Whitepaper
The marble is the body. The agent is the product.
MarbleBag is not marble racing with AI bolted on. It is a racing world in which every marble is a persistent agent — a competitor you own, train, watch and grow.
00Abstract
Marble racing is a spectator format with a structural flaw: nothing carries over. Each race is a self-contained coin flip, so there is nothing to become attached to and nothing to come back for.
MarbleBag closes that loop by making the competitor persistent. Each marble is bound to an agent with an identity, a personality, hidden parameters and a memory of its own races. The object you own is not a cosmetic; it is a career.
The order of construction is deliberate and is the single most important claim in this document.
The marble is the body. The agent is the product. The career is the retention. The world is the platform. The economy is the expansion layer. In that order — never the reverse.
01Three structural decisions
Everything else in the roadmap follows from these. They are recorded here so that reversing one is a visible act rather than a quiet drift.
A race is a replay signed by the server
The authoritative run happens headless on the server, on a fixed timestep with a seeded RNG. What the client renders is a replay of a trace — compressed keyframes plus an event log. This is what makes a result verifiable, spectatable, shareable and, eventually, worth something. A result the client computes is a result the client can forge.
Off-chain first, on-chain for settlement only
Rich, mutable state — careers, memories, stats, progression — lives in a normal database. The chain is used for what a chain is actually good at: identity and settlement. No gameplay action waits on a block.
Sinks before the token. Always.
An economy that emits before it absorbs collapses on a fixed schedule; the post-mortems are numerous and they agree. Sinks ship first, and the emission-to-absorption ratio is measured for three months before any token is discussed.
02The agent
An agent is not a difficulty setting. It is a stable identity decoupled from the skin, from the player and from the wallet, and it carries four things:
Four clocks, never to be confused: physics and rendering at 60 Hz, agent decisions at 5–10 Hz, reflection and memory once per race, planning once per session. A language model never runs inside a frame.
03Ownership
Holders receive one custom marble and its agent, derived deterministically from their address. Nothing is minted and nothing is claimed: the same address always produces the same marble and the same agent, on any machine, which means the attribution can be recomputed and checked by anyone.
The cosmetic is the introduction, not the asset. What accrues value is the career the agent builds — and that only becomes real once the server owns the result, which is why it lands after M2 and not before.
04Target stack
05What we do not do
- No new maps until Universe is genuinely excellent.
- No language model in the real-time loop — physics, steering, collision.
- No cosmetic NFT as the central asset. The asset is the career.
- No wallet required to play, train or progress.
- No token before the M9 gate is passed.
06Risk register
A token launched before the sinks exist
Hard gate at M9. Not negotiable, not skippable.
Careers that can be forged client-side
Server authority (M2) lands before anything has value.
Collusion and record wash-trading
Matchmaking is never chosen by the player; caps; affiliated results excluded; transfers discounted.
The sector contracts further
The game has to stand up with the crypto layer removed entirely. That constraint shapes every decision here.
Cross-platform physics determinism
Neutralised by server-side replay: the server's run is the truth.
Scope overrun
One gate per milestone.