Elsewhere

Elsewhere is a 3D city that runs in your browser. It sits at 0°N, 0°E, the point in the Atlantic where the equator crosses the prime meridian. Nobody lives there in real life. For years the only thing at that spot was a weather buoy called Soul, which was retired in 2021.

To move in, you connect a Solana wallet and pick a name. You are put on the next flight. Flights land every 15 minutes†. When yours lands you get a house, an address, and a place on the map that anyone can look up. That part is free and stays free.

$ELSE is the token the city runs on. You spend it on things that are scarce or permanent: a bigger house, a waterfront plot, a shop licence, a billboard, a share of a new public building. Half of every $ELSE spent is burned†. The rest goes to a public City Treasury and to running costs.

$ELSE launches on a public bonding curve. There is no presale, no private round, and no team allocation. If the team wants tokens, the team buys them on the open market from a wallet you can watch.

Over the last couple of years a new kind of social account appeared: the follower city. You follow the account and you become a resident of a small illustrated town. Your username goes on a house. The largest of these have well over 100,000 residents, with daily errands, jobs, an ID card office, a newspaper, and a mayor who posts announcements. People check in every day to see what got built and whether their name made the paper.

They work for reasons that have little to do with graphics:

• Joining costs nothing and takes one tap.
• You are a resident with a name on a door, which feels different from being a user with an account.
• New residents arrive on a schedule, so there is always something to wait for.
• The city has rituals: a paper, a radio station, small jobs, a town square.
• Things get built because residents asked for them.

They also have limits. Each one is tied to a single platform, a single language, and a single time zone. Residents own nothing; the house is a row in someone else's database. Real money only flows one way, as donations. And nobody outside can check the books.

Elsewhere keeps the first list and tries to fix the second.

3.1 Coordinates

Elsewhere is at latitude 0, longitude 0. Mapmakers call this spot Null Island, because badly formatted location data ends up there. It belongs to no country, which suits a city meant for everyone.

The city clock is UTC. The sun in the 3D city follows UTC, so it gets dark in Elsewhere at the same moment for everybody, wherever they are. Daily resets happen at 00:00 UTC.

3.2 Streets and addresses

Two roads cross at the centre. Equator Avenue runs east to west. Meridian Street runs north to south. They meet at Zero Plaza, where a lighthouse named Soul stands in for the old buoy.

Every plot has an address made of two numbers: how far north or south of the Equator it is, and how far east or west of the Meridian, counted in plots. 3N 7E is three plots north and seven plots east. The four quarters of the city (NE, NW, SE, SW) will develop their own character over time.

3.3 Growth

The city grows outward from Zero Plaza in rings. Earlier arrivals live closer to the centre. The order in which plots are handed out is a fixed public rule, so given the list of arrivals, anyone can recompute who lives where. We will publish that rule as open-source code.

4.1 Citizen Pass

Your pass is a wallet signature plus a name. You sign a short message to prove you control the wallet. It is not a transaction and it costs nothing. Then you choose a handle.

• One wallet, one pass.
• Pass numbers are issued in order: EW-000001, EW-000002, and so on.
• The pass is your login, your name in the plaza, and your vote at City Hall.
• The pass is not an NFT and cannot be sold. It may become a non-transferable on-chain credential later if there is a reason to do it.

4.2 Flights

New citizens do not appear instantly. You are booked on the next flight, and flights land every 15 minutes† on the quarter hour, UTC. Each flight has a number (EW 0412) and a public passenger list.

The Arrivals board on the home page shows the flight that is boarding, who is on it, and the last few that landed. When your flight lands, a plane comes in over the water, your house goes up, and your pass page updates with your address.

The wait is deliberate. It gives you something to share while you wait and a reason to come back.

4.3 Your first house

Every citizen gets a starter house. It is small. It is free. Its shape and roof colour are derived from your wallet address, so streets do not look copy-pasted.

The city opens in stages (see section 12). This section describes the whole design.

5.1 Homes

Starter houses can be upgraded: more floors, a garden, a garage, a different roof. Structural upgrades cost $ELSE. Furniture and small decorations cost Shells.

5.2 Work

Citizens take shifts: courier, farmer, fisher, cook, firefighter, harbour hand. A shift is a short interactive task of one to three minutes, and it pays Shells.

What you produce goes into the city's shared supply. When the city runs low on fish, fishing pays more. Seniority comes from how long you have lived in the city and how many shifts you have worked, so it cannot be bought.

5.3 Daily errands

A short list that resets at 00:00 UTC: read the paper, finish a shift, catch two fish, visit a neighbour. Each errand sends you to a different part of the city. Errands pay Shells.

