⛏️ Mining & Earning
In Bitcoin, machines mine. Here, you do — by reading, walking, connecting, creating.
Mining on Matsuri means one thing: real involvement with Japanese culture produces MTC. No mining rigs, no staking dashboards as a prerequisite — visit a shrine, finish an article, bring a friend, guide a tour, and the ledger credits you. This chapter is the canonical map of every way to earn, and every way to spend.
The MTC lifecycle
Every pillar feeds one wallet; the wallet feeds real experiences — or your own Phantom wallet.
⛩️ Pillar 1 — Worship Mining (参拝マイニング)
Worship Mining (参拝マイニング — sanpai mining, "shrine-visit mining") — first developed under the codename Project Junrei — is the flagship earning mechanic: GPS check-ins at sacred sites across Japan, rewarded in MTC. It is live in the Matsuri app today, with all 47 prefectures localized and a sacred-site map with tier filters.
Regional tiers — places have tiers, people don't
Every sacred site carries a regional tier, a property of the place itself (see Levels & Tiers for how this differs from user levels and membership tiers):
- Frontier (秘境)×10.0Remote sacred places — mountain temples, hidden 霊場 (reijō, sacred grounds)
- Regional (地方)×5.0Rural historic shrines far from the tourist trail
- Mid (中規模)×2.0Prefectural hubs and regional grand shrines
- Major (メジャー)×1.0The famous names — 浅草寺 (Sensō-ji), 清水寺 (Kiyomizu-dera)
On top of the fixed tier, each site has a dynamic multiplier from 0.01× to 50×, tuned by operations in real time. Think of it as inverse surge pricing: where ride-hailing raises prices when demand spikes, Worship Mining lowers rewards where crowds gather (a packed site might run at 0.1×) and raises them where visitors are scarce (a depopulated region can climb toward 50×).
Because you earn more where fewer people go, the reward map itself redirects footfall — away from overcrowded landmarks, toward the regions that need visitors most. Regional revitalization is not a slogan here; it is the payout curve.
Check-in rules
- 200 m GPS geofence — you must physically be within 200 meters of the site.
- One check-in per user, per site, per day.
- Pioneer Bonus — 100% ÷ visit order: the first visitor of the day at a site earns a 100% bonus, the second 50%, the third about 33%, and so on. Early birds at quiet shrines do best.
Sponsored Beacons — B2B/B2G demand
Municipalities, railway companies, tourism boards, and merchants can deposit MTC to boost rewards at specific sites they want to promote. Sponsored Beacons turn Worship Mining into a two-sided market: travelers earn more, sponsors buy foot traffic, and every sponsorship creates structural demand for MTC.
How a visit works
- Open the Sacred Site MapBrowse nearby sites with live multipliers and tier filters — all 47 prefectures are covered.
- Arrive within 200 mGPS confirms you are physically at the site. One check-in per site per day.
- Check in — Pioneer Bonus appliesFirst visitor of the day earns a 100% bonus, the second 50%, and so on down the visit order.
- Draw an AR omikujiPoint the camera at the site and draw a fortune — your reward multiplier for this visit.
- MTC lands in your walletA 大吉 (daikichi — great blessing) also auto-mints a 御朱印 (goshuin — shrine seal) NFT to your collection.
AR Omikuji — the fortune is the multiplier
Every check-in includes an AR omikuji (おみくじ — fortune slip) drawn through the camera. The odds are fixed in configuration and always sum to 100%:
| Grade | Reading | Odds | Reward multiplier | Extra |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 大吉 | daikichi — great blessing | 5% | ×3.0 | auto-mints a 御朱印 NFT |
| 吉 | kichi — blessing | 15% | ×1.5 | — |
| 小吉 | shōkichi — small blessing | 30% | ×1.2 | — |
| 末吉 | suekichi — future blessing | 35% | ×1.0 | — |
| 凶 | kyō — misfortune | 15% | ×1.0 | — |
Even a 凶 pays the full base reward — the design honors the act of visiting itself. Odds and multipliers are admin-configurable, but must always total 100%.
Two illustrative draws show the inverse-surge logic at work:
- Sensō-ji on a packed holiday (dynamic 0.1×, tier ×1.0), 末吉 → 10 × 0.1 × 1.0 × 1.0 = 1 MTC
- A frontier mountain temple (dynamic 5×, tier ×10.0), 大吉 → 10 × 5 × 3.0 × 10.0 = 1,500 MTC
Nothing is wagered: the draw is a free bonus on top of a visit that already pays. Draws today use cryptographically secure server-side randomness; the on-chain omikuji contract on the roadmap moves draws to a commit-reveal scheme, so no one — including us — can alter a result after the commit, and every draw becomes publicly verifiable.
📖 Pillar 2 — Media mining
Read, listen, watch, and answer quizzes on J-Times — completed engagement pays MTC, tracked per user per piece of content. Per-action amounts are operator-tunable, with a daily cap of 50 MTC and a 5-minute cooldown between rewards, so knowledge pays steadily without flooding supply.
A commute's worth of articles or a podcast episode is enough — the Media chapter covers the full J-Times platform.
🤝 Pillar 3 — Social mining (縁)
縁 (en — the ties that bind people) is a currency of its own in Japanese culture. Matsuri makes it literal: connection earns.
- Referrals — share your link; every new registration through it earns 100 MTC on signup (the app hero puts it plainly: 新規登録で 100 MTC).
