The Cookout Menu

The Cookout is a live multiplayer trading game. Every match at the Cook Out is a brand-new token created for that match by a community creator. It opens through a fair batch auction, trades live for a few minutes in front of a crowd, then ends one of three ways: graduation, timer, or a rug.

It is not a simulated casino chart. Every candle you see is made of real trades by real players against a real market. During the paper beta all balances are simulated (pETH), so the competition is real and the risk is zero.

Getting in takes under a minute: sign in with an email, Google, X, or your own wallet and you're at the Cook Out. No whitelist, nothing to deposit. The beta is free to play. How accounts work →

The Cookout is in open beta: no whitelist, no waves, no crypto knowledge required. Hit Play Now and sign in with an email, Google, X, or an existing wallet (login is handled by Privy). That's the whole onboarding.

Every account comes with its own wallet address under the hood, created automatically and secured by your login. That address is your identity: your XP, level, match history, and leaderboard runs all hang off it. You never sign transactions or manage keys to play; the blockchain stays in the background.

Your money lives in your ⚡ Cook Out Balance (in the profile menu):

• Cook Out balance: the stake matches can spend. Your starter 10 pETH is staked here automatically on sign-up so you can walk straight into a lobby.
• Bank: the rest of your paper money. Safe, can't trade. Move funds between bank and Cook Out any time you're not queued into a match.
• Your wallet: the real on-chain address behind your login, shown with its live balance. Real deposits, withdrawals, and funding your Cook Out balance with real ETH open at mainnet; during the beta everything you play with is pETH.

During the beta, matches are kept busy by our Swarm: house traders that behave differently every round, so there's always a market to out-trade. As real players fill the lobbies, they take the Swarm's seats.

The crowd also hangs out in our Telegram, where launches, live matches, and wins get called out as they happen. Join the group and pull up.

1. Scheduled: the match is booked at the Cook Out. You see the theme; the token stays a teaser until the lobby opens.
2. Lobby: token revealed. Check the tokenomics panel, the crowd size, and make your Moon-or-Rug call.
3. Queue open: submit buy intents into the batch auction. The live bid board shows everyone entering with you.
4. Settling: the queue closes at a fixed time and every fill settles at one clearing price, in one shot.
5. Live: continuous trading until the round ends. Watch the graduation bars and the kill feed.
6. Results: winners, superlatives, XP, achievements, leaderboard moves.

On every other launchpad, the open is won by whoever has the fastest bot. Here, speed buys nothing:

• Buy intents queue until a fixed close time. Arrival order is irrelevant.
• Everyone settles at one uniform clearing price: first bid and last bid pay exactly the same.
• If the round is oversubscribed, every intent is filled pro-rata: never by price priority, never first-come-first-served.
• You can set a max price; if the clearing price lands above it, you're fully refunded.
• Every settlement publishes an audit hash you can recompute yourself from the public intents and our open-source clearing math.

Once the auction settles, it's a real market: your buys push price up, sells push it down, 1-second candles, everything visible to the crowd. The chart shows market-cap view. Big buys and sells pop tagged bubbles right on the chart. A 🔥 Cooking tag means volume is running hot.

Fees are flat and published: 1% per trade, 0.5% on auction fills. That fee stream is the only thing the house ever earns. Player losses always go to other players, never to us.

A round ends the moment any of these fire:

• 🎓 Graduation: market cap, volume, and holder targets all met (watch the bonding bars above the chart). The token becomes a Cook Out Alumni; holders keep their position.
• ⏱ Timer / low volume: the round hits its max length or goes quiet. Every remaining holder exits automatically at one uniform redemption price: the same rate for everyone, no exit-order games, always liquid.
• 🔥 Rug: the pool drains hard, or the creator dumps their own bag. Specifically, a launch is pulled once the creator has sold 75% of the most they ever held of their own coin (cumulative, not one trade). Trimming a little to take profit is fine. The kill feed calls it Burnt. Rugging tanks the creator's reputation and earns their wallet a launch ban (see Reputation & Rug Bans). This is the full ruleset, and it applies in Classic and Pressure matches. Blitz and Reflex run with rug rules off, so there is no auto-rug at all (see Game Modes). Creator sells are also time-locked briefly after the open when rug rules are on.

Rounds last minutes, exposure is capped on lower tiers, and there is no such thing as being stuck holding an unsellable token here.

Every coin launches in one of four curated game modes. A mode bundles two things: how long the match runs, and whether rug rules are on. The creator picks it at launch, and you'll see it as a badge on the coin card so you know what you're walking into.

