Documentation · Season 1

How Portico works

The full rules, including the parts that are unflattering. Every number on this page is computed from the same configuration the game runs on, so it cannot drift out of date. If the game and this page disagree, the game is right and this page has a bug.

What Portico is

An idle city builder on a coastal district of twelve lots. Buildings produce on a timer whether or not you are watching. You collect, you upgrade, and at level 10 and 20 each building is physically rebuilt into something grander.

The part that makes it more than a game: every lot is a stream into a real tokenized asset on Solana. Arcade Row pays GME. Tensor Foundry pays NVDA. The Vault pays SGOV, a 0-3 month Treasury bill fund. Banking your pending balance credits each asset in proportion to what its lot produced, and the real token withdraws to your own wallet.

Withdrawals are not open yet. The treasury holds nothing today, and the server refuses to sign a voucher it cannot honour rather than let you pay fees for a transaction that would fail. What you earn is recorded in units of the asset and waits for you; nothing about it expires.

You never accrue dollars that get converted later. You accrue fractions of the asset itself, at a fixed published rate of 0.00001 units per point. No price enters the system, so there is no oracle to manipulate and no gap between what the ledger says and what the payout is worth.

On top of that, 10% of the token supply is divided between players at the close, in proportion to the points they banked.

The twelve assets

The assets are xStocks, equities tokenized by Backed Finance and held 1:1 with real shares at a regulated custodian. Every mint below was read directly off Solana and checked one by one. Be careful if you go looking yourself: searching by symbol returns dozens of mints, and most of them are impersonations.

The heaviest streams sit behind the deepest progression. The Vault at 1.4 and Index Spire at 1.6 unlock at account level 26 and 30, and they pay a Treasury bill fund and an S&P 500 tracker rather than a single company.

Cash is not points

Two currencies, and confusing them is the most common mistake. Cash is what buildings pay out. It only ever buys more city: new lots, upgrades, boosts. It has no value outside the game and it is not counted at the close.

Points accrue on a clock, in the background, at a rate your city determines. You never collect points by tapping. Building a bigger city raises your points rate; that is the entire connection between the two.

The loop

• Register a lot. Empty lots carry a dashed outline. They unlock by account level, from level 1 up to level 30.
• Collect. Cash stacks above each building. Collect several inside a couple of seconds and a combo multiplier stacks with them.
• Upgrade. Each level costs ×1.17 more than the last and shortens the production cycle.
• Evolve. Level 10 makes a Complex, worth ×3. Level 20 makes a Landmark, worth ×8. These two jumps dwarf everything else.

The maths, exactly

Your points rate per day is an account floor plus what every building contributes:

rate/day = baseRate(level) + Σ [ 0.25 × (1 + 0.06 × lot level) × tier × weight ]

• baseRate is 1.12 at level 1, 17.9 at level 10, 22.9 at level 20, 27.6 at level 40. It climbs logarithmically, so it front-loads hard and then flattens.
• tier is ×1 below level 10, ×3 from 10, ×8 from 20.
• weight is per lot, from ×0.6 to ×1.6. All twelve together sum to ×11.4.

What that means in practice

Run those formulas over a realistic save and the shape of the season becomes obvious:

Three things fall out of that table, and two of them are not obvious.

Early on, your account level matters more than your buildings. At level 12 the account floor is 19.3 of a 21.3 total. Levelling up beats optimising which lot to upgrade next. That inverts once your buildings reach Landmark.

The 200/day playing cap never binds in real play. Even a level 80 city with twelve lots at level 40 produces 110/day. The cap exists to bound the pathological case, not to limit you. We would rather tell you that than let you think you are racing a ceiling.

The idle cap is the one that actually bites, and only late. It starts costing you real points once your raw rate passes 50/day, which happens around the point your district is all Landmarks. Before that, idling and playing accrue the same amount.

Caps

• Idle: 30/day below level 10, 50/day from level 10.
• Playing: 200/day. Counted as playing when your action counters advance, not when a tab is open.
• Shared budget. Idle and playing draw from the same 200/day. They do not stack.
• Coming back after days away credits at most one day of the idle cap, not one per day absent. Offline accrual is deliberately bounded.
• New accounts cannot bank for the first 7 minutes.

Banking

Points accrue into a pending balance. Only banked points count for the claim. The window opens every 10 minutes with no minimum.

Holding pays: an unbanked balance gains +1% per day held, capped at +15%, applied at the moment you bank. The bonus resets to zero after each bank, so the choice is real. Bank often for certainty, or hold 15 days for the maximum.

The twelve lots

Weight is the only thing that separates them for points. A Landmark Index Spire is worth 2.7× a Landmark Arcade Row at the same level, which is why the late lots are gated behind level 30.

The claim

Season 1 runs 10 weeks. At the close: final snapshot, token minted on Solana, liquidity on a Solana DEX, claim program opens.

your share = your banked points ÷ all banked points × 10% of supply

You need 500 banked points to be eligible. The claim window is limited and anything unclaimed rolls into the next season's treasury.

There is no holder multiplier this season because there is no token to hold yet. Season 1 is a flat field. That is the point.

What is actually onchain

Not the game. Signing a transaction to collect a coin would be miserable and nobody would play, so we do not pretend otherwise. Three things are onchain, and they are the three that need to be provable:

• Your identity. You sign a message with your Solana wallet. It is free, it is not a transaction, and it moves nothing. We never ask for a signature that spends.
• A weekly checkpoint. Every week the Merkle root of the points ledger goes on Solana mainnet. Once a week is published, those standings cannot be rewritten by anyone, including us. This is the part that makes the leaderboard mean something.
• The claim. A Merkle airdrop program at the close, paying each account on proof of its final balance.

Cheating

The points ledger is computed on the server from your declared progress and the server's own clock. The browser only displays a forecast. Editing local storage, or patching the bundle, changes what you see and nothing that counts.

Being counted as playing requires your action counters to advance, and to advance by an amount that is reachable given the buildings you own and their cycle times. A script clicking into an empty page stays on the idle cap.

It is still not airtight, and we would rather say so. Someone who simulates plausible play can pass the check. Closing that fully would mean replaying the entire simulation server-side, which is not worth it for one season. Between the daily caps, the 7-minute hold and the 500-point floor, a fake account has to be played convincingly for hours before it is worth anything. That raises the cost. It does not make it impossible.

Straight answers

Do I need to buy anything?

No. There is nothing for sale and points cannot be bought.

Can I buy the token now?

No. It does not exist. There is no presale and no whitelist. Anyone offering you Portico tokens today is running a scam.

What will points be worth?

Unknown. A point is a share of a fixed allocation, and what that share is worth depends on a market that has not opened. Nobody can tell you, and anyone who does is guessing or selling.

Can I play without a wallet?

Yes, and your progress saves locally. You need a Solana wallet — Phantom, Solflare or anything that signs — to bank points, to appear on the leaderboard, and to claim. Points do not accrue to an account that does not exist.

What if I stop playing halfway through?

Banked points stay banked. Your city keeps accruing at the idle cap, so you keep gaining slowly. Nothing is lost or decayed.

Is it better to bank often or to hold?

Holding 15 days is worth +15%. There is no risk to holding beyond forgetting to do it, since pending points are not lost. The only cost is that unbanked points do not count until they are banked.

Is this financial advice?

No. Points are a game score, not a security. Play it because building the city is fun, and treat the drop as a bonus rather than a plan.