An exchange has been reaching into your wallet since the first hour of this game. One got hacked and took coins out of your balance, and you did not choose which ones. One froze a coin while you were holding it and you sat there watching a number you could not act on. One delisted something and your position stopped being a position. Fees went up exactly when the market got violent, which is exactly when you needed to move. None of them ever offered you anything afterwards. The only protection that exists in this game is a piece of software you had to buy with your own money, which tells you everything about who was expected to absorb the loss.
This patch hands you the other side of that. You buy the third building, you open your own exchange, and now every one of those decisions is yours. Somebody else is holding coins on your platform. When you get hacked, and you will, the question of whether they get their money back is a question you answer. You will find that it is a harder question from this chair.
New Feature: Opening The Exchange
The Third Building: The Exchange Office costs 350,000 and it is the last purchase in the chain. Eight desks in it, and none of the exchange staff can exist without it. The sign has been standing out there since the last patch.
The Licence: The exchange itself is another 180,000 on top of the building. That opens the doors with four listing slots and nothing else, so plan on spending more before it earns anything.
Three Things To Upgrade: Servers decide how many coins you can list and how much volume you can clear in a day. Security decides how often you get hacked and how much it costs when you do. Liquidity backing decides how big a coin is allowed to be before it will talk to you. They are bought separately and on purpose, because buying the cheap one first is a mistake I want you to be able to make.
The Commission Dial: One rate for the whole exchange, from 0.05 percent up to 0.5 percent, and you turn it. Raise it and you earn more per trade while volume walks away. Lower it and volume comes back worth less each. The number it starts on is not the correct answer, it is just a starting point.
Big Coins Cost Money, Small Ones Pay You: Listing BTC is you writing a cheque. Listing an unknown project is them writing you one. That is the whole shape of the business in one line, and it is also why a board full of the things that pay you is a board that is about to have a bad month.
Growth Blocks Itself: Hit your daily volume ceiling and trades slow down, complaints come in, and trust drops. Not upgrading is not free, it just sends you the bill in a different currency.
Capacity And Trust
Two Separate Axes: Money buys capacity. Nothing buys trust. Trust comes from a clean record, from time passing, and from paying people back when something goes wrong. The large coins want both, so there is no single slider to push to the end.
Trust Moves Like It Does Everywhere Else: Up slowly, down fast. A clean day is worth a fraction of a point. Refusing to cover a hack costs you two and a half. That asymmetry is the same one the Launchpad already taught you and I did not want a second set of rules for the same idea.
Listing Coins
The Coins You Already Know: Everything in the game can be listed on your exchange, and each one has its own integration price and its own volume. Steady, boring, and they pay the bills.
Projects Apply To You: Unknown teams come to you asking to be listed, four in the pool at a time, refreshing every few days. The card shows their team verification, their audit status, how many promises they have made and not delivered, and a short record. It is the hiring card again, from the other side of the desk, because you already know how to read it.
Some Of Them Are Going To Rug: They do not do it out of nowhere. The team wallet starts selling, the promise count grows, volume starts behaving strangely. If you spot it you can delist early and keep most of what would have been lost. If you spot it wrong, you threw away a paying listing for nothing.
You Cannot See The Signals Without An Auditor: With nobody auditing, a rug is just something that happens to you one morning. An auditor is the difference between an event and a warning, so that hire is not a percentage bonus, it is a whole channel of information you either have or do not.
False Alarms Exist: Honest projects sometimes look exactly like the ones about to run. A better auditor buys you a longer look, not a correct answer.
Deposits And Getting Hacked
That Money Is Not Yours: Users hold balances on your exchange and the pool grows with your volume and your trust. It is displayed as what it is, an obligation, not as part of your net worth. If it looked like savings you would spend it, and then the morning would come.
Success Is The Risk: This is the only system in the game where doing well makes you more dangerous to yourself. More rigs is not more risk. More traders is not more risk. A bigger deposit pool is a bigger target, and the ratio of what a hack costs to what you earn does not improve as you grow, which means you cannot outrun it by getting large.
Then You Decide: When it happens you have three days to choose whether to cover it. Covering it keeps your trust and empties your account. Refusing keeps the money, drops your trust hard, and raises how interesting you look to an investigation.
Refusing Loses You People: Every event you walk away from permanently sends part of your userbase somewhere else, and they trickle back very slowly. Trust recovers on its own. Users who left do not. Those are two different punishments and they are deliberately not merged into one number.
The Exchange Does Not Close: There is no game over here. You can run an exchange nobody respects for as long as you like. The damage is permanent, the business is not.
The Right Answer Changes: Early, with weak security and no cash, refusing is genuinely the better play. Later, with good security and a large userbase built up, paying is. I measured this one specifically because a moral choice with a single correct answer is not a choice, and the first version of it had exactly that problem.
