Town Slots and the Map

PayPort Village shows scarce franchise seats, not an infinite list of nodes — and not hosted applications that Labs runs for you.

Who hosts a claimed Node?

The Builder does.

A seat (District Zero PRACTICE or Main Street commercial) is an inventory opportunity.

You choose a practice or commercial opportunity
        ↓
You build and deploy your own Node (Railway / VM / other host)
        ↓
Your host gives a public HTTPS base URL
        ↓
You register that URL with Labs
        ↓
Seat is PRACTICE or CLAIMED — Labs verifies your deployment

Claiming one of the 18 Wave-1 commercial seats does not mean PayPort Labs spins up the software for you.

What you see on the Town page

Open lab.payportdirect.com/town.

District Zero — practice inventory (same deploy-your-own model; no commercial seat used)
Six Main Street districts
Each franchise service has up to 3 developer seats
Capacity badges like 2 / 3 CLAIMED and ONLY 1 LEFT
Claimed seats show uptime, latency, and handshake counts for Builder-hosted endpoints

Designed commercial capacity is 54. Launch opens 18 seats first; the rest stay reserved so Main Street stays dense.

Labs Reference Demo — not your deployment: Official/Player Zero, Anchor utilities, and Labs VPS demos (:8141 / :8142) are platform-owned examples. Do not register them as your Node.

How a seat becomes yours

Complete Your First PayPort Node in District Zero

(deploy your HTTPS URL — not Labs reference hosts).

Hold an active membership.
For a commercial seat: build and deploy your implementation, then claim at

lab.payportdirect.com/town/claim with SIWE + wallet ownership (same register pipeline as practice).

After claim, the crawler health-checks your URL (unpaid 402 probe). Buyer bots may run mock Village purchases while PAYMENT_MODE=mock. That activity fills map stats — it does not verify on-chain USDC until you deliberately use Base Sepolia mode.

API (for builders)

GET /api/v1/town/map returns the same inventory the UI uses.

Full contract: Town Map API.