Cassette

Payments and Blockchain Disclosures

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Cassette keeps blockchain jargon out of the way while you play, but what you buy and how you pay do run on a public blockchain. This page says plainly how that works and what can go wrong. It is part of our Terms of Service.

The basics

  • Your account is a wallet. Signing in to Cassette creates a wallet on the Polygon blockchain, provided by Polygon's OMS Wallet service. It's non-custodial: we never hold its keys.
  • What you get are tokens. Game licences and items are tokens (sometimes called NFTs) issued to your wallet by the developer's own storefront contract. @usernames are tokens issued by Cassette, for free. A licence lets you play a game; an item does what its game says; a username is your name on Cassette.
  • You pay the developer's storefront. Each developer sells from its own storefront contract, created from our public factory and owned by the developer. You pay it in USDC, a digital dollar issued by Circle, on the Polygon network. We don't hold, receive or control the payment; Cassette may receive a referral fee from the developer out of the price (0% during our launch period).
  • Self-refund escrow. If the developer offers a self-refund window (6 hours in the standard template), your payment stays in the developer's storefront until the window closes, and you can take it back yourself until then. After that, the payment is released to the developer.
  • You add your own funds. Cassette doesn't sell USDC or take cards. To pay, send USDC on Polygon to your Cassette wallet address, for example from an exchange. Send only USDC, and only on the Polygon network: other tokens or networks may be lost.

Tokens are for playing, not investing

Licences, items and usernames are digital content for use on Cassette and in games. They are not investments, shares, savings or money. We don't promise that they'll keep or gain any value, we don't buy them back, and we don't run a marketplace for reselling them. Most licences can't be transferred at all. Where a developer allows a licence or item to be transferred, you may be able to trade it on websites we don't run; if you do, you take the risk of fakes, scams and prices falling to nothing. Be wary of anyone offering to buy or sell Cassette tokens or accounts.

Your balance is USDC in your own wallet

The balance Cassette shows is USDC that you own, in your wallet. It is not a deposit with us or with any developer, it doesn't earn interest, and it isn't covered by any deposit guarantee scheme. USDC is designed to be worth one US dollar, but its value depends on its issuer, and for you it may also move against your own currency. If we add other ways to pay in the future, we'll update this page first.

Things that can go wrong

  • Blockchain transactions are final. Once a purchase or transfer is confirmed, nobody, including us, can reverse it. Refunds are separate payments back to your wallet: a self-refund from escrow, or a refund from the developer who sold to you (see the Terms). We don't pay refunds for developers' sales.
  • Mistakes are permanent. If you send tokens or USDC to a wrong address, they are lost. Cassette never asks you to send funds anywhere: be suspicious of anyone who does.
  • Your sign-in is your key. If someone takes over the email, Google or Apple account you sign in with, they may be able to empty your wallet. If you lose that account, you may lose the wallet. We can't help with either.
  • Smart contracts can have bugs. The storefront code is tested and reviewed, but that can't guarantee it has no errors, and a bug could disrupt purchases, escrowed payments or tokens.
  • Nobody can change a storefront, including us. Storefronts and their factory have no admin, upgrade or pause key. That protects you from changes, but it also means a bug in a deployed storefront can't be fixed; a developer would have to move to a new one. The developer controls its own listings, prices and refund policy, for future sales only. Our own contracts (usernames, the game registry and the abuse registry) do have admin keys; none of them can move or block a purchase from a developer's storefront, or take tokens out of your wallet. The abuse registry's admin could, through a faulty or misused update, stop self-refunds at storefronts that chose to use it.
  • Outside services. Cassette depends on the Polygon network, the wallet provider and USDC's issuer, and each game on its developer's hosting. If one of them has an outage, changes its service or stops, buying, signing in or playing may stop working for a while, or for good. Your tokens stay recorded on the blockchain, and developers' storefronts keep working, even if Cassette ends.
  • Network fees. Cassette's wallet pays the Polygon network fee for your transactions with our contracts and with storefronts created by our factory, within daily limits per wallet. Otherwise, or if you move tokens or USDC elsewhere, you pay it yourself, in Polygon's own currency (POL).
  • Everything on the blockchain is public. See our Privacy Policy.
  • Rules can change. Laws on digital assets are still developing, and changes may affect Cassette, tokens or USDC.
  • Taxes. Trading tokens or USDC outside Cassette may have tax consequences for you. We can't advise you on them.

How we see these tokens

On Cassette, developers sell access to their games and items from their own storefronts, as tokens, because that makes ownership portable and checkable. We don't sell or issue those tokens, we don't offer tokens as investments, we don't run a trading platform for them, and we don't hold anyone's funds or tokens. We don't issue USDC or exchange it for other currencies. That is how we've designed Cassette; it is not a statement that any regulator has reviewed it.

Questions

Write to [email protected].