0. TL;DR

The TAOmagotchi mechanic design is good. The chain, the name, and the "TAO" leg are wrong for September 2026. This brief keeps the mechanics, swaps the substrate:

1. What is actually happening on Robinhood Chain (researched 2026-09-03)

The chain

• Ethereum L2, Arbitrum Orbit stack, operated by Robinhood. Mainnet live 2026-07-01.
• Chain ID 4663 (testnet 46630). EVM, ETH gas, fees around $0.005. Permissionless deploys.
• Chainlink has been the official oracle from block zero: CCIP, Data Streams, Data Feeds. Every Stock Token has a per-asset Chainlink price feed on-chain.
• Uniswap v2 / v3 / v4 are all live.

The dominant meta: stock-paired meme coins

This is the single most important finding, and it did not exist when the TAOmagotchi doc was written.

• Robinhood built the chain for tokenized stocks. Memecoins took it over.
• Tokenized stocks are ERC-20s issued by Robinhood Assets (18 decimals). They give economic exposure to the real equity but are legally debt securities, not shares. Only Authorized Participants can mint or burn against real shares.
• Traders started using Stock Tokens as the quote asset in liquidity pools instead of ETH. A meme becomes "the mascot of $TICKER".
• Scale as of early September 2026:
• ~$217M in memecoin-vs-stock-token pair volume on 2026-09-02 — more than direct stock-token trading.
• ~17.2% of the on-chain supply of 19 high-liquidity stock tokens is locked in 432 pools that use the stock token as the quote asset.
• Direct tokenized-stock volume is only ~$55M/day. The meme wrapper tail is wagging the dog.
• Claimed tickers already: Artificial Inu ($AI) on NVDA (~$150-170M cap), BONER on HIMS (absorbed 53% of on-chain HIMS supply and briefly pushed the wrapper to 4.6x the underlying). Others in the early meme economy: CASHCAT, HMM, TENDIES, STONKBROKER, YOLO, PIPEDOG, microduck, DOGO.
• ~95+ tickers are tokenized, including AAPL, NVDA, TSLA, SPY, GME, RDDT.

The wedge: the meta is one meme mascot per ticker, and most tickers are unclaimed. The play is not "another meme on RH chain". It is claiming an unclaimed high-nostalgia ticker and becoming its permanent mascot, with a game attached that nobody else has.

Launchpads

• hood.fun is the flagship fair-launch pad: bonding curve, auto-migrate to a permanently locked Uniswap v3 pool, creator earns fees for life. 6,471 launches in one 24h window.
• It is not the volume leader by count — PONS (11,547) and flap (9,935) out-list it; bankr.bot, Virtuals, clanker also active. Total ~42,709 new tokens in 24 hours.
• Pools.trade (Uniswap Labs) is the other credible option, notable for permanently locked liquidity.

Implication: 42k launches/day means launchpad choice is a rounding error. Distribution decides everything. See §7.

Risks confirmed on-chain

1. Ticker impersonation is rampant. There are 354 separate contracts using the ticker GME, and the impostors out-trade the real GameStop stock token 2:1. Any pairing must hardcode the canonical Robinhood Assets contract address from docs.robinhood.com/chain/contracts/, and the site must show that address prominently.
2. Off-hours dislocation. Nobody can mint new stock tokens outside market hours, so an on-chain stock token can trade far above the real price overnight; when NYSE reopens, market makers buy real shares, mint, and dump into the pools, collapsing the premium. If $NEST is only priced against a stock token, $NEST inherits that dislocation.
3. No confirmed VRF. Chainlink Data Feeds / Data Streams / CCIP are live. VRF is not confirmed on Robinhood Chain. No Pyth Entropy or Gelato VRF either, as of this research. → Real-money gambling stays blocked. (Same blocker already documented for $FWH.)
4. Scam wave generally: honeypots, copycats, fake bridges. Canonical bridge is the Arbitrum Portal.

