I Built 'Sanpai Mining' — An AI System Where Visiting Forgotten Shrines Earns More Than Famous Ones

The Problem Japan has 80,000+ shrines and temples. But 80% of tourism revenue goes to about 5% of them. Famous spots like Fushimi Inari get 30,000 visitors/day while equally historic sites nearby get 3. Meanwhile: Local festivals are dying (no young people to carry them on) Culture bearers (priests, craftsmen, guides) get almost nothing from tourism revenue Tourists get shallow experiences at overcrowded spots I'm Ko Takahashi, CEO of Jon & Coo Inc. I've been building Matsuri Platform for the past 3 years to fix this. Here's the technical deep-dive. The Core Idea: Sanpai Mining 参拝マイニング (Sanpai Mining) = "worship mining" Visit a sacred site → earn MTC (Matsuri Coin, Solana-based token) The twist: The less popular the site, the MORE you earn. AI calculates a real-time "Cultural Impact Score" for each site. A quiet 700-year-old shrine in Shimane prefecture might be worth 20x more MTC than Fushimi Inari. Tech Stack Backend: Rust (Actix-web) Frontend: Next.js + TypeScript + Tailwind Databas