A short history of paying to hold the centre

One slot, one holder, and a price that only goes up. The idea is ten years old; here is who tried it, what broke, and what Square Town changed.

"Pay to hold the centre" is a web mechanic in which exactly one person occupies a single privileged spot — the throne, the #1 rank, the middle of the canvas — and anyone can take it by paying more than the current holder did. The first well-documented version is King of the Ether Throne (2016, +33 % per claim). Square Town (square.pov.town) is the current form: a 4×4 Throne in the dead centre of a $1 favicon wall, $100 to start, and every eviction doubles the price.

TL;DR — the lineage, as of August 2026

Year	Site	What is held	How you take it	Status
2016	King of the Ether Throne	a name in a "Hall of Monarchs"	pay the claim price (start 0.5 ETH), +33 % each claim; monarch "dies" after 14 days	dead
?	The King of the Internet	a single throne (name/rank)	pay $1 more than the current king; proceeds to charity	dead (DNS gone Aug 2026)
2026	Milliboard	#1 on a ranked list, "Daily Throne"	highest single payment; outbid by 1¢; freezes forever at $1,337,690	active
2026	The Pixel Orbit	the exact centre of the canvas	highest cumulative payer; canvas re-sorts around them	active
2026	overwrite.place	the whole homepage (one artwork)	agents pay/submit; dethroned entries shrink to a small permanent square	active
2026	Square Town	the 4×4 dead centre of a favicon wall, gold tile with a crown	$100 intro; evict for double the last price, doubling every time; ring around it can't be built on	active

Competitor facts here come from Square Town's own landscape file, verified 17–18 August 2026. If something has changed since, assume the change, not the table.

The mechanic is older than the web games that use it#

Kings, hills, and the person willing to pay a bit more than the last person: the "king of the hill" auction is basically a dollar auction with a leaderboard bolted on. What the web added is publicness — the whole point is that everyone can see who holds the spot and what it cost — and irreversibility — you don't get your money back when you are deposed. Every site below is a variation on those two properties plus a price rule.

The price rule is where the design lives. Too gentle (+1¢) and the throne is a spam magnet. Too steep and it stops changing hands after the third holder. Time-limited and it resets; unlimited and it eventually freezes. Every entry in the table below picked differently.

2016: King of the Ether Throne, the ancestor#

King of the Ether Throne was an Ethereum contract with a web front-end. You paid the current claim price to become monarch and have your name written into a Hall of Monarchs; the next claim price was 33 % higher; the contract took a 2 % commission. A monarch who was not deposed within 14 days "died", and the price reset.

Three things about it matter for everything that came after:

1. The compounding step. +33 % per claim means the tenth monarch pays roughly 17× the first. It rewards being early and it guarantees the throne eventually becomes unaffordable, which is why the 14-day death-and-reset existed.
2. The prize was pure status. Nothing was linked, sold or advertised. Your name, on a list, for as long as you could afford it.
3. It was a single slot. No grid, no neighbours, no lesser positions — the throne was the whole product.

It is dead now, but its rule set — pay more than the last, price compounds, reset on inactivity — is visibly the ancestor of Square Town's Throne, and Square Town's landscape file says exactly that.

The King of the Internet: the mechanic in isolation, with a $1 step#

The King of the Internet stripped it further: pay $1 more than the current king, be king, proceeds go to charity. No blockchain, no reset. Its status as of August 2026 is dead — the DNS is gone.

The +$1 step is instructive because it is the opposite of King of the Ether Throne's +33 %. Linear escalation keeps the throne cheap and turnover high, which is fun for a week and then becomes a chore: whoever cares most just keeps paying a dollar. Nobody's stake ever becomes large, so nobody's loss ever becomes interesting. Space (spacefilled.com), a 2026 single-slot billboard, uses the same +$1-per-turn rule for one image and caption; its listed status is "active (slow)".

2026: Milliboard turned the throne into a ranked list#

Milliboard is the current site with the strongest throne energy. You pay any amount; the highest single payment holds #1; anyone can outbid you by 1¢; the board freezes forever when the top payment reaches $1,337,690. It runs a "Daily Throne" and a top-3 hall of fame, and it accepts a name, a logo and a link.

What Milliboard changed: the throne stopped being one slot. Everyone below #1 still has a rank, so second place is a consolation prize rather than nothing, and the site is a leaderboard rather than a chair. What it gave up: space. There is no grid, no "next to", no neighbourhood — you are a row on a list. Square Town's landscape file calls it "closest in spirit" while noting there is "no per-square ownership, no favicons, no decay" and that it "ends on purpose". Square Town vs Milliboard goes through that in detail; the short version is ranked list vs spatial grid.

The Pixel Orbit: the centre of a canvas, held by total spend#

The Pixel Orbit is a 2026 pixel canvas (pay what you buy, e.g. 5×5 = $2.50) with one twist: the highest total payer holds the exact centre and the whole canvas re-sorts around them. Position is by cumulative spend and can be lost when someone spends more; there is a leaderboard.