The Other Way
Listing Your Own Coin: If you launched something on the Launchpad you can list it on your own exchange. Instant volume, instant visibility, and an obvious conflict of interest that will not stay quiet forever.
Wash Trading: You can manufacture volume in three escalating amounts. Fake volume is what pulls in the large coins and the projects, because everyone is looking at the same number you are inflating. It costs money to run and it is the direct answer to setting your commission high, which is why it exists at that point in the curve.
Lending Out The Deposits: Up to 60 percent of what your users are holding can be moved into your trading floor as free capital. Your traders make money with it and you keep the difference. The catch arrives on the day you get hacked, because the money you would have compensated people with is in an open position. This is not a new idea and you know exactly which exchange it comes from.
No New Punishment System: All three feed the suspicion counter you already have, and the investigation that already exists comes for you the way it already does. There is no compliance officer to hire, because a staff member who suppresses suspicion for a salary would turn a decision into a line item.
You Are Not The Only Exchange
Three Competitors: One undercuts everyone on fees, one is the safe institutional choice, one plays dirty and looks bigger than it is. They do not attack you, they do not steal your coins or your staff, they just exist and slowly get better at what they are already good at.
Your Dials Now Mean Something Relative: A 0.4 percent fee is not high or low on its own. It is high if the cheap one just went to 0.2. Your share of the market comes out of your fee, your trust, your security and how many coins you carry, measured against theirs.
Standing Still Is Losing Slowly: Do nothing for a year and their drift takes about a quarter of your share. It is pressure, not a collapse, and the dirty one occasionally has a scandal and hands some of it back.
The Whole Market Breathes: Total volume across every exchange moves with what the market is doing. In a panic your exchange shrinks at the same time your traders are struggling, because they live in the same world and I did not want the second desk quietly insuring the first one.
Offers And A Roadmap On Your Phone
Six Kinds Of Offer: A whale negotiating a permanent fee discount, a regulator asking for a filing, a project offering you money to skip the questions, someone proposing a volume partnership, a competitor's employee looking to move, and a press outlet with a story to sell. Clean and dirty in the same list, in whatever order they arrive.
Saying No Is Usually Free, Once It Is Not: The regulator card costs you trust if you ignore it. Every other card is free to refuse. If refusing were always free, never opening your phone would be a strategy.
They Are Spaced Out: Exchange offers arrive far less often than your traders' requests and never back to back. These decisions are larger and I would rather you weigh one than skim four.
A Roadmap Tab: Your phone now opens on a list of the twelve things this game asks of you, from closing your first trade to listing your first coin on your own exchange. Each one crosses itself out when you get there. Before, if you opened your phone early it showed you an empty list and gave you no reason to open it again.
Every Step Is Visible From The First Minute: Nothing on the list is hidden until you unlock it. I would rather you see where this goes and decide you want it than find out by accident thirty hours in.
Exchange Staff
Hired From The Exchange, Not The Team Panel: Security, support and auditors are hired inside the exchange app. Your traders are your traders and your exchange is your business, and I kept the two screens apart because they are two different jobs.
Three Roles, Three Different Outcomes: Security lowers how often you get hacked. Support holds your trust up against complaints. Auditors give you rug warnings and better applicants. None of them overlap, so there is no obviously correct hire.
They Sit In The Building: Eight desks, and the people you pay for are visibly in the room. The exchange runs on a screen but the payroll walks around.
You Can Talk To Them: Walk up to a desk and open the card, the same way you do with your traders. Security tells you how exposed you are right now, support tells you how the complaints are going, auditors tell you what they are seeing in your listings. They say it in their own words and the numbers behind it are the live ones.
Smaller Things
Mining Lives In The Apartment: Mining equipment now only runs inside your apartment, and equipment left anywhere else is marked in red so you can see why it stopped earning. Cooling is a room, not a map, and once there were three buildings an air conditioner in one of them was cooling a rig in another.
This is the end of the chain that started two patches ago. Apartment, office, exchange. There is nothing further to buy after this one, and that is on purpose, because I did not want the answer to every late game problem to be another building.
The part I am least sure about is the entry cost. The full path to a working exchange is well over a million and I have measured that it is roughly right, but measuring is not the same as playing it, and a number that is correct on a spreadsheet can still feel like a wall. If you get there and it feels like a wall, say so.
The other thing I want to hear about is the compensation decision. It is meant to be genuinely hard and to have a different answer depending on where you are in the game. If it ever feels obvious in either direction, that is a bug in the design and I want to know which way it tipped.
From here I am looking at the moment to moment rather than at new systems. The game asks you to make a lot of decisions now and I am less sure than I was that it makes them all feel worth making.
Thank you.