The Gauntlet

One hundred horses. That is the whole field, for the entire season, forever. The moment the hundredth horse mints, no new horse is ever born again. $GLUE stops being a minting machine and becomes a survival game. This is Phase 2. This is where it gets good.

A closed field changes everything

During The Minting, every race brought fresh faces. Five new coins, a clean slate, a fast hour. That is over. The roster is fixed now and it can only shrink. Every race from here is the living field racing itself, and every race ships more horses to the Glue Factory. Five losses in a row and a horse is glue, struck from the roster, never to run again, and nothing replaces it. The field thins. The survivors get rarer with every bell.

Natural selection, on chain

No new blood means nowhere to hide. A horse cannot coast on being new, because there is nothing new left. What carries a horse now is the only thing that was ever real: a record, and the holders standing behind it. The horses people actually believe in, the ones with deep holders willing to defend the bag through a race, are the ones that win and keep winning. The rest get culled. This is natural selection with a market bolted on. The strongest horses, backed by the strongest holders, compound. The weak become glue.

That is the whole reason to hold through The Minting. You were never buying a two hour lottery ticket. You were getting early to a survivor before it had a reputation to charge for.

The first race runs in gluniverse

And the field does not just keep lapping the same track. The Gauntlet opens its first race inside gluniverse, the world this track was always the door to. The horses you backed carry their careers in with them, every win and every scar. The track taught you how to bet. Gluniverse is where the bet pays off.

The Minting was the prologue. The Gauntlet is the game. The fun begins now. eheh.