5.4 Places

Zero Plaza is where you walk around and talk to other citizens. Around it: the harbour, the market, the park, a racing circuit, a school with a daily quiz, hot springs. New places are added by City Hall votes and public works (section 7).

5.5 The paper and the radio

The Elsewhere Daily is written from what actually happened: who landed, what was built, which job was short-staffed, how much $ELSE was burned. The radio plays music and reads the headlines.

5.6 Events

Seasonal competitions such as fishing derbies and circuit races. Prizes are paid by the City Treasury or by sponsors.

5.7 Businesses

A citizen with a licence can open a café, a farm stand, or a workshop, and offer shifts to other citizens. Licences cost $ELSE. Businesses earn Shells.

There is no way to turn Shells into $ELSE.

The reason is simple. When a currency that players earn can also be sold, bots farm it and sell it until it is worthless. That is what happened to most play-to-earn games in 2021 and 2022. Shells have no market, so there is nothing to farm at scale. The game never mints $ELSE, so it cannot be farmed at all.

Every item on this list is a purchase. None of them pays you for holding.

Every $ELSE spent in the city is split three ways†:

The Treasury and Operations wallets are public. The split is carried out by an on-chain program in a single transaction, so there is no step where the full amount sits in a wallet someone controls.

Two things follow from this design, and we would rather say them now:

• There are no emissions. No tokens are held back to pay rewards. Everything the Treasury pays out was first spent by someone in the city.
• Rewards scale with activity. If few people spend, the prize pools are small. There is no staking, no APY, and no fixed return of any kind.

9.1 What the team does

• The team buys on the open market like everyone else, from one wallet published before launch.
• Team purchases are capped at 3% of supply† and locked for 12 months†.
• The project pays for itself from three places: creator fees paid by the launch venue (if any), the 20% Operations share, and sponsors.

9.2 Before launch

$ELSE does not exist yet. Until the contract address is published on the official site, any token using this name is not ours.

Fair launches attract bots. The first buyers on any public curve will include automated wallets, and we cannot prevent that. What we can do is hold nothing back for ourselves and make every wallet we control public.

Governance starts small on purpose.

• Votes decide what gets built next and which events run.
• One pass, one vote. Balance does not multiply your vote.
• To vote, a pass must be at least 14 days old† and its wallet must hold a small minimum of $ELSE†. This is there to slow down fake accounts.
• At first, votes are advisory: the team commits to following them and publishes the result and what was done.
• The Treasury publishes a monthly statement of what came in and what went out.

Binding on-chain votes over Treasury spending come later, once there is a track record and enough citizens for a vote to mean something. Elsewhere is not a DAO on day one, and we will not call it one.

In the browser. The city is rendered with three.js. Buildings are instanced, so tens of thousands of houses draw in a handful of calls. It runs on a phone. There is nothing to download.

City core. A small open-source library turns the arrival list into the map: plot order, addresses, building variants. The server and the browser both use it, and so can anyone who wants to check our work.

Game server. Day-to-day play (shifts, errands, Shells, furniture) is kept off-chain. Moving a couch should not need a wallet signature.

On Solana.

Sign-in. A signed message, never a transaction. The site will never ask you to approve a transfer in order to log in.

Security. The split program will be audited before it handles funds. The project never takes custody of a citizen's tokens.

Phases are ordered. They do not have dates, because a date we miss helps nobody. Each phase starts when the one before it is stable.

The token can go to zero. $ELSE is a utility token for a game. Its price depends on people wanting to spend it in the city. It may never be worth more than you paid, and it may be worth nothing.

Regulation. Calling something a utility token does not settle how a regulator will treat it. Rules differ by country and are changing. $ELSE may be restricted or unavailable where you live. The project will take legal advice before launch and may change the design because of it.

Launch mechanics. Bonding-curve launches are volatile in their first hours. Bots and coordinated wallets will be among the first buyers. Launch venues change their rules and fees.

Software. Smart contracts and game servers have bugs. An audit lowers the chance of a serious one; it does not remove it.

The team. This is a small team. People leave, funding runs out, plans slip. Because there is no team allocation, there is also no large treasury to fall back on.

Fake citizens. Wallets are free to create, so the population count can be inflated. Pass age, minimum balances, and optional social links reduce this. They do not eliminate it.

Central control. The game server is run by the team. Houses, Shells, and addresses are records on that server. If the team stops, the on-chain parts remain, but the city as a place you can visit would need someone else to run it. Open-sourcing the city core is a partial answer.

The name. An unrelated project used the name Elsewhere in 2022. Trademark and domain checks are still to be done. The name may change.

This document describes a product that is being built. It is not a prospectus, an offer of securities, or financial, legal, or tax advice. $ELSE gives no claim on revenue, profit, equity, or assets of any company. Do not buy it expecting a return. Do not spend money you cannot afford to lose.