2. Naming: why not Tamagotchi, and what instead

Do not use "Tamagotchi" or any near-miss. TAMAGOTCHI and たまごっち are registered trademarks in 56 countries and Bandai runs an active, published anti-counterfeiting programme. A token is a commercial product; enforcement here is not exotic, and the practical damage is not a lawsuit but a delisting / DEX-screener takedown / exchange refusal at exactly the moment you have momentum. "$TAOMAG", "$TAOCHI", "$GOTCHI" all carry the risk, and "-gotchi" additionally collides with Aavegotchi and a Solana "Tamagotchi/TAMA" project already in market.

The genre is not protectable. A virtual pet you feed, clean, and evolve is a mechanic, not IP. Ship the mechanic under an original mark.

Recommendation: Nest Egg — ticker $NEST

Why it is the right answer and not just a safe one:

• The lifecycle is already in the name. Tamagotchi starts as an egg. So does this. Egg → hatch → chick → fledgling → full bird. No explanation needed.
• "Nest egg" is literally a finance term for the savings you grow. The treasury is a nest egg. The pun is the product, not decoration.
• Robinhood Chain's mascot is a bird. A robin. You are hatching a robin on Robinhood's own chain. Free thematic ownership of the chain itself, with no trademark on Robinhood's marks required because you never use their name, logo, or the word "Robinhood" — you use a bird and an egg.
• Evolution ladder writes itself: Egg → Hatchling → Fledgling → Robin → Hooded Robin.
• $NEST is a short, clean, pronounceable ticker.

Alternates (in rough order): - $TICKR — "the pet that eats tickers." Ticker + tick + heartbeat. Very clean, less warm. - $BROOD — brooding an egg + a brooding market. Darker, degen-friendly. - $HATCH — verb-as-ticker, strong CTA, but heavily used across crypto already. - $YOLKY / $YOLK — funnier, weaker as a long-lived brand.

Do before locking anything: search hood.fun, PONS, flap, Robinscan and DEX Screener for existing $NEST / Nest Egg contracts on chain 4663, plus a USPTO/TESS knockout search. Given 42k launches/day, assume collisions until proven otherwise.

3. Which stock to pair with

The meta rewards claiming a ticker's mascot slot. Pick on three axes: liquidity, unclaimed, and narrative fit with an egg/bird/nest-egg pet.

Recommended: GME primary, SPY as the "grown-up" second pool later. GME buys the launch narrative; SPY buys the multi-year story if the project survives ("the pet finally bought index funds").

Critical caveat — do not pair only against the stock token. Because of the off-hours mint blockade (§1 risk 2), a stock-token-only pool means $NEST's chart is polluted by weekend and overnight premium/discount noise that has nothing to do with $NEST.

Pool structure: 1. $NEST / WETH — primary price discovery, the chart everyone quotes. Deep, locked. 2. $NEST / GME — the narrative pool, the volume pool, the reason you appear on stock-pair scanners like HoodPools. Smaller, deliberately.

4. Mechanics: Tamagotchi → Nest Egg mapping

Everything below is a rename/retarget of the original doc's design. The original mapping was sound.

Why the market-hours sleep cycle matters

It is the only Tamagotchi mechanic that maps perfectly and for free to a real-world clock everyone in the audience already watches. It gives you: an opening bell ritual, a closing bell ritual, a weekend state, holiday jokes, and a Telegram bot with something true to say twice a day forever. It also solves the classic pet-game problem of needing to invent daily engagement.

5. The economic engine

The sell fee — implementation

The original doc assumed a 3% sell tax. A fee-on-transfer ERC-20 is the wrong build here: - hood.fun and every fair-launch pad issue standard ERC-20s with no tax hooks. - FoT tokens are broken/hostile on Uniswap v3, which is what hood.fun graduates into. - FoT is a red flag to the exact traders you want, and blocks aggregator routing.