Standard rules (Classic & Pressure): the full ruleset. The dev-dump rug, the pool-drain rug detector, and the brief dev sell lock all apply, exactly as described in Rugs, Redemption & Graduation.

Rug rules off (Blitz & Reflex): no auto-rug, no drain detector, no dev sell lock. Nobody gets rugged. The coin simply runs its clock, and the price action is the whole game. The dev can trade their own bag freely with no reputation hit. These modes run on thin liquidity, so they are fast and violent by design.

Pull-up cap: each mode also sets the Fair Open cap, the most the opening batch auction accepts. It is shown when you launch and on the coin's pull-up meter. If pull-ups go past the cap, everyone settles pro-rata at one price and the unfilled part is refunded to your Cook Out balance, so the cap sizes how much can pile into the open.

⏱️ Over Time (modifier): an optional toggle you can add to your coin at launch. Near the end, if the coin is still cooking (trade volume, liquidity, and market cap), it earns a bonus minute so a banger gets to run, up to a few extra minutes. A quiet, dying coin gets nothing and no overlay. It can save a coin and turn it into a winner at the last moment.

🕛 Endurance: the plain launchpad, for when you just want to launch a coin instead of playing a timed round. There is no clock — it opens with the same Fair Open and then keeps trading until the coin completes its bonding curve and serves up. It's strictly PvP: no bot swarm ever trades an Endurance coin, and no modifiers can be added. Endurance runs on its own track, so any number can be live at once alongside the timed matches — but it still has to clear the community vote to start. Active Endurance launches get their own queue on the Cook Out page; when one serves up it lands in Past Results under Endurance.

No dev rug in Endurance. There are no rug mechanics here at all — no dev-dump auto-rug, no pool-drain rug, no dev sell lock, no reputation hit and no launch ban. The reason is simple: the developer has to fair-enter their own coin through the same Fair Open as everyone else, at the same pull-up cap, with no pre-allocated bag. They hold nothing you could be rugged of, so if they sell, they're just a trader selling — the price takes it and the market moves on.

What you do get is visibility. Every developer sell is called out immediately with the dev's name and profile picture: a full-screen banner in the arena, a callout on the chart, a highlighted line in the event feed, and a message in the match chat. A dev dumping their own coin isn't punished by the rules — it just tells the room the dev isn't serious about it, and everyone can price that in.

Beta: every mode is open to everyone from level 1, so you can try them all.

The Pit is a bonus game mode that lives next to the Cook Out. Instead of trading against other players, you go up against The Flame Goon Squad AI — an adaptive AI that runs believable market stories (accumulation, momentum runs, fake recoveries, panic selloffs, late rugs). It launches straight from The Pit page, no vote.

A creator picks a duration — ⚡ Blitz (1m), 🔥 Standard (5m), 🧠 Marathon (10m) — and one or both game modes:

• 🔮 Prediction market. A real betting market with player-chosen wager sizes. Place a Main prediction — Graduate, Rug, or Timer — and optionally the featured House Special, a rotating side bet (Early Rug, Photo Finish, Dead Market, and more). The net pool is split between the two winner groups by an admin allocation (e.g. 75% Main / 25% House); within each group, winners split pro-rata to their wager. Call both correctly for the Double Down Bonus. You can edit or withdraw your bets any time until the round goes live.
• ⚔️ Battle the Flame Goon Squad AI. Pay a buy-in and trade an equal paper stack against the Goons. It's a race against the other traders — the highest PnL when the bell rings takes the whole pool (ties split).

A match needs two bets in each enabled pool before a short countdown starts and it goes live. Winnings and entries flow through your Cook Out balance and the ledger, and every Pit match earns profile XP that also counts toward the Weekly Jackpot.

Entry fees & the split

A small Pit fee (10%) is skimmed off every entry before it funds a pool. Here's where that fee goes:

No carryover. If a pool goes unclaimed (nobody called it right, or nobody traded), that money is swept into the Weekly Jackpot — Pit pools never carry into the next match.

Every creator carries a public reputation score: it's on your profile, your public profile, and your creator page for anyone to check before they vote your coin up.

When a coin you launched rugs, your wallet earns a launch ban. A ban blocks one thing only: putting new coins on the ballot. You can still trade every match, chat in The Grill, earn XP, and climb the leaderboard exactly as before. Banned players just wear a 🚫 banned badge on their name in chat until the ban lifts.

