Gauntlet documentation
Read this before you play for money
Gauntlet is a first-person shooter where eliminations pay out of the match pot and the pot lives in a contract you can withdraw from yourself. This page explains exactly how that works, what the game decides, what the contract enforces, and what is not finished yet.
What is Gauntlet
Gauntlet is a skill-based competitive shooter built in Unreal Engine 5 and settled on Robinhood Chain. You stake to enter an arena, you fight other players in a free-for-all, and every elimination you get is worth money from the pot that everyone in the match staked. When the round ends, the payouts are written onchain in one transaction.
The distinguishing idea is not that the game pays you. Several games do that. It is where the money sits while you play. Gauntlet does not run a private ledger with a withdrawal button we control. Your stake and your winnings sit in a contract, credited to your address, and the rules that protect them are enforced by that contract rather than by our promise.
Getting started
1. Download the Windows client
Gauntlet is a downloadable PC client for 64-bit Windows 10 and 11, built on Unreal Engine 5. Playtest builds go to invited players first, and invites are announced from @GauntletRH and nowhere else. Nobody from Gauntlet will ever DM you a build.
2. Play free first
You do not need a wallet, a balance, or any crypto to play. Practice arenas are free and always will be. A wallet only becomes relevant when you want to enter a staked match or withdraw something you have won.
3. Connect a wallet and sign in
Staked play uses an EVM wallet on Robinhood Chain, and that wallet is your Gauntlet identity. There is no username and no password to lose.
Connecting runs three steps, and you approve each one in your own wallet:
- Share an address. The wallet asks which account you want to use.
- Switch to Robinhood Chain. If the network is not in your wallet yet, it offers to add it. Chain ID
4663. - Sign the sign-in message. A plain-text message naming the site, your address, the chain and a one-time nonce. This is a signature, not a transaction: it moves no funds and costs no gas.
Signing out just forgets the address on your device. It does not move anything and it does not affect your escrow balance, which is tied to the address itself.
4. Deposit, then join
You deposit into the escrow contract once, and that balance is what you spend to enter matches. You can withdraw whatever is not currently staked in a live match at any time.
How a match works
A Gauntlet match is a short free-for-all round on a single arena. Everyone in the lobby is an opponent. There are no teams to carry you and no objective to farm; the only thing that earns is elimination.
Join
You stake into the match pot from your escrow balance. The pot is the sum of everyone's entry.
Fight
Free-for-all until the round timer ends. Deaths cost you your entry, not your whole balance.
Settle
The server signs the result and the contract pays every earner from the pot in one transaction.
Cash out
Winnings land in your escrow balance. Withdraw to your wallet whenever you like.
Matches are hosted on dedicated servers that we run. The server is authoritative: hit registration, deaths and scoring are decided server-side, never by your client or anyone else's.
Stakes and payouts
Every arena runs at a stake tier. Your entry buys you into the pot for that round, and each elimination you record pays a bounty out of that same pot. The money you win comes from the other players in your match, minus the platform fee. Gauntlet does not print rewards and there is no emission to farm.
| Event | Effect on your balance |
|---|---|
| Enter a match | Your entry moves from your balance into the match pot. |
| Eliminate a player | You earn a bounty from the pot, credited when the round settles. |
| Get eliminated | You lose your entry for that round. Anything already in your balance is untouched. |
| Round ends unsettled | After a timeout every player in that match can reclaim their share of the pot. |
Your balance
Your escrow balance is held by the contract against your wallet address. It is not an account on our servers, and we cannot spend it, freeze it, or move it somewhere else.
- Deposits are a transaction from your wallet into the contract. Nothing is credited until the chain confirms it.
- Withdrawals go straight from the contract to your wallet. There is no minimum, no queue and no manual approval.
- Pausing does not touch withdrawals. If we pause the game, new deposits and new matches stop; taking your money out keeps working. This is enforced in the contract, not a policy.
- Only what you staked is at risk. Entering a match moves your entry into the pot for that round. The rest of your balance is not exposed to the match at all.
The escrow contract
The contract is deliberately small and deliberately dumb. It knows nothing about shooting. It cannot tell who is winning. It enforces a short list of rules about money that hold no matter what the game server says.
| Rule | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| Conservation per match | A match can never pay out more than its own pot, minus the fee. Winnings cannot be conjured from another match's money. |
| Participants only | Only addresses that actually staked into a match can be paid from it. A stranger cannot be inserted into a payout. |
| Paid at most once | Each address can be paid once per match. A settlement cannot be replayed to pay someone twice. |
| Ordered settlement | Payout batches are numbered and must arrive in order, so an old signed batch cannot be resubmitted later. |
| Refund on timeout | If a match is never settled, its stakers reclaim the pot pro rata after the deadline. A dead server cannot hold money hostage. |
| Fee ceiling | The platform fee is capped at 5% in the contract. Nobody can raise it past that, including us. |
| Withdrawals always open | Withdrawing is not gated on the pause switch. There is no state in which the game is running and your exit is closed. |
| No upgrade path | The contract is not upgradeable and has no admin function that can move a player balance. Changing the rules means deploying a new contract in public. |
What the server actually decides
One thing: who got the kill. The game server holds a key that signs match results, and that is the full extent of its authority. If that key were stolen, the attacker could misattribute bounties inside a match. They could not mint money, drain the contract, pay a non-participant, pay anyone twice, or stop you withdrawing. Everything in the table above still holds.
