rules

There is exactly one, and it lives in a contract on Robinhood Chain (4663). One address holds it at a time. That address has ten minutes to pass it on. If those ten minutes run out, the torch is out — permanently, with no function in the contract that can relight it. Not the owner, not the last holder, not a vote.

You can only pass the torch to an address that has never held it. That is enforced on chain by a mapping that is only ever written, never cleared. So the chain cannot bounce between two wallets, and it can never come back to you — whatever your leg was, it was your only one. This is also why the chain gets harder as it grows: not because the clock shortens, but because you have to find somebody new every ten minutes.

Exactly 0.0005 ETH, plus a fixed burn of RELAY sent to 0x…dEaD — the contract never holds the tokens and nobody can retrieve them. Only the current holder can call pass(); for everyone else it reverts.

Sixty percent of every fee is split equally between the five carriers immediately behind you and credited to them on the spot. Thirty percent goes to the ember pot. Ten percent is the operator's. Early in the chain there are fewer than five carriers behind, and that unpaid remainder falls into the pot rather than to the operator.

Read this part twice: carrying the torch only pays you if five more people carry it after you. Whenever the chain ends, the last carriers are the ones who paid in and got nothing back. That is not a bug in the design, it is the design — and it is the reason the ember pot exists.

It can only leave the contract one way. Once the deadline passes, anyone may call burnOut(); the pot is credited to the last address that successfully passed the torch, and they withdraw it with claim(). Note who that is not: the person holding the torch when it went out gets nothing. The reward is for running your leg, not for being last.

Two things, each exactly once, and both before the torch is lit: setFuel() wires the RELAY token address (it does not exist when the contract is deployed — it is launched on pons afterwards), and ignite() lights the torch and hands it to the first carrier. After that the owner has no power over the chain, the deadline or the pot. There is no pause, no upgrade, no proxy, and no function that moves the torch other than a pass by its current holder.