Build it as a Uniswap v4 hook instead. v4 is live on the chain. A hook can: - charge an asymmetric fee (0% buy / 3% sell) at the pool level, legitimately and visibly; - route the fee straight to the treasury contract in the same transaction; - be read by anyone before they trade, so it is disclosed rather than discovered.

This means a custom launch with your own v4 pool, not a hood.fun bonding-curve launch. That is a real trade-off: hood.fun gives you a fair-launch trust signal and its own traffic; a v4 launch gives you the engine. Decision D2 below.

The four treasury legs

Sell fees accumulate in one public treasury wallet. The team (later, stakers) allocates to:

1. Medicine — add + lock liquidity. Reduces price impact. Health goes up.
2. Cleanup — buyback and burn. Removes supply. Poop removed permanently.
3. Nest egg — buy the GME stock token and hold it. This is the replacement for the TAO leg and it is strictly better on this chain: - It is a real tokenized security position, publicly verifiable on-chain at a known address. - It has a live Chainlink price feed, so the pet's net worth is provable, not claimed. - It ticks with the market during NYSE hours — the pet's belly literally moves with GME. - It gives the token a floor narrative that is not circular: the treasury holds something that is not the token itself. - It also deepens your own $NEST/GME pool's relevance, because you become a significant holder of the on-chain float — exactly the dynamic BONER ran on HIMS.
4. Rewards pool — staking payouts. Phase 2.

Legal flag, not a blocker but do not skip it. Stock Tokens are legally debt securities. A treasury that accumulates them, publicises the accumulation, and lets holders vote on allocation starts to look like a pooled investment vehicle to a regulator, and "holders vote on the treasury's securities purchases" is the part that looks worst. Keep allocation team-controlled at launch, describe the treasury as a game mechanic rather than as backing or a claim, and get an actual securities opinion before you ship staking or holder voting. This is cheap to do early and extremely expensive to retrofit.

Evolution trigger — replace ATH with share count

The original doc flagged the ATH-milestone idea as "needs some work". It does. ATH milestones are manipulable with a thin book, they reset the narrative on every drawdown, and they reward wicks.

Use the nest egg instead: evolution stages unlock at share-count milestones.

Why this is better: - Monotonic. Shares only go up. The pet never un-evolves in a dip, so drawdowns don't kill the story. - Verifiable. Anyone can read the balance at the treasury address. No trust required. - Causal. Buying → volume → sells → fees → shares → evolution. The community can do something. - Self-marketing. "412 / 1,000 shares to Hooded Robin" is a progress bar, and progress bars are the most reliably viral object in this entire category. - Optionally dual-gate with a market-cap ATH so evolution needs both a healthy treasury and a healthy market. Recommend keeping it single-gated on shares for simplicity at launch.

6. The site

Keep the original vision: a Tamagotchi-shaped toy that expands to full screen, pet centred, status bar top and bottom. Changes:

• Original shell, not a Bandai clone. Egg-shaped device, three buttons, LCD-style screen. Do not reproduce the Tamagotchi silhouette, colourway, or icon set.
• The screen is live on-chain data, not a simulation: buys animate as feeding, sells as poop, burns as cleaning, LP adds as medicine, stock-token buys as the nest egg growing.
• Nest egg counter is the hero element, with the progress bar to the next stage.
• Wake/sleep state driven by NYSE hours; pet visibly asleep on weekends.
• Canonical GME contract address shown in the footer, given the 354 impostor contracts.
• Telegram bot mirrors every event: feed alerts, poop alerts, medicine, cleanup, nest egg purchases, stage-up, opening/closing bell, sickness warnings.

Technically this is close to the $FWH arcade stack you already have: an EVM chain-read layer behind a game seam. There is real reuse available from fox-wif-hood-arcade (the mockChain seam, sim/EV scripts) if this goes ahead.

