Docs

How a contest runs, where the money goes, and what the platform can and cannot do with it. If something here does not match what the product does, the product is right and this page is a bug.

1Overview

A crypto project opens a content contest and puts up a prize in dollars. The full prize is locked in an escrow contract before the contest is visible to anyone. Creators enter by posting on X and submitting the link. People — not a script — judge every entry, and the call is recorded. Winners claim their share straight from the contract.

The platform never holds a key that can move a prize. That single constraint explains most of the decisions in this document.

2Running a contest

You set the brief, the rules, the prize pool and the split between placings. Then you fund it. Until it is funded, nobody can see it.

  • The prize is paid in the dollar of the chain you pick — USDC on Solana, USDG on Robinhood Chain. See Which chains.
  • The split is a table of placings and percentages. It has to add up to the whole pot: less would strand prize money, more would let the last winner find an empty vault.
  • The dates set when entries close, when curation ends, and the deadline you have to settle by.

3The prize and the escrow

Funding transfers the prize into a contract that has no owner. No admin, no pause, no upgrade. Once it is in, nobody at SHILL can move it, redirect it or freeze it.

There is also no cancel. Deposited is deposited. An organizer cannot pull the pot after creators have already produced work — and that is the whole reason a creator can afford to spend three days on an entry.

The contract can never pay out more than what went in, no matter what the organizer publishes afterwards. That cap is checked on every single claim.

4The fee

The protocol fee is 50% of the prize value, charged on top. A $10,000 prize costs the organizer $15,000, and the creators still receive the $10,000 that was announced: the fee is never taken out of the prize.

It is paid in the same transaction as the deposit, and always in the dollar of that chain: USDC on Solana, USDG on Robinhood Chain, which has no canonical USDC. Never in the contest token: a treasury full of partner tokens would have to sell them to convert, which means dumping on the community of the project that just paid.

The fee is the same asset as the prize, so funding a contest needs one approval and one asset in your wallet, not two.

The fee goes straight from the organizer to the treasury. The escrow contract never touches it, so there is no protocol balance sitting inside it for anyone to withdraw.

The rate is fixed and the same for everybody. No tiers, no negotiation — a fee that changes per customer is a fee nobody can trust.

5Where the fee goes

The protocol has two sources of revenue, and both are split the same way: half buys $SHILL on the open market and burns it, half runs the platform.

  • Contest fees — the 50% charged to organizers when they fund.
  • $SHILL creator fees — what the token itself earns on the venue it launches on.

The half that runs the platform pays for curation, infrastructure and audits. Curation is people reading posts every day; promising 100% to the burn would be promising that those people work for free.

Every buyback and burn appears in analytics with the transaction that did it.

$SHILL has not launched. Until it does, no burn has happened and the burn figures are zero — not hidden, not estimated. Zero.

6Entering a contest

Connect your X account, read the rules, then enter. Entering is an explicit act and it timestamps that you saw the rules as they were at that moment.

You can leave while you have no entry in. Once you have submitted, you cannot — deleting your participation while a piece of yours is still in the queue would hide the author of work that is still competing.

Authorship is proved by the handle. The handle in the post URL has to match the handle on your X session. It is free, it is instant, and it stops the most common fraud: taking someone else’s post.

7How entries are judged

Every submission runs through the rule engine first. It separates what can be proved from what cannot.

  • Blocking — things we can check, like a missing hashtag or cashtag, a wrong content type, a post outside the contest window.
  • Warning — things only a person can settle, like whether a clip is actually about the token.

Nothing is approved automatically. Without the paid X API we cannot read the post, so the best an automated check can reach is needs review. A warning is never silently marked as passed — that would turn curation into theatre.

A curator opens the post, decides, scores it, and records the view count they see. That number is the one the ranking uses.

The organizer curates their own contest and may invite judges to help. A judge decides entries and issues cards there and nothing more — funding, settling and freezing the ranking never leave the organizer.

