How Tournaments Work
A tournament is a time-boxed skill event you join with a single ticket. Tournaments recur on a fixed schedule — daily, weekly, every two weeks and monthly, each starting at 18:00 UTC and shown in your local time — and you can be in as many of them at once as you like. Winners are decided by how well they race, and nothing else.
Tiers
| Tier | Ticket | Prizes | Real money? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sponsorship | Free — no wallet transaction | a purse put up by a sponsor in its own token (USDG by default, or an approved project token such as PONS or CASHCAT), plus EXP and GEARS | real prizes, no payment |
| Open | paid in GEARS, the in-game currency you earn by playing — daily and weekly | GEARS and EXP | no |
| Bronze | $5, paid in USDG or ETH — daily | USDG and ETH | yes |
| Gold | $5, paid in USDG or ETH — weekly | USDG and ETH, plus bikes | yes |
| Platinum | $5, paid in USDG or ETH — every two weeks | USDG and ETH, plus bikes | yes |
| Grand Slam | $5, paid in USDG or ETH — monthly | USDG and ETH, plus bikes | yes |
Paid tickets are strictly opt-in: one wallet transaction each.
Some tournaments set a minimum Account Level — a loyalty gate, not a skill gate: it asks that you’ve put in the laps, and your skill rating never blocks entry. Premium riders skip the level requirement. The bypass is access only: everyone races with the same attempts, the same physics, and lands in the bracket their skill earns.
Every tournament needs a linked wallet before you enter — it’s where a prize is paid and a bike is minted. A tournament with a real-money prize — Sponsorship included — also asks you to accept the tournament rules, and the wallet must pass our safety screening. Accepting the rules is required to race: a ticket bought straight from the contract keeps your seat, and the trail asks you to Accept Rules before your first run.
Your ticket
A ticket is bound to that specific tournament — it isn’t valid anywhere else, can’t be transferred, and one account holds at most one ticket per tournament.
- Sponsorship. Tap the tournament to open it, tick the rules and press Get Ticket: the ticket is taken and your seat is yours in one step — no wallet prompt, nothing to pay. A ticket you already hold from the store shows Enter instead.
- Open. The GEARS entry fee is taken the moment you enter.
- Bronze, Gold, Platinum, Grand Slam. Before you pay you accept the rules and pick USDG or ETH; the popup shows the $5 price in the token you picked, the current purse, the minimum pool and the bonus on top. The ETH price is fixed when the tournament is created. Your entry shows as pending while the purchase confirms and turns active only when it’s seen on-chain.
Taking a Sponsorship ticket and entering are one action, so every taken seat belongs to a rider who is in the race. A ticket held from before still enters with the same button; if the start moves, it moves with it.
Seats
A tournament can cap its field. The seats left number on every card is the real count of tickets already taken — never a made-up figure — and when it reaches zero the tournament reads Sold out and shows when the next one opens.
Schedule
Registration opens a set time before a fixed start, and every card shows when, with a riders / minimum meter. A tournament runs only with its minimum number of riders — usually 15.
A Sponsorship tournament waits for its field: if it is short at the start, the start moves one day later and the card shows Extended, until the sponsor’s last date. Every other tournament starts on time or is canceled.
If a tournament is canceled
A tournament that doesn’t reach its minimum number of riders is canceled before it begins:
- GEARS entry — your GEARS go straight back to your balance and the tournament shows Refunded.
- Paid real-money ticket — the ticket becomes refundable: open the tournament and press Refund; the refund is one wallet transaction you sign, paid from the escrow contract in the token you paid. If you haven’t claimed it after 30 days, we send it back to your wallet ourselves. You either race for the full purse or you get your money back.
- Free Sponsorship ticket — nothing was charged, so there is nothing to refund.
A canceled tournament you entered stays reachable from the tournaments page. A tournament nobody entered is left out of the history.
Trails and attempts
- Trails — the set of tracks in a tournament (a few per event). They’re special tracks made just for tournaments: never in the public list, fixed for the whole event, and never playable outside a tournament. Before the start everyone sees only how many trails there are and their total length; names and courses open at the start, so nobody can practice in advance.
- Attempts — each tournament states a fixed number of tries per trail (three is the usual), and only your best run on each counts. This rewards mastery and consistency, not a single lucky run. Extra attempts are never for sale — every entrant gets the same number. An attempt has to be started before the tournament ends and finished shortly after, so a run can’t be held back and submitted later.
- One run at a time — while one of your tournament runs is live, starting any other race asks you to go Back to run or Give up; an attempt is never spent behind your back by another tab or device.
How placement works
Your placement on each trail earns points, and your points across all the trails combine into your final standing. One bad trail won’t wreck your event, and wildly different tracks stay fairly comparable.
Ties break on total time, then on who set the score first. If riders are still exactly level, the prizes for the places they occupy are added together and split equally — nobody is picked arbitrarily and nobody is paid twice.
Pacers
Some free tournaments carry pacers: house riders run by Data Racing so a young event has a pace to chase, the way racing games show staff ghosts or medal times. Each pacer is ridden by the house autopilot on the same bike physics you ride, and every pacer run is checked like any other run — no time is ever made up. Pacers span skill levels from elite to rookie, so there is a target near your own pace. They are always labelled PACE on the standings, appear only in free tournaments, never take a seat, never place for a prize and never receive one, and never outnumber real riders. The prize places are ranked over players only.
Hall of Fame
The Hall of Fame ranks riders across every tournament they have ever finished. A win is a first place, a podium is any top-three finish; only tournaments that have closed with verified results count, and pacers never appear. Riders rank by wins, then by podiums; when two records are equal, the rider who reached it first stays ahead. The hall is lifetime — it does not reset with seasons.
Fair by design
- Skill only — no betting against other players. You never wager against anyone; you race.
- Best-run scoring across multiple tracks means demonstrated skill decides the result.
- Leading isn’t winning — live standings are marked provisional while the tournament runs. When it ends, the tournament shows Under review while every prize-relevant run is verified; a run that fails verification is removed and the riders below move up. Prizes attach only after that. See Anti-Cheat.
See what you can win in Prizes & Payouts.