7. Distribution is the whole game

42,709 tokens launched in a single 24-hour window on this chain. Contract quality is not the constraint; attention is. Whatever launches, it needs:

• The stock-pair scanners (HoodPools, Robinscan, DEX Screener RH-chain pages) to list you the day you launch — that is where this specific audience shops.
• A claim on the GME mascot slot stated loudly and early, before someone else takes it.
• The 2021 buy-button story used deliberately. It is the emotional core and it is free.
• Nostalgia asset pack: 90s toy packaging, blister packs, CRT ads, fake instruction manuals. The original doc's "repurpose old commercials" instinct is right, just do not use Bandai footage.
• Sticker pack + meme pack, as originally scoped.

8. Open decisions

9. Next steps (revised from the original doc)

1. Collision + trademark knockout on $NEST / Nest Egg (hood.fun, PONS, flap, Robinscan, DEX Screener, TESS).
2. Confirm GME mascot slot is genuinely unclaimed — scan the $GME-quoted pools on HoodPools.
3. Pull the canonical Robinhood Assets contract addresses from docs.robinhood.com/chain/contracts/.
4. Model realistic volume → fee → share accumulation, then set the evolution ladder from it (D6).
5. Securities opinion on the stock-token treasury before any staking or voting is announced.
6. Secure accounts and domain under the locked name.
7. Brief branding: egg/robin lifecycle sprite sheet, 5 stages, plus sick/sleeping/eating/pooping states.
8. Brief the v4 hook contract + treasury contract. Audit is non-negotiable.
9. Brief the site (reuse FWH arcade seam where possible).
10. Telegram bot event feed.
11. Sticker pack (10-15 emotions) + meme pack.

Sources

• https://www.kucoin.com/blog/robinhood-stock-paired-meme-coins
• https://cryptoslate.com/robinhood-put-stocks-on-a-permissionless-blockchain-memecoin-traders-are-stress-testing-what-happens-next/
• https://www.altcoinbuzz.io/robinhood-chain-memecoins-tokenized-stocks
• https://cryptoticker.io/en/robinhood-chain-memecoins-explained/
• https://www.kucoin.com/news/flash/robinhood-chain-launchpad-sees-42-709-new-tokens-listed-in-24-hours
• https://trustswap.com/robinhood/launchpad
• https://hood.fun/
• https://docs.robinhood.com/chain/stock-tokens/
• https://docs.robinhood.com/chain/contracts/
• https://docs.robinhood.com/chain/oracles-and-price-feeds/
• https://bitquery.io/investigations/robinhood-chain-tokenized-stocks
• https://www.hoodpools.com/
• https://robinscan.io/stocks
• https://genfinity.io/2026/07/01/robinhood-chain-mainnet-launch-chainlink-oracle-integration/
• https://tamagotchi-official.com/gb/anti-counterfeiting/

10. PONS v2 as the launch venue (added 2026-09-03)

This section supersedes the "custom Uniswap v4 hook launch" recommendation in §5 and D2.

Verdict: launch on PONS

PONS v2 (live 2026-08-04) does almost exactly what §5 said you'd need a custom hook to do, and does it inside a fair-launch wrapper. Recommendation is to launch there.

What PONS v2 gives you

• Graduates into a Uniswap v4 pool with liquidity locked permanently. Single full-range position transferred to a locker at graduation. No unlock button, no waiting period, no privileged wallet — not the creator, not PONS. (Note: an older third-party guide claims PONS "does not lock liquidity by default." That is stale v1 information. Verify against the v2 docs, not secondary write-ups.)
• Tokenized stocks as native quote assets. This is the whole meta, supported out of the box.
• A protocol-level creator fee routed to an address you control. This is the treasury engine. No custom hook, no fee-on-transfer token, no bespoke contract to audit, no aggregator breakage.
• Snipe protection built in: opening tax starts at 99% of buy value and decays exponentially to zero over 5 seconds.
• It is the current fee and volume leader: >$500M in a 24h window ending Sept 1, $4B cumulative,

  $25M paid out to creators. Roughly a quarter of curve volume is priced in tokenized stocks.

