thot market

A market for research flow

Don’t get distilled for free.

Whitepaper · Mechanism v0.8 · 15 September 2026

This paper describes the proposed public market and its selected economic terms. Public THOT payments and locking are not active.

AI makes expertise more productive. It may also shorten the time for which that expertise remains scarce. A person can use a model to do better work today while producing the examples that help a future model do that work without them.

The resulting record can be valuable: the context an expert supplies, the mistakes they catch, the alternatives they reject, and the evidence that finally changes their mind. We call this research flow, or thot flow. Its value comes from the judgment it contains and the uses a buyer can find for it.

thot market gives people a way to offer that research for sale. Contributors choose which traces to release. Buyers pay for specified access and rights. A finite acquisition reserve helps establish the market before independent demand is reliable. THOT is the payment currency, the buyer membership asset, and the token contributors can lock to retain more of their own sales.

The proposition is simple: your research can earn twice—once through what it helps you do, and again when someone pays to learn from it.

1. From expertise to an asset someone can buy

A useful trace might document a programmer diagnosing a difficult bug, a researcher testing a hypothesis, or a trader investigating a company. A trade expresses a conclusion; the research trace records how that conclusion was reached. This is the connection between a market for research and the trading activity around Robinhood Chain, the selected launch network.

Potential buyers include model developers seeking training or evaluation material, researchers studying a workflow, and agents looking for examples of a task solved well. Different buyers want different evidence. A conversation’s length, token count or apparent sophistication is not enough to determine its price.

An assay evaluates a trace against a stated purpose. The initial buyer-facing property check has two inputs: a workflow category and a minimum turn count. It compares them with the recorded workflow label and turn count, and returns those values and whether they match. It does not read the conversation to judge quality, recommend a purchase or calculate a fair price. Content evaluation, provenance and outcome evidence can support richer assays later; comparable-sale estimates are a separate calculation.

A trace need not have sold to receive an estimate. The comparison uses completed purchases of research with similar workflow, provenance and conversation length to show a range of observed prices. It uses the past 90 days and requires at least three distinct contributors. Each contributor’s median price has equal weight, so one prolific seller cannot dominate the estimate. The displayed gross price is before the seller’s applicable 30–95% share; similar properties do not establish identical quality or licence rights. It reports how many different contributors support the comparison and when those transactions occurred. Sparse cohorts show “not enough comparable sales,” rather than an invented value or zero. Aggregate comparisons must meet a minimum cohort size and avoid exposing another contributor’s private work.

Treasury sampling prices and independent buyer prices are kept separate. A fixed sampling price is evidence of the program’s offer, not evidence that an outside buyer values every similar trace at that price. Estimated income also depends on whether a trace sells: a sale-price comparison alone cannot establish a daily earnings forecast.

The market distinguishes three amounts:

A funded offer is stronger evidence than an estimate, but its payment remains pending until settlement. Protocol purchases and external purchases produce real token proceeds under the same settlement rules; they are reported separately so that subsidy is visible. A protocol purchase is counted once, not again as an additional reward.

The aim is to make the value of ordinary research visible and realizable. Uploading a trace, passing an assay or holding THOT does not by itself earn a payment.

2. A purchase, from offer to payment

A contributor selects the exact material, reviews its release and licence, and authorizes sales at the stated THOT price. That authorization happens when enrolling the contribution, once for those terms. The screen shows the applicable seller-share schedule before activation. In the initial version, each signed authorization covers one sale of that exact release and has a stated expiry. Private upload without this authorization remains private.

A buyer reviews the available description and evaluation