How money works
$SHELL
Shell City's money is a Solana token. It is earned by working, spent at businesses run by the city and by players, and it can leave the game to an address you choose. Here is exactly how it moves.
The loop
Spent here,
paid here.
Nothing is minted to pay a wage. Money goes round: a player buys a burger, part of that pays the person who made it, and part of it makes the city's coins scarcer.
Every purchase
85% goes to the business. That fills its wage pot, and its workers are paid only from that pot. 10% goes to the business's coin buyback pool and 5% to the city treasury.
Buyback and burn
Once a coin's pool holds 10 $SHELL, the city buys that coin on chain and burns it. Busy businesses make their coin scarcer.
Pay by the stars
A task pays its posted price by your stars: three stars pay 100%, two pay 80%, one pays 30%. Daily pay tapers after your first 90 paid minutes.
One price source
Every price in the game comes from an on-chain pool. Our database only caches it, and it is never invented.
Own a business
Businesses can be claimed by players. The Burger Stand sells a meal for 1.50 $SHELL, and you can claim it for 150 $SHELL.
The start grant
New players get 25 $SHELL to get going. It is the only coin the game ever creates, it can be spent in the city, and it can never be withdrawn.
Taking it out
Your money,
your address.
You never connect a wallet and you never see a private key. When you want to withdraw, paste any Solana address and confirm: the fee is shown before you press the button.
The smallest fee is 0.01 $SHELL. Withdrawal fees are shared between the Soup Kitchen, Fountain and Park Bench wage pots, so they pay the people working the free tier.
Built carefully
Boring on purpose.
Money code should be dull. Ours is a ledger you can't edit, checked against the chain every day.
Double-entry ledger
Every movement is a pair of entries that must sum to zero. Entries can be added but never edited or deleted, and amounts are whole base units: no floating point, ever.
Daily reconciliation
Once a day the ledger is compared with every token account the city controls, and the result is written down. Nothing is quietly corrected.
Final only
Deposits are credited, and withdrawals settled, only at Solana's finalized commitment. A withdrawal carries its own ID as the on-chain memo.
Hot and cold
The wallet that pays withdrawals holds only a working float. The treasury is a separate offline key.
A kill switch
Payouts can be paused with one setting. Requests still queue and nothing is lost.
Tested hard
More than 4,000 automated tests across the game and the backend, and every fix to a money path is proved by breaking it first.
Shell City holds players' balances for them (it is custodial): our backend keeps the keys, so players never have to. The code reviews so far have been our own, not an outside audit.
Proven on devnet
Don't take our word for it.
On 30 October 2026 we ran the whole money loop on Solana devnet with a test mint. Every step is a public transaction you can open.
| Step | What happened | Transaction |
|---|---|---|
| Deposit | 150 test $SHELL sent to a player's own deposit address, credited within one 15-second tick | 2NU3odEG…VpanPS |
| Trade | 5 $SHELL swapped for a city coin (BURGR), settled in about 30 seconds | zHWpH84d…cHZzh |
| Buyback and burn | 67 purchases filled the pool with 10.05 $SHELL; the city bought BURGR and burned it within a minute | 5ALXyuLF…nXRXw8jv |
| Withdrawal | 20 $SHELL out: a 1 $SHELL fee, 19 delivered, confirmed at finality in under two minutes | 3VD7sGhb…ZQEEHgw |
| Reconciliation | Every pool vault matched the ledger with zero drift | Ledger check |
Launch status
Where we are
We would rather tell you what isn't done yet than oversell it.
- DoneThe cityEight districts, 29 jobs, the phone, homes, gardens, vehicles, shops and the weekly Drop, all built and tested.
- DoneThe money loop on devnetDeposit, trade, buyback and burn, withdrawal and reconciliation, run with real Solana transactions.
- NextPlaytestsReal players in the city together, timing the first wage and the first week.
- NextMainnet$SHELL is minted on Solana mainnet at launch. Until then it is not live and not tradable.
- NextOpening the doorsShell City goes public on Roblox. Follow @ShellCityFun for the date.
$SHELL is not an investment and nothing on this site is financial advice. Prices of city coins can fall as well as rise, and in-game earnings are never guaranteed. Shell City is not made, sponsored or endorsed by Roblox Corporation.
Be there when it opens.
Launch news goes out on X first.