- GCF agents — GCF members acting as official agents earn multi-level commissions from the real activity of their network: 20% at L1 (direct referrals) and 5% each at L2–L4. Gathering signups alone earns nothing; the network has to actually book, buy, and participate.
- En-Mining score — the referral engine scores every agent's network:
Toku (徳 — virtue) staking lets you lock MTC to raise your multiplier from 1.0× up to 10.0×; permanent titles earned through contribution add up to a further 50%. The on-chain leg of En-Mining is roadmap — today scores accrue in the backend and are queued for a later oracle phase (see the status block below).
🎓 Pillar 4 — Creator & guide mining
The deepest earning isn't passive — it's delivering culture yourself. Every creator surface on the platform pays in JPY and/or MTC:
Plan tours, meetups, and classes with the AI event assistant; sell tickets with tier pricing and referral links. See Experiences.
GCF-member guides claim open GuideSlots first-come-first-served, earn revenue share and/or fixed commissions — plus post-event tips (preset chips ¥300–¥5,000, via Stripe or MTC). See GCF.
Open a KYC-verified shop and sell catalog, one-of-one, digital, or NFT products with escrow protection. See Shop.
Live streams attached to events, shops, or campaigns collect tips in five rails including MTC; media contributions feed the J-Times ecosystem.
🏦 Pillar 5 — Liquidity mining
Provide MTC/SOL liquidity on Raydium (Solana's DEX, where the initial MTC/SOL pool lives) and earn a share of trading activity. Early liquidity providers support the ecosystem's trading infrastructure at its most fragile stage.
The early-provider incentive is a target of 20% APY — a design target for the initial liquidity program, not a guaranteed or promised return. Actual results depend on pool conditions. See the Disclaimer.
💎 What MTC is for
Earning is half the loop. MTC is a first-class payment method across the platform — no conversion step, just "pay with MTC" at checkout (prices are always recomputed server-side).
| Spend it on | What happens | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Events, tours & experiences | Pay from your MTC balance at checkout, alongside Stripe and Solana Pay | Live |
| Crowdfunding contributions | Back campaigns with MTC — and earn 1% base MTC cashback × tier multipliers | Live |
| Tips | Tip guides after events and creators during live streams | Live |
| Toku staking (徳) | Lock MTC to raise your En-Mining multiplier (1.0–10.0×) | Roadmap — parameters finalize with the on-chain phase |
| DAO voting | Governance participation | 2027 — see Roadmap |
Withdrawing to self-custody
Your in-app balance is an audited ledger — and it is yours to take on-chain. Withdraw MTC to your own Phantom wallet on Solana at any time, within fraud-screened limits:
- Per transaction
- 5,000 MTC
- Per day
- 10,000 MTC
- Per month
- 100,000 MTC
- Auto-approval
- withdrawals of 1,000 MTC or less; larger amounts are reviewed
- Cooldown
- 60 minutes between withdrawals, with fraud screening
- Destination
- your own Phantom wallet — self-custody on Solana
Matsuri does not exchange MTC for fiat currency. Once MTC is in your Phantom wallet it is a standard SPL token — you can swap it on Raydium or hold it, entirely under your own control.
A day in the MTC economy
Morning — two J-Times articles and a podcast episode on the train. Media mining credits MTC toward the day's 50 MTC cap.
Afternoon — a detour to a Regional-tier shrine (×5.0) outside the city. First visitor of the day: Pioneer Bonus 100%. The AR omikuji comes up 吉 (×1.5). A meaningful stack of MTC — and a quiet shrine got a visitor it would never have had.
Evening — a Shinjuku Golden Gai bar crawl, booked in the app and paid straight from the MTC balance. The guide — a GCF member who claimed the slot that morning — earns the commission, and a ¥1,000 tip afterward.
Result — curiosity became an experience; the guide, the shrine's region, and the community were paid directly. No intermediary took a platform-defining cut.
🔗 On-chain status — the canonical summary
This is the whitepaper's single source of truth for what runs on-chain today versus what is staged behind audits. Other chapters link here rather than restating it.
On-chain now (Solana mainnet): the MTC SPL token (900M fixed supply, mint and freeze authority revoked), the 550M Streamflow lockup with its irrevocable 2027-06-01 cliff, the initial Raydium MTC/SOL liquidity pool, and Solana Pay / Phantom payment verification live in the production apps.
Off-chain now: mining rewards — Worship, media, social, creator — accrue in the backend's audited MTC ledger (with idempotency and a full transaction history), and become on-chain tokens the moment you withdraw to Phantom. Apps never touch Solana directly; every on-chain action flows app → backend → Solana.
Staged security audit (Hashlock) — initiated April 2026 at TEAMZ Summit Tokyo:
- Phase 1 — matsuri-buyback: submission package complete; kickoff targeted August 2026, findings September, final report October; mainnet deployment targeted Oct–Dec 2026, after the DEX listing.
- Phase 1.5 — matsuri-vesting + matsuri-distribution: Q1 2027, live at the 2027-06-01 Grand Unlock.
- The contracts are code-complete but not deployed to any cluster: 43 tests across matsuri-buyback (1,797 LOC, 17 tests) and matsuri-vesting (1,629 LOC, 26 tests), zero clippy warnings, zero unwrap/panic in production code.
No contract that moves user funds goes to mainnet before passing its audit. Full schedule: Roadmap.