How a round settles
- The dedicated server opens the match onchain when the round starts.
- Every accepted elimination is posted to the settlement service as it happens, with the identifiers needed to attribute it.
- When the round ends, the service totals the bounties, checks them against the pot, and signs the payout list.
- The contract verifies the signature, re-checks every rule above, and credits each earner's balance.
- Anything the settlement leaves undistributed, plus the fee, goes to the treasury. The pot is fully accounted for.
Large lobbies settle in batches. Each batch is checked against the pot on its own, so a partially settled match can never overpay, and if settlement stops halfway the refund path still returns the remainder fairly to everyone who staked.
Fees
- Platform fee: taken from the match pot, capped at 5% by the contract.
- Deposit and withdrawal fees: none from us. You pay the network's gas, which on Robinhood Chain is a fraction of a cent.
- Hidden spreads: none. Matches are staked and paid in the same asset.
Arenas
Four arenas ship in the current build. All of them are built for short, dense rounds with short rotations and no safe corner to sit in.
Bistro
A European side street of shuttered storefronts and awnings. Tight sightlines and constant flanking.
Abandoned Factory
A derelict works of brick halls, gantries and courtyards. Verticality and blind corners.
Military Trenches
Cut earthworks and sandbag lines. Fights collapse into corridors where reflex wins.
City
Open plazas ringed by hard cover. Easiest to learn, hardest to hold a lead on.
Weapons and operators
Loadouts are chosen before you spawn: a primary, a secondary, a lethal and a perk. Weapons are licensed, realistically modelled firearms with recoil and handling tuned per weapon rather than per rarity tier.
Fair play
Because eliminations are worth money, they are treated as financial events, not just score. The server records them and the settlement service filters them before anything is signed.
- Server-authoritative. Kills come from the authoritative server. A modified client cannot report a kill.
- Bots do not pay. Eliminating a bot is worth nothing. Only human-versus-human eliminations carry a bounty.
- Self-kills and team kills are unpaid. Both are rejected outright.
- Duplicates are collapsed. The same death cannot be counted twice, and retried reports are de-duplicated by event id.
- Farming is visible. Repeated eliminations of the same player by the same player, and abnormal kill rates, are recorded and reviewable. Matches that look like collusion are not settled.
Cheating in Gauntlet is not just against other players' fun, it is against their money. Accounts caught manipulating results lose access to staked play.
Network
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Chain | Robinhood Chain, an Ethereum layer 2 |
| Chain ID | 4663 mainnet, 46630 testnet |
| Asset | Native ETH. No custom token is involved in staking or payouts. |
| Wallets | Any EVM wallet that can add a custom network |
| Escrow address | Published here and from @GauntletRH when it is deployed. Verify it here before you send anything. |
| Token address | Not deployed. When the token launches its address is published here first. Any address circulating before that is not ours. |
Build status
What is finished and what is not, kept current rather than aspirational.
| Component | State | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Game client | Playable | Unreal Engine 5 build, four arenas, dedicated servers, full weapon and operator set. |
| Escrow contract | In testing | Written and covered by tests for conservation, replay, refunds and fee caps. Not deployed to mainnet. |
| Settlement service | In testing | Signs and submits results. End-to-end rehearsal passes against a local chain. |
| Testnet play | Next | Full loop on Robinhood Chain testnet with no real value at stake. |
| Real-money matches | Not open | Every build ships with the economy in demo mode. Paid entry stays off until testnet play, an independent contract review and the legal work are done. |
Safety
- Gauntlet will never ask for your seed phrase or private key. Nobody legitimate ever will.
- Signing in is a free signature. If a site asks you to send funds to connect or verify, it is a scam.
- The only official channels are this documentation, the main site, and @GauntletRH. We do not DM first and we do not run giveaways.
- Always check the contract address on this page before depositing, and read what your wallet is asking you to approve.
Risks and disclaimers
Gauntlet is a competitive game played for money. You can lose your stake. Losing is the normal outcome of a round you do not win, and there is no mechanism that makes you whole.
- Skill-based, not chance-based. Outcomes are decided by play. That does not make losses less real.
- Crypto assets carry risk. ETH has a fluctuating market price and its value can move sharply while your balance sits in the contract.
- Smart contracts can have bugs. Ours is tested and will be independently reviewed before real-money play opens. Review reduces risk; it does not remove it.
- Jurisdiction matters. Skill-based competition for money is restricted or prohibited in some places. Paid play will be limited to jurisdictions where it is permitted, and you are responsible for the rules where you live.
- Only stake what you can afford to lose. Nothing here is financial advice.