The quote asset list — GME is approved

Approved pairs reported as: NVDA, SPCX, GOOGL, TSLA, GME, AAPL, SPY, SNDK, AMD, AMZN, MSFT, META, CRCL, COIN, MU, PLTR, TTWO, COST, DJT, MSTR, QQQ, RDDT, USDG, cbBTC, HIMS, BB, GLD, ETH.

The §3 recommendation stands unchanged: pair against GME. No whitelist petition needed. (HOOD appeared in PONS's original v2 announcement but not in the expanded list above — verify on the launch screen if HOOD is wanted as an alternative.) The list is closed: only assets PONS has explicitly approved can be used for pairing, and nobody else can add one. New assets go through contact@ponsfamily.com.

The unplanned win: the nest egg fills itself

Creator fees are charged on the quote leg. Pair against GME, and your fee stream arrives denominated in tokenized GME automatically.

This is strictly better than the §5 design. There is no "collect fees, then the team manually swaps into the stock token" step, which means: - no treasury discretion over the core accumulation, so far less regulatory surface (§5 flag), - no execution risk and no timing accusations, - the share count — and therefore evolution — ticks purely on trading volume, mechanically, - the whole thing is legible in one sentence: every trade feeds the nest egg.

The share-count evolution ladder (§5) becomes the single best mechanic in the design, because it is now fully automatic and fully verifiable.

What you give up, and how to design around it

1. No custom hooks

All graduated pools use a shared "Meme hook" singleton, which only validates pool registration and accrues fees after swaps. Every other Uniswap callback is disabled and reverts.

Game logic therefore cannot live in the pool. It lives in the fee-recipient treasury contract plus the site reading chain state. This is cheaper, not harder: the only thing needing an audit is the treasury allocator, not a novel fee hook sitting in the swap path.

2. Fees are bidirectional — "only sells poop" is dead

The fee is charged on the quote leg in both directions, on buys and on sells. You cannot have an asymmetric 0% buy / 3% sell.

Reframe, don't fight it. The pet takes a bite of every interaction. Feeding it costs a crumb, and so does cleaning up after it. This is honestly a better pitch than a sell tax — sell taxes read as exit punishment and scare off the traders you want, whereas a flat both-ways fee that visibly buys GME reads as a machine that works whichever way the market moves. Sells still map to pooping in the game; they just are not a special fee tier.

3. No team, marketing, or staking allocation — at all

The entire supply is minted straight to the curve. No vesting, no team allocation, no reserve. Nobody, including the creator, holds a bag set aside before trading opens.

This deletes the tokenomics section of the original doc. Team, marketing, and the staking rewards pool cannot be pre-allocated. They must be funded from: - the creator fee stream (paid in the quote asset), and/or - open-market buys on the curve like everyone else, disclosed publicly, with addresses.

Treat this as a feature and lead with it. "No team allocation, structurally impossible" is a strong trust claim on a chain with a documented scam wave, and it is verifiable rather than promised.

4. Almost everything is immutable after launch

Supply, pairing asset, and fees are fixed at creation. The creator can only redirect the fee-recipient address and toggle buybacks. Get the launch config right the first time; there is no second attempt.

Fee numbers — do not trust secondary sources

Reported figures conflict across write-ups: a 1% trade fee split 70/30 creator/protocol; a separate optional creator tax "up to 10%", capped by PONS and fixed at creation; legacy launches on a 90/10 split; and at least one source describing the graduated pool as Uniswap v3 while the v2 docs say v4.

Read the actual numbers off the launch screen and the factory contract before locking anything. The cap is displayed live at launch. Do not model economics off a blog post.