How you clear a ban depends on the phase you're playing in. Your Profile always shows which applies to you, in the Reputation panel:

• Paper beta: self-serve. A rug ban is a lesson, not a sentence. Open your Reputation panel and hit Clear my ban to lift it yourself and get back to launching. The rug still stays on your record forever. Reputation remembers, even after the ban is gone.
• Real-money phases: wait it out. Bans lift themselves on a timer, and repeat rugs wait longer each time. Your Reputation panel shows a live countdown to when you're clear.

Either way, the whole history lives on your creator page: every launch, every graduation, and every rug. Reputation is the point. It's what tells the crowd whether your next coin is worth a vote.

Under every game mode sits an economics tier that sets the liquidity depth, position caps, and dev sell lock. Classic and Pressure run on standard; Blitz and Reflex run on degen. You don't pick a tier directly anymore, the mode does it for you, but here's what each one means for the market:

Deep liquidity means gentle moves; thin liquidity means violence. During the beta the unlock levels are all set to 1 so everyone can try every mode. They come back as a progression gate later.

You earn XP every round regardless of profit: participation, first buys, diamond hands, perfect exits, rug survival, and more. Every point counts toward your level for life. Levels never reset. Each bracket carries a title that rides next to your name everywhere. (Risk tiers used to unlock with levels; during the beta every tier is open, so you can play any game mode right away.) The curve steepens as you climb (XP to reach a level ≈ 80·(L−1)^1.6).

Badges, titles, chat colors, and frames unlock from levels, achievements, season placements, and the monthly season pass. Full detail on earning XP is in Quests & Earning XP; the complete badge list is under Badges & Achievements. Everything cosmetic is earned; nothing is for sale that affects play.

Every trade on The Cookout feeds a single, site-wide Weekly Jackpot: a shared prize pot that pays out to the top players every week.

• Trading fills it. 30% of every trading fee across the whole site flows into the pot (half of the platform's house cut). Nothing is minted for it. It's pure fee revenue, so a busy week directly means a bigger jackpot. There is no cap.
• XP wins it. When the week closes (Monday 00:00 UTC), the top 10 players by XP earned that week split the pot. It rewards playing, not just profit, and it resets every week, so newcomers and veterans compete on the same clock.
• 1st, 2nd and 3rd take the most, then the shares taper down through 10th: 25% · 18% · 14% · 10% · 8% · 7% · 6% · 5% · 4% · 3%.
• Paid automatically. During the paper beta, winnings land in your paper balance and show as trophies on your public profile. In production the same payout goes out as real ETH to the winning wallet addresses.
• It only grows. If fewer than 10 players earned XP in a week, the unclaimed shares roll into next week's pot.

The live pot, this week's standings, the full fee breakdown, and past payouts are all on the Jackpot page.

XP is the whole game. It sets your level, unlocks tiers and cosmetics, and decides the Weekly Jackpot. You earn it from many places, and the way to the top of the board is always playing well and often, never spamming one action. Every source:

Daily quests · 4 of these 24 rotate in each day

The board reseeds every day at 00:00 UTC (always with at least one easy starter). Clear all 4 for a +50 XP sweep bonus.

Weekly challenges · all 14 live all week

They reset Monday 00:00 UTC with the jackpot week. Clear the whole set for a +400 XP bonus.

Streaks · show up, get paid

Lifetime milestone ladders · never reset

Monthly season pass · free track

Your season XP climbs a free monthly track, with no paid tier, ever. Hit the marks for XP kickers and pass-exclusive cosmetics, then it resets for a fresh climb.

Track all of it (quests, streaks, milestones, and your pass) on your profile.

One anti-farm rule worth knowing. The “grind” sources (trade XP, daily quests, and just showing up) are capped at 1,000 XP a week toward the jackpot. Past that, only skill, competition, streaks, and milestones keep counting. You can't out-grind the board, you have to out-play it, which is exactly why the jackpot stays fair when it's paying real ETH.

Badges are earned once and displayed on your profile forever. Each pays one-time XP scaled by rarity: common 25 · rare 60 · epic 120 · legendary 300. Rarer badges are harder plays. The registry grows over time. Every one live today:

The Grill is the always-on chat that follows you across the whole site. It never logs out and never leaves the screen. It lives in the dock at the bottom-left corner: a small tab when closed (showing who's online and an unread count), the full console when open. Here's the console, labelled:

Three things share the dock, switched by the tabs up top:

• 💬 Chat: the conversation. It has channels (see below).
• Feed: a live ticker of what players are doing right now: pull-ups, wins, rekts, graduations, level-ups. Flip it to Following to see only people you follow.
• People: everyone online, grouped by what they're doing (trading, in queue, spectating, hanging out). Tap a name to open their card and follow them.

