Project Vanta Whitepaper

Version 0.9 — Working Draft · August 2026 · Vanta Studios

1. Abstract

Project Vanta is a AAA two-faction battle royale and team-deathmatch shooter built in Unreal Engine 5, backed by a fixed-supply token economy in which players own their items and earn for performance. Two factions — AEGIS and ВОЛГА — fight a persistent seasonal war. Every kill, placement, and faction victory pays out $VANTA from a pre-allocated, auditable rewards pool. Every item — weapon finishes, operative skins, blueprints — is an on-chain asset the player can hold, trade, or sell.

The design goal is simple to state and hard to execute: a shooter good enough to play for free, with an economy strong enough to reward the people who make it competitive. The economy serves the game; the game is never allowed to serve the economy.

2. The Problem

Modern free-to-play shooters run on player-funded economies. Players collectively spend billions per year on skins, passes, and cosmetics — and own none of it. Inventory is a database row in the publisher's account system: non-transferable, non-sellable, revocable at will. Secondary demand exists (grey-market skin trading proves it at scale) but is pushed into unsafe, unsanctioned channels.

Three failures follow from this structure:

• No ownership. Time and money invested by players is captured entirely by the publisher. Player exit value is zero.
• No alignment. The most valuable players — the competitors, creators, and community leaders who make a shooter live for a decade — are compensated with nothing but rank icons.
• Unsafe secondary markets. Where trading is prohibited, it happens anyway — without escrow, provenance, or consumer protection.

Earlier "play-to-earn" games attempted a correction and mostly failed, because they inverted the priority: token first, game later. Their emissions were uncapped or reflexive, their sinks were weak, and their gameplay could not retain users without the subsidy. Project Vanta's economy is designed from those post-mortems.

3. The Game

3.1 Core modes

3.2 The faction war

Enlistment locks each account to one faction per season. Match outcomes move a persistent front-line score. At season end, the winning faction's members split a protocol-funded war chest proportional to individual seasonal contribution (capped per account to prevent whale capture). Faction populations are balanced through queue-priority incentives rather than hard locks.

3.3 Technology

• Unreal Engine 5; dedicated servers at 128-tick with sub-tick hit registration.
• Server-authoritative simulation: movement, damage, and economy events are computed server-side. The client renders; it is never trusted.
• Anti-cheat: kernel-mode client protection, ML behavioural detection, hardware fingerprint bans, and stake forfeiture for confirmed cheaters in staked queues.

4. The $VANTA Token

4.1 Supply and allocation

Fixed supply of 1,000,000,000 $VANTA. No inflation mechanism exists; no further mint is possible after genesis.

4.2 Utility

• Entry stakes. Staked Faction Royale and ranked queues denominate entry in $VANTA. Winners take the pot; the protocol rake is burned.
• Crafting and upgrades. Crafting finishes, rerolling patterns, and upgrading wear grades consumes tokens permanently.
• Marketplace currency. All item trades settle in $VANTA.
• Staking. Staked tokens earn a share of marketplace fees and grant governance weight (§7).
• Governance. Emission curves, new-arena funding, esports prize pools, and treasury grants are decided by council vote.

4.3 Chain selection

The deployment chain is announced with the TGE, after audit. Hard requirements: sub-cent transaction fees at consumer scale, mature marketplace and custody infrastructure, and email-based custodial onboarding so non-crypto players never see a seed phrase. A custodial default with self-custody export is a launch requirement, not an option.

5. Emissions

5.1 Seasonal schedule

The 350M rewards pool is released on a declining seasonal schedule. Unspent season allocation rolls into the treasury, never forward into later seasons — emissions can undershoot but never overshoot.

Beyond Season Four, gameplay rewards are funded from recirculation: marketplace fee share, treasury allocations approved by governance, and sponsored prize pools. The economy is designed to reach fee-funded sustainability before the emissions pool is exhausted.

5.2 Skill weighting

Per-match payouts are computed server-side from placement, eliminations, objective actions, and opponent strength, normalised by mode and lobby MMR. Payouts scale with the quality of opposition — farming low-MMR lobbies yields marginal returns. Per-account daily emission caps apply, with diminishing returns inside a session.

5.3 Anti-farming controls

• Server-authoritative scoring; no client-reported statistics enter the payout function.
• ML anomaly detection over input cadence, movement entropy, and social graph clustering to catch bot rings and win-trading.
• Device and identity heuristics rate-limit multi-accounting; flagged accounts earn zero pending review.
• All emission events are recorded and published in aggregate for public verification of pool integrity.

6. Sinks and Burns

Every major player action that consumes value removes tokens from circulation:

Sink volume scales directly with play activity, which is the property that failed economies lacked: the more the game is played, the faster tokens are removed. Economic simulation across ten thousand bot-driven seasons (varying whale concentration, bot pressure, and churn) was used to tune emission and burn coefficients before any real token is minted; the simulation methodology will be published alongside the audit.

7. Staking and Governance

7.1 Staking

Tokens may be staked in 30 / 90 / 180-day locks with escalating weight (1.0× / 1.5× / 2.2×). Stakers receive the staker share of marketplace fees pro-rata to weight, paid continuously. Staking also gates access to premium queues and the seasonal pass.

7.2 The Vanta Council

Governance operates in seasonal epochs. Staked weight elects proposals into a binding queue. In scope: emission-curve adjustments within audited bounds, treasury grants, arena funding, and esports pools. Out of scope permanently: minting new supply, altering vesting schedules, and seizing player assets. Protocol-critical parameters carry a 14-day timelock; the community can exit positions before any change takes effect.

8. The Item Standard

Items are on-chain assets carrying immutable provenance: float value, pattern index, wear grade, mint season, and an optional kill-counter register. Cosmetic only — no item affects damage, recoil, movement, or hit registration. Items are minted exclusively through gameplay (drops, crafting) and never sold directly by the studio, which keeps the studio out of competition with its own players on the marketplace.

9. Security

• Contracts. Token, vesting, staking, and marketplace escrow contracts undergo third-party audit before TGE. Reports are published in full on the audits page.
• Custody. Default custodial wallets are held with a regulated provider; self-custody export is always available.
• Bug bounty. A public program opens at TGE covering contracts and the payout pipeline.
• Treasury. Multi-signature control with independent signers; all treasury movements are on-chain and published.

10. Risk Factors

• Token values can go to zero. Nothing here is a promise of price, profit, or return.
• Gameplay earnings depend on skill, activity, and pool parameters, all of which change over time.
• Regulatory treatment of game tokens varies by jurisdiction and is evolving; availability of token features may be restricted in some regions.
• Pre-alpha software: dates, figures, and mechanics in this document will change. The audit, not this document, is the final word on contract behaviour.

11. Roadmap

12. Glossary

© 2026 Vanta Studios. This document is informational and subject to change without notice.