Timing: the gas subsidy clock

Robinhood Chain's 90-day gas waiver began 2026-07-01 and lapses around the end of September 2026 — roughly four weeks out. It is what made deploying ~10,000 tokens a day economically viable.

Two coherent strategies, and they are opposites: - Launch inside the window — maximum ambient traffic and attention, but you are one of ~10k launches that day, and roughly 99 in 100 tokens die on the curve without ever graduating (1,362 graduated out of 124,016 launched, about 1.1%). - Launch just after it lapses — mass spam launching stops being viable, the noise floor drops hard, and a project with an actual product stands out against far less competition.

DECIDED 2026-09-04: launch now, inside the window. The case for waiting was that a real product stands out better in a quiet field. The case for going now, which won, is that attention is a bird in the hand: the chain is hot today, and there is no guarantee the audience is still there in October once the subsidy ends. A quieter field is worth nothing if everyone has left it.

What this decision commits us to, and what it therefore costs: - We are launching into ~10k launches/day, so the launch cannot rely on being noticed organically. Distribution (§7) is no longer a nice-to-have, it is the plan. Have the memes, the sticker pack, the scanner listings and the GME-mascot claim ready before launch day, not after. - Speed now beats polish. The game/site can ship after the token, but the name, the pair, the launch config and the story must be right on day one, because PONS makes them immutable. - It raises the stakes on the pre-launch checks (D1 collision sweep, canonical GME contract), because there is no time to recover from getting one wrong.

Additional PONS-specific risks

• Concentration risk. PONS dominates launchpad activity on a very young chain. Uniswap's zero-fee Pools.trade is direct competition and could compress the model.
• PONS's own buyback is not immutable. 80% of protocol fees currently fund PONS buyback-and-burn via a TWAP process, but the docs say that percentage can still be changed. Do not treat PONS's own token economics as fixed when reasoning about the venue's durability.
• Graduation is not a quality signal and PONS says so directly. It is a liquidity threshold (default reported at 4.2 ETH), nothing more.

Revised D2 and new decisions

Revised next steps

1. Read the live launch screen and factory contract for real fee numbers, the creator-tax cap, the launch fee, and the graduation threshold. Screenshot everything.
2. Confirm on-screen that GME is selectable as a quote asset, and that it resolves to the canonical Robinhood Assets contract (remember: 354 contracts use the ticker GME).
3. Confirm whether the creator buyback toggle burns or just repurchases (D13).
4. Decide D10 — this one is on a four-week clock.
5. Rewrite the tokenomics section against a zero-allocation reality (D12).
6. Everything else in §9 still stands, minus the v4 hook contract brief, which is now unnecessary.

Additional sources

• https://docs.ponsfamily.com/v2
• https://github.com/ponsdotdev/ponsfamily
• https://www.cryptotimes.io/2026/09/01/pons-claims-top-onchain-launchpad-fees-as-robinhood-chain-frenzy-drive-rally/
• https://www.kucoin.com/blog/pons-token-robinhood-chain-pump-fun-rival
• https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2026/07/23/pons-v2-upgrade-eth-bonding-curve/
• https://crypto.news/robinhood-chain-launchpad-pons-announces-v2-with-uniswap-v4-upgrade/
• https://coindesk.cc/pons-v2-upgrade-puts-nvda-and-aapl-pairs-on-a-memecoin-launchpad-90351.html
• https://airdropalert.com/blogs/launch-token-on-pons/
• https://trustswap.com/robinhood/pons

11. Evolution ladder simulation (D6 resolved, 2026-09-04)

Run it yourself: python sim-evolution.py. 2,000 Monte Carlo runs per scenario, 180 days.

The arithmetic that makes this simple

Because the pair is GME, fee income arrives already denominated in GameStop. No swap, no discretion. So:

shares gained = volume traded x our take x nest-egg allocation / GME price

At GME $18.97, a 1.5% take, and half of fees routed to savings: every $1,000,000 of trading volume buys the pet 395 shares. That one line is the whole engine.

