How DegenGo works

DegenGo — Meme Wars is a location-based crypto game built on pump.fun's “GO” bounty marketplace (a “pay anyone to do anything” escrow platform on Solana). The tagline says it all: Tag the world. Stack SOL.

Players travel to real-world landmarks (Eiffel Tower, Burj Khalifa, Machu Picchu…), prove they're physically there, and claim a SOL bounty that was held in escrow. Think Pokémon GO, but the PokéStops are landmarks and the reward is cryptocurrency.

What makes DegenGo distinct:

• 6 crypto-meme factions (Pepe, Doge, Wojak, Bonk, Brett, Chad) with “Faction Wars”.
• Collectible, gacha-style Hunter Cards.
• A real, draggable 3D globe + a Google-Earth-style satellite map.
• Custom AI-generated meme mascots and landmark imagery.

1. 1
   Connect & pick a meme. Link a wallet, choose a hunter tag and one of six factions.
2. 2
   Find a LIVE bounty. Scan the 3D globe or flat map for a glowing drop. Each one escrows real SOL.
3. 3
   Travel to the landmark. The game is location-based — you must physically get there.
4. 4
   Prove it. Verify your GPS on-site and record a 30-second proof video at the spot.
5. 5
   Submit — first valid wins. It's a race. The first accepted submission gets the escrow paid straight to their wallet, and war points to their faction.

What is real today: the full interactive UI, the 3D globe and satellite map, the AI-generated art, the simulated wallet/claim flow (saved to your browser), and a live production deployment on Railway with a provisioned Postgres database.

Bounty / Drop

A reward attached to a landmark, claimable by tagging it.

Tag

Proving you're at a landmark to claim its bounty.

Escrow

SOL locked when a bounty is created, released to the winner.

Faction

A meme team you rep; your tags earn it war points.

Hunter

A player. Identified by a hunter tag (e.g. @gigatagger).

Hunter Card

A collectible character card that buffs your tags.

War points

Faction score; the top faction wins the season pool.

pump.fun GO

The real Solana bounty marketplace this concept builds on.

A bounty is a landmark with: a SOL reward (0.5–3◎), a status (LIVE / PENDING / CLAIMED), a rarity tier, a live countdown, and a count of hunters racing for it.

Rarity controls how rare/valuable a drop is:

All 12 demo bounties live in lib/data.ts as the BOUNTIES array (place, country, lat/lng, reward, status, rarity, countdown).

At sign-up you pick one of six meme factions. Every bounty you tag funnels war points to your faction. A territory-control bar shows who's winning, and the top faction at season end splits a 500◎ prize pool.

The six: Pepe Legion, Doge Pack, Bonk Squad, Chad Order, Brett Boys, Wojak Union. Scores update live as the feed claims bounties (see state management).

Collectible, gacha-style character cards. Each has a rarity, three stats (speed, stealth, luck) and a faction perk (e.g. “+25% SOL on Legendary tags”). On the landing page they flip on click and you can “rip a pack” to spotlight a random pull. Defined as CARDS in lib/data.ts.

The leaderboard ranks top hunters by claims, SOL earned and streak. The live feed shows real-time activity (“@BonkZilla tagged Osaka 🚀”). In the demo it's driven by a timer that pushes a new randomized event every ~2.6s and bumps the relevant faction's score — your own claims appear there instantly.

• / — the marketing landing page (hero + 3D globe, bounty board, faction wars, hunter cards, how-it-works, leaderboard).
• /explore — the full-screen Explorer app: the real interactive globe + satellite map.
• /docs — this documentation.

Built with react-globe.gl (a React wrapper around three.js). It's a real WebGL globe you can drag to spin and scroll to zoom.

• Satellite earth texture + topology bump map from public/textures/.
• A green atmosphere glow and a starfield background.
• Each bounty is an HTML mascot pin with its SOL price tag, plus a glowing dot and a pulsing ring for LIVE drops.
• Pins on the far side of the planet are hidden by a custom occlusion check (dot-product of the pin vs. camera direction each frame).
• Clicking a pin (or sidebar card) flies the camera to it.

The “FLAT” mode is a real slippy map built with leaflet. It has two styles:

• SAT — Esri World Imagery satellite tiles + place/road label overlays (free, no API key).
• GAME — a stylized CartoDB dark basemap.

Bounties become mascot markers (Leaflet divIcon). Selecting one flies the map to it. Lives in FlatMap.tsx, loaded client-side to avoid the same SSR window issue.