8The ranking

Inside a contest, entries are ordered by views, with the curation score breaking ties. The ranking cannot be frozen while any approved entry is missing a view count or a score: if the column shows one number and the order comes from another, the screen is lying.

The global ranking orders creators by views accumulated across approved entries. Those counts are read off the post by the curator who judged it, never pulled from an API.

10If the organizer disappears

The organizer cannot settle before curation ends. That gap is the dispute window, and it is enforced by the contract, not by a calendar — it is the time a creator has to contest a manipulated placing, because a payout cannot be reversed.

Past the settlement deadline, anyone can trigger the payout. Sitting on the pot never gives it back; it only costs the organizer the right to choose who gets paid.

  • If the ranking was frozen in time, the prize goes out exactly as announced. The placings come from the frozen order; the amounts come from a table written into the vault on the day of the deposit and never editable since.
  • If nobody ranked anything, it splits equally among the entries curation approved. Not everyone who entered — rejected work would be paid for exactly what curation filters out. And not winners, because in this path nobody ranked anything.

Either way, a verified wallet on that chain is required. If a missing wallet could block the payout, one entrant could freeze everybody else’s money.

The fallback needs to know who curation approved, and that is the one thing it cannot read off the chain. So SHILL publishes the approved list, and re-publishes it on every curation decision — not once at the end, which would leave a window where the organizer disappears and no list exists. It is the only key the platform holds, and it chooses who is on the list, never how much anyone gets: the amounts come from the table written into the vault on the day of the deposit.

There is no emergency exit. The contract has no cancel, no timeout and no way to sweep an unclaimed share. That is what makes the deposit a real commitment rather than a gesture — and it also means that if the approved list is never published, the prize stays in the vault permanently. Nobody can retrieve it, including us.

11Which chains

Solana and Robinhood Chain.

Prizes are paid in the dollar of the chain you pick: USDC on Solana, USDG on Robinhood Chain. Choosing the chain chooses the asset, so there is no token address to paste and no decimals to get wrong.

A creator spends days producing before they know what they will receive. A dollar is worth a dollar on the day they claim, which is the one promise the escrow can keep on its own — it guarantees the tokens are there, never that they are worth anything.

Paying a prize in a project’s own token is not open yet. The escrow handles any token the platform can price, and the rule would be if we cannot price it, we will not let you promise it — but pricing covers price, not depth, and a token can be priceable and still be impossible to sell in size.

12Verified accounts

A gold badge marks a verified organization, a blue badge a verified person. The colour says what kind of account it is, the same convention X uses.

Only SHILL grants them, and only SHILL removes them. There is no application form and no queue: the moment verification becomes a form, it becomes currency. Hovering a badge says exactly what was checked.

13Discipline

Cards are issued against a person, not a contest: someone who copies work in one contest copies it in the next, so the record travels with them. Blue lasts two months, yellow one, red is permanent. Two active blues become a yellow automatically.

Whoever issued a card can revoke it — a curation mistake cannot be final. The public wall only shows active cards: keeping someone exposed after the punishment expired would be a permanent penalty for something the rule itself defines as temporary.

14Beta limits

During beta a prize is capped, and the platform holds a limited amount across all contests at any one time. The caps live in the application and not in the contract: the contract has no owner, so a limit written there would be permanent.

The escrow contract is not deployed on any chain yet. The application currently runs against a simulated escrow, which is why no fee has been collected and no burn has happened.

15Glossary

  • Escrow vault — the contract holding one contest’s prize. One per contest, no owner.
  • Settlement — the organizer publishing who won, which opens claiming.
  • Fallback payout — what happens when the organizer misses the deadline. Anyone can trigger it.
  • Dispute window — between the end of curation and the settlement deadline, when a placing can still be contested.
  • Attester — the key that publishes who was approved and in what order, so the fallback has something to pay against. It chooses who, never how much.
  • Verified wallet — an address whose owner signed a one-time nonce. Required to receive a prize.