Coppers

Coppers (also known as cc, money or browns) is the in-game currency of the TrackMania franchise. It is one of the biggest features in the game and is still being used to push the game's economy forwards, and allows players to exchange virtual goods in between each other.

Earning
Every player starts with 500 coppers available on their account right after creating it. There are several ways to multiply that amount and majority of players choose one of the following ways of doing it:

Playing campaign maps in Official Mode
After beating each time medal on any Nadeo map (for the first time only), the player receives a small but fair amount of coppers. The prizes are: The prizes sum up so players can obtain up to 385cc for each map. Although this method is relatively easy, it is only a single-time income. Note, however, that puzzle maps are excluded from this method.
 * 5cc for bronze medal
 * 20cc for silver
 * 60cc for gold
 * 300cc for the author medal

Building and publishing maps
Building maps is the TrackMania's equivalent of investing in real life. As each map requires the builder to pay a certain amount of coppers to create a map (depending on how many blocks they have placed), the entry wealth level is medium. Builders can then upload their maps to TrackMania Exchange and hope to get their maps added to an online server. Getting an award for a map on TMX gives back 10 times the amount the map was "worth" upon creating it. Having a map added to a server results in the builder getting a passive income of 1 copper per each player playing the map each round. This method has 2 sub-strategies that work the best:
 * 1) The first one is building massive and polished maps that require very large amount of coppers and time to be created but then they return even greater profits. Prime example of this approach is the trial map builder igntuL, who managed to get over 1700000 coppers from a single map (Detroit II)
 * 2) The second is the opposite - try to build as many cheap maps as possible and then hope to have them added to a server with a lot of players. Small risk, small reward. Builder who is the most famous for such approach is LolSport as he created over 15000 maps, and almost 80% of them are still being played online, resulting in him becoming the top 3 richest players in the history of the game

Trading skins, manialink domains and avatars
As the demand for skins and other in-game goods is constantly big since the game's release, trading items is one of the most stable and reliable ways to get money in TrackMania. People can browse various trading manialink forums in-game, such as TM-Stock, Thrift-Mania or - most notably - KripkesManialink, where they can buy all sorts of stuff from other players. Some of the items are created directly by the sellers, thus being brand new, and some others are resold multiple times. Finding and buying a rare avatar/skin for a good price can result in a massive copper income, as the rarest ones can then be resold for a mind-bending amounts reaching half a million money.

Gambling
Gambling divides into 3 main sub-levels:

Betting on servers
Betting is the most normalised and accepted way of gambling in TrackMania. Simply, when a new round starts, all players are able to set a starting bet that other can accept. Person who wins the round, takes all of the coppers in the stake. If the winner of the round did not bet, coppers go to the player who has finished the map the most times. If no player finished, coppers go to the alphabetically first player on the server.

Playing on Casino Manialinks
There are several manialinks that work as in-game casinos (such as ManiaLoto). They are an amazing way of making money in game, due to their anonymity privacy and low-risk nature. Players can choose from wide variety of games such as: slots, roulette, plinko, coinflip, dice, crash, minesweeper and many more. Also, each new player in the casino gets 500 free coppers to spend there for a good start. Betting in the casino is also a perfect way of making friends, as there is a whole community dedicated only to playing there, instead of the core TrackMania.

Lootboxes
Lootboxes are the hidden economy system that allows players to have a chance at getting ultra rare items, that are impossible to get in any other way. Lootboxes contain items from 5 distinct tiers:
 * Common - usually being a small amount of coppers or a mildly modified version of one of the basic skins in the game (90% of chance)
 * Unusual - custom Nadeo-made avatars, medium amounts of coppers, skins of countries not included in the base game, for example Yugoslav or North Korean (7% of chance)
 * Rare - skins of real life cars and trucks, menu theme packs, music packs that can be then included in The Classic FM Radio (2% of chance)
 * Ultra Rare - big amounts of coppers, chat emojis, access to hidden manialinks, new car painting brushes (0.99% chance)
 * Legendary - huge amounts of coppers, color-shifting nicknames, skins with changed hitboxes, full movies as avatars (0.01% chance)

Spending
It is worth noting that the way of either gaining or spending in-game money is mostly not controlled by Nadeo and players are free to do with it whatever they want. A few regulations have been introduced following the 2016 inflation - most well-known being the Nadeo tax.