/explore (in Explorer.tsx) is the full-screen app:

• A left bounty board sidebar with search, the live feed, and filters.
• A center stage that toggles between GLOBE and FLAT.
• A right detail panel: reward + ≈USD, “hunters on the way”, the 3-step how-to-claim, coordinates, “Verify my location” (uses the real browser Geolocation API + a haversine distance check), and “Open in Google Maps”.

The mascots and landmark photos are AI-generated via fal.ai and committed into public/generated/. The mascots are reference-guided so they actually resemble the real memes:

1. 1
   Download references. Real meme images in public/refs/ — Pepe/Doge/Wojak from Wikipedia, Bonk/Brett/Gigachad from CoinGecko token logos.
2. 2
   Upload to fal storage. So fal's models can fetch them.
3. 3
   Restyle with nano-banana. fal's nano-banana/edit (a Gemini image model) turns each reference into a consistent 3D collectible toy, keeping its identity — far better than image-to-image, which duplicated subjects.
4. 4
   Cut out the background. fal's rembg makes them transparent PNGs.

Landmark aerials + the app icon come from scripts/gen.mjs (flux schnell). Re-run the mascots with node --env-file=.env.local scripts/gen-mascots.mjs.

app/
  layout.tsx        → fonts, <AppShell> (global providers + modals)
  page.tsx          → landing page
  explore/page.tsx  → the Explorer
  docs/page.tsx     → this page
  globals.css       → theme, neon utilities, globe/map pin styles

components/
  Hero, Nav, Footer, BountyBoard, Factions, Cards,
  Leaderboard, Feed, HowItWorks, GlobeFab   → landing
  Explorer, FlatMap, BountyDetail           → /explore
  Globe3D + Globe3DImpl                      → the 3D globe
  GameProvider                               → global game state
  Onboard, CommandPalette, Toasts, Avatars   → shared UI

lib/data.ts         → all mock data + helpers
scripts/            → fal.ai image generation
public/
  generated/        → AI mascots, landmarks, icon
  textures/         → earth textures for the globe

All game state lives in one React context, GameProvider.tsx, wrapped around every page by AppShell. It holds: wallet connection, hunter tag, faction, balance, claimed bounties, faction scores, the live feed and toasts — and persists your session to localStorage.

Key actions any component can call via the useGame() hook:

const { connected, hunter, faction, balance,
        claimed, scores, feed,
        claim, finishOnboard, disconnect,
        toast, setOnboardOpen } = useGame();

claim(bounty) credits your balance, marks the bounty tagged, adds faction points and pushes a feed event. In the detail panel, Verify my location reads your real GPS and only claims if you're within 250m — otherwise it tells you how far off you are.

lib/data.ts is the single source of truth for the demo: FACTIONS, BOUNTIES, LEADERBOARD, CARDS, feed templates, plus helpers like mascotSrc(), landmarkSrc() and fmtNum() (a locale-safe number formatter that avoids server/client hydration mismatches).

The app is live in production on Railway:

• Workspace My Projects → project degengo, with a web service (Next.js) and a Postgres service.
• web is connected to the GitHub repo gn-inconcepts/DegenGo — so every push to main auto-deploys.
• Build = Railpack auto-detect → npm install → npm run build → npm start.

A managed Postgres is provisioned and its connection string is already injected into the web service as a reference variable:

DATABASE_URL = ${{ Postgres.DATABASE_URL }}

It's live but not yet used — the app still reads mock data. Wiring it up is the next milestone.

1. 1
   Database layer. Add Prisma/Drizzle + a schema (bounties, hunters, claims, factions, feed), migrate against the live Postgres, seed from the current mock data.
2. 2
   API + realtime. Replace mock reads with API routes; add WebSocket/SSE for the live feed and 'hunters on the way'.
3. 3
   Wallet auth. Sign-in by signing a nonce with a Solana wallet (Phantom) — no passwords.
4. 4
   On-chain escrow. Integrate the real pump.fun GO bounties (or a custom Solana escrow program). This handles real money and needs audits.
5. 5
   Geo + proof + anti-cheat. Enforced GPS, the 30-second proof video, and human/ML moderation to stop spoofing.
6. 6
   Legal & safety. ToS, geo-restrictions, and KYC/AML review — it's real-money and gambling-adjacent.

Made with Claude Code · DegenGo — Meme Wars