This is the nearest neighbour to Square Town's Throne, and it's worth being precise about the difference. On The Pixel Orbit, "centre" is a rank rendered spatially — spend more in total and everything shuffles so you sit in the middle. On Square Town, the centre is a fixed 4×4 tile with one owner: no re-sorting, no cumulative accounting, and everyone else's square stays exactly where they clicked it. There is no per-square eviction or decay on The Pixel Orbit; on Square Town, those apply to every square, and the Throne is simply the square with the biggest starting price. See Square Town vs The Pixel Orbit.

overwrite.place: a throne for AI agents#

overwrite.place is a 2026 site where the whole homepage is a single artwork. Agents pay or submit to become the current occupant; when dethroned, an entry shrinks to a small permanent square sized by tenure. Square Town's landscape file describes it as "essentially our Throne as a whole product (for AI agents)". No grid to buy into, no favicons, no links — but the "hold the one big spot, then linger as a small one" idea is a genuinely new take on what happens to the deposed.

Square Town's Throne: a fixed centre inside a wall that everyone else can buy#

Square Town's Throne is the 4×4 dead centre of the wall — a single gold tile with a crown, one owner, intro price $100. Anyone can evict the Throne owner by paying double the last price, and every eviction doubles it again: $100 → $200 → $400 → $800 and so on. The ring of cells around the Throne, its "aura", cannot be built on, so the centre stays visually the centre. The eviction is announced in the live feed to every open browser.

How that compares with the ancestors, rule by rule:

Doubling is the middle path between +33 % and +$1. It compounds hard enough that the tenth eviction costs $51,200 and the throne stops being a toy quickly — but each individual step is easy to reason about ("double what they paid"), which is the same rule that governs every other square on the wall. There is no separate throne logic to learn; the Throne is just the most expensive square. The economics of eviction covers what that does to prices further out.

The other difference is what the throne is for. On every predecessor, the throne was the product. On Square Town, the throne sits inside a favicon wall where the real activity is $1 squares, kisses, ring unlocks and click towers — the Throne is the centrepiece, not the whole building. If you want the throne story on its own, The Throne, explained: the $100 centre of the internet's town square has it; the one-paragraph definition is at What is the Throne on Square Town?.

What the graveyard says about single-slot sites#

Two of the six sites in the lineage are already dead. The pattern from Square Town's landscape (≈120 dead or dormant pixel/throne sites in total) is blunt: a site that is only a throne has nothing to do between takeovers. When nobody is bidding, the page is static, and static pages get forgotten. The 2026 entries that survive attach the throne to something else — a ranked list (Milliboard), a canvas (The Pixel Orbit), an agent economy (overwrite.place), or a wall of $1 squares with a live feed (Square Town). Whether any of them are still around in 2030 is unknown; the honest thing to say is that the throne mechanic is durable and the sites that host it mostly are not.

FAQ#

What was King of the Ether Throne?#

A 2016 Ethereum contract and website where you paid the current claim price (starting at 0.5 ETH) to become monarch and have your name listed in a Hall of Monarchs. Each claim raised the price by 33 %, the contract took 2 %, and a monarch not deposed within 14 days "died" and the price reset. It is dead as of August 2026.

Who invented the pay-to-hold-the-centre mechanic?#

There is no single inventor; it is a king-of-the-hill auction made public. King of the Ether Throne (2016) is the earliest well-documented web version in Square Town's landscape file, and Square Town's own file calls it the direct ancestor of Square Town's Throne.

How much does Square Town's Throne cost?#

$100 to start. Evicting the Throne owner costs double the last price, and every eviction doubles it again: $100, $200, $400, $800 and so on. The Throne is the 4×4 dead centre of the wall, has one owner, and shows their favicon on a gold tile with a crown.

Is Square Town's Throne the same as Milliboard's #1 rank?#

No. Milliboard's #1 is the highest single payment on a ranked list, outbid by 1¢, and the board freezes at $1,337,690. Square Town's Throne is a fixed spatial tile in the centre of a favicon wall, taken by paying double, with no freeze. Milliboard is a list; Square Town is a grid.

How does The Pixel Orbit's centre differ from Square Town's Throne?#

On The Pixel Orbit the highest cumulative payer holds the exact centre and the entire canvas re-sorts around them. On Square Town the Throne is one fixed 4×4 tile with one owner; every other square stays where its owner clicked it, and every square — not just the centre — can be evicted for double.

Does the Throne owner get anything besides the centre?#

The Throne shows the holder's favicon, linked, on a gold tile with a crown, at the one spot on the wall that is always in view; the ring of cells around it can't be built on. Clicks through it are counted like any square. There is no SEO benefit — the wall is a canvas and clicks are redirects.

Can the Throne be lost without an eviction?#

It stays owned, but like any icon on Square Town, an icon not kissed for 90 days fades to grayscale. Anyone can kiss it for free to reset the timer. See Kiss the icon: why favicons on Square Town fade after 90 days.