What the sim says

Median shares owned, three worlds:

The finding that matters: accumulation plateaus

Look at the Base row. Day 30 is 3,529 shares and day 180 is 5,172. Six times the elapsed time buys under 50% more shares. Memecoin volume decays as a power law, so cumulative savings flatten out hard, and any ladder with big round top numbers will stall forever and read as a dead project.

The second finding: the spread between worlds is roughly 600x (215 vs 127,737 shares at day 180). No single fixed ladder can pace both a dud and a breakout. Pick one to calibrate against, and handle the others structurally.

Rejected: the original ladder (1 / 25 / 250 / 2,000)

The sim killed it. In the Base case all four levels are cleared by day 6 and the game is over in under a week. In the Dud case Robin is reached in only 21% of runs and Hooded Robin in 0%.

Recommended ladder (calibrated to the Base case)

This gives the Base case the right shape: two levels on launch day for immediate dopamine, the third within 48 hours, and a month-long climb to the top rung that the community can actually rally around.

Plus an open-ended prestige tier (this is the important part)

A fixed ladder ends. In the Breakout case it ends on day one, which wastes the whole mechanic. So above Hooded Robin, add tiers that scale in percentage terms, not fixed amounts:

Prestige tier N = 3,500 x 1.15^N shares (each tier needs 15% more than the last)

Percentage scaling is what makes one rule work across a 600x range of outcomes: - Base case: about 1 new tier every two months. Slow, but never actually stuck. - Breakout: about 1 new tier every week, indefinitely, with no ceiling to hit.

Honest caveat

In the Dud case the pet stalls at Fledgling and never moves again. That is correct behaviour, not a bug - the pet's growth is supposed to reflect reality, and a stalled pet on a dead token is honest. But be aware we are publishing a mechanic that visibly announces failure if it fails.

Also note the ladder is not the real lever. Shares scale linearly with take rate and allocation: double the creator tax, or route 100% of fees to savings instead of 50%, and every number above doubles. Settle D11 and the allocation split before publishing the ladder, because they move it.

All numbers assume a 1.5% total take. Verify the real PONS cap on the launch screen first (D11).

Timing note: GameStop earnings, 8 September 2026

GME reports on Sept 8, with options pricing an expected move of about 9%. Given we are launching now (D10), that is worth planning around deliberately: it is a day of guaranteed attention and volatility on our exact pair, and the pet's savings visibly move with it. Treat it as either the launch beat or the first big content moment right after launch.

v3 update: dual gate, age AND shares (supersedes the ladder above)

Aydan's objection to the share-only ladder was correct: in a breakout the pet clears every named stage on day one, and numeric prestige tiers are a weak substitute for a pet turning into a new creature.

The fix is the Tamagotchi mechanic that was there all along. A real Tamagotchi evolves on a clock, one year per day. So each stage now needs both a minimum age and a minimum share count:

• Age is the floor. It says the earliest the pet may evolve. Nothing can rush it. This is what stops a hot launch from finishing the story in an afternoon.
• Shares are the test. At the age, the pet evolves only if the savings are there. Otherwise it waits, and everyone can see exactly how far short it is.

Share gates are set at the 35th percentile of the Base case at each age, so a modest winner clears them roughly on schedule (~65% of runs) and the rest have to earn it. Hatchling is deliberately trivial: the egg cracking is the onboarding moment and must feel instant in every scenario.

"Slow run" is the 90th percentile: the gap between it and "on time" is the share gate doing its job, and it is the community's reason to keep feeding the pet. After Elder Robin, prestige tiers continue at 4,300 x 1.15^N (Base clears ~2 in year one, Breakout ~25).

Two more named stages than before (six, plus Egg) means six sprite sets to commission, not four. Script: python sim-ladder-v3.py. Re-run after D11 fixes the real take rate; every share number scales linearly with it.