ModernMaffia is in active development. Balance, features, and mechanics can change at any time, and the game world may be reset or wiped without notice.
ModernMaffia (dev)

Clean vs. Dirty Cash, and Laundering

Every dollar you hold is either Clean or Dirty, and the difference matters everywhere.

  • Clean Cash is legitimate money. It spends anywhere, and it's the only kind a police raid can never touch.
  • Dirty Cash is straight crime proceeds. It spends in shadier corners of the game — hot gear, the drug trade — but it's exposed: a raid can seize it, and holding a lot of it raises your Heat.

Turning dirty into clean

Laundering happens at the Global Crypto Exchange on your Phone, for a 10% fee off the top. That fee isn't fixed for everyone: a Financier gets a discount laundering their own money, and an even better one laundering for their crew — it's the class's whole identity, the same way a Hacker's identity is market intel. Crew upgrades can shave a little more off the crew-wide rate over time.

Picking a chain

The exchange is neutral, unownable, and reachable from anywhere — there is no local desk to travel to any more. The 10% exchange fee is flat on every chain and always destroyed. What you're choosing is what happens on top of it:

  • Bitcoin — the regulated public exchange. It charges another 10%, which is also destroyed, so 20% all in. In exchange it is completely clean: nothing you move through Bitcoin raises your Heat, ever.
  • Crew chains — any crew can list one and charge up to 5%, so 10–15% all in, and that part goes to the crew rather than being burned. But a crew chain is unregistered plumbing, so it raises your Heat, scaling with the size of the wash.

Which one to use

There's no right answer, and that's deliberate.

A crew chain is always cheaper — even the greediest one at 5% still beats Bitcoin's 20%, and the cap exists precisely so no crew can price above the public exchange. If money is what you're short of, use a crew chain.

Bitcoin is the only way to move money without leaving a trace. If you're already warm, or you're about to do something that needs your Heat low, the extra 10% is what you pay to stay invisible. Washing a big pile through a crew chain when you're sitting near the RICO threshold is how people get raided.

So: cheap and traceable, or dear and clean.

Chains fill up

A crew chain can only move so much every 6 hours — and that limit is shared by everyone using it, not per person. Wash a big pile through one and there's less room for the next person, including your own crewmates.

It refills gradually, not all at once: each wash stops counting against the limit 6 hours after it happened, so room comes back continuously rather than everybody racing for a reset.

Two things follow from that, and both are intentional:

  • When the cheap chains are full, you go somewhere else — a rival's chain, or Bitcoin. Bitcoin is never full. That's exactly when paying double for the clean option earns its keep.
  • There's no priority for the crew that owns the chain. First come, first served. A rival can deliberately dump money through your chain to fill it and lock your own members out — a hostile move that doesn't need a war declared.

A crew raises its chain's ceiling through the Infrastructure upgrade track. Every chain starts at the same limit, so nobody begins ahead; the difference between chains is bought with Rep and cash, not handed to whoever has the most members.

The listing quotes every number — what each chain costs you, how much Heat it adds, and how much room it has left — for the exact amount you're moving, before you commit to anything.

Running your crew's own chain

If your crew has no chain, every member is washing on Bitcoin at 20% and every penny of that is destroyed. Register your own and your members wash at a fraction of that, outsiders pay you for the privilege, and the surcharge lands in your treasury instead of vanishing.

A Financier who can manage crew businesses can do it: pick a name and a symbol, pay a one-off cost from the treasury, and you're listed. From then on you set the surcharge (0–5%, changeable once an hour). The Financier who registered it is the chain's operator and takes a cut of the revenue — though never from their own washes.

Yes, you can use your own chain. The surcharge goes out of your pocket and back into the treasury, so a crew washing on its own chain effectively pays just the flat 10% — the cheapest laundering available to anyone. It still costs Heat, and it still eats your own capacity, which is what stops it being free money.

Setting your rate at 0% means the cheapest chain on the board and no income. Setting it at 5% earns the most per wash but leaves every rival room to undercut you. That trade is the game.