 | – | ROLLING |
| PAID SHIFTS | 1 h / 4 h / 8 h at $5 / $15 / $50 in SOL. Every entry grows the one pot. | in | – | ROLLING · DEVNET |
| THE POT | One global number. Every paid ride changes a page other people are looking at. | 50/20/20/10 | – | ACCRUING |
| LIVE BOARD | Watch without a wallet: who is driving, how far, PAUSED / NO SIGNAL. | $0 | – | BOOKED |
| SHARE PAGE | One URL per finished ride (/r/:id): route, distance, verdict, pot at the time. | a page | – | BID |
| X POSTS | The pot number, one post per paid finish. Account not named yet. | time | – | BID |
| SOLANA CROWDS | People who already sit through long on-chain spectacles and streams; leaderboard chasers. | time | – | BID |
| PLAYTESTS | Five people outside the team on the public URL, Oct 10. Finishes and paid attempts counted – that is the demand number, whatever it is. | 5 favours | – | BID |
| PAID ADS | Not this week. | – | – | NOT LISTED |
| MOBILE WALLETS · REGIONS · KYC | Beyond Phantom / Solflare on desktop: not this week, on purpose. | – | – | NOT LISTED |
COMMISSION 10 % of every weekly pool – the business, once pools pay out.
SEED 20 % carried into next week so the board never shows zero.
THESIS attention is the scarce good; a public clock, a public pot and a public board sell it.
ABOUT
Freight Chain sells proven time-on-road. Desert Run is the first title.
WHY A TRUCK
Desert Bus (1995) was an eight-hour drive from Tucson to Las Vegas at 45 mph for one point. Nobody should have finished it, and people did – and other people watched. The scarce thing was attention. This is that, with the finish decided by a server and the pot in SOL.
BUILT · CUT · NEXT
- Built: the sim, Sign-In With Solana, server-timed rides, on-chain payment check, weekly pool accounting, live feed, boards, badges, this page.
- Cut on purpose: Anchor escrow (memo-checked transfer instead), truck upgrades, mint-on-unlock, Telegram, mainnet.
- Next: the draw and payouts, deterministic replay, a share page per ride.
THE STACK
Vanilla ES modules + three.js in the browser, no bundler. NestJS + SQLite on the server. Phantom / Solflare, System transfer + Memo, SOL/USD from Coinbase then CoinGecko. Solo build for the Colosseum Crypto World's Fair, Sep–Oct 2026; the driving sim predates it and is disclosed in the README.