Channels

Chat isn't one firehose. It's split into channels so the right talk reaches the right people, and the dock switches you automatically as you move around the site:

Good to know

• Newest message sits at the bottom and the log auto-scrolls to it, like every chat app you already use.
• 📌 Pinned: a pinned announcement sits above the log and stays put; house tips and launch/result banners fade out on their own after 30 seconds so the channel doesn't clog.
• Emoji & spam bar: the emoji picker drops into your message at the cursor; the quick-react bar fires single emoji Twitch-style, one tap each.
• Your name carries your level and any equipped badge/color. A 🚫 banned tag means that wallet has an active rug ban. They can still chat, they just can't launch coins (see Reputation).
• Match rooms freeze when the round ends. You can still read the legendary moments, but new messages move to The Grill.

1. Submit a concept on the Launchpad: name, symbol, theme, art, your own total supply, and a game mode (Classic, Pressure, Blitz, or Reflex). The mode sets the match length and whether rug rules apply. Tokens deploy from the platform template only. You never supply code, and no mint/pause/blacklist functions exist.
2. The community votes. 10 upvotes sends your coin straight to the Cook Out in your chosen mode; the window closes after 24 hours. While it's up for a vote, hit the 𝕏 Shill button on your coin's vote card to fire off a ready-made post (with the coin card art and a link to vote) to your followers.
3. Your round runs. You earn 30% of the round's trading fees, reputation for clean launches (double for graduations), and a permanent "Launched by" credit. In Classic and Pressure you can trade your own coin freely, but dumping 75% of your holdings rugs it, which tanks your reputation and bans you from launching until the ban clears. A live rug meter on your trading screen shows how close your selling is to the line. In Blitz and Reflex rug rules are off, so none of that applies (see Game Modes).

🔁 Run It Back

A coin that doesn't graduate isn't done. Its developer gets a second serving. On any of your failed coins you'll see a Run It Back button: on the coin card in the Cook Out's Past Results, and on your creator page launches. It opens a quick confirm with your coin card and a mode picker, so you can relaunch in a fresh mode. Confirm, and it goes straight back to the Cook Out, no new vote needed.

Only the coin's own developer can run it back. (If you launched under a rug ban, you'll need to clear it first, the same gate as a fresh launch.)

Is this real money?

Not in the paper beta. Everyone starts with 10 pETH of simulated balance. The format, the market, and the leaderboards are fully real.

Can the platform rug me?

No. The house has no withdraw rights over round liquidity, every settlement is auditable, and our only revenue is the published fee stream. If you lose, a player won, not us.

What happens to my tokens when a round ends without graduating?

Automatic uniform redemption: every remaining holder exits at the same price, pro-rata against the pool. You always get out; the only question is the price.

My coin rugged or didn't graduate. Can I launch again?

A coin that didn't graduate (timed out or went quiet) can be re-launched with Run It Back: pick a mode and confirm, no new vote. A coin that rugged earns your wallet a launch ban first; clear it from the Reputation panel on your Profile (or wait it out, in real-money phases), then you're free to launch again.

I got a 🚫 banned tag. What can't I do?

Just one thing: put new coins on the ballot. You can still trade every match, chat, earn XP, and climb the leaderboard. See Reputation & Rug Bans.

Why did my limit intent get refunded?

The clearing price landed above your max. That's the limit doing its job: full refund, no fill.

How do I start playing?

Hit Play Now and sign in with an email, Google, X, or your own wallet. Under a minute, free, no whitelist, no deposit. Your starter pETH is staked into your Cook Out balance for you, so you can pull up to the next match immediately. Details in Getting In & Your Account.

Do I need a crypto wallet?

No. Signing in creates a secure wallet address for you automatically, and that's your account. If you already live on-chain you can connect your own wallet instead. Either way, you never sign transactions or touch keys to play.

Who am I playing against?

Real players, plus our Swarm: house traders that keep every beta match active and behave differently each round. They can win or lose just like you. As the community grows, real players take their seats. Follow @hoodcookout for match events and announcements.

How does the Weekly Jackpot work?

A slice of every trading fee builds a shared pot that pays the top 10 players by weekly XP every Monday, and the more the site trades, the bigger it gets. Full details in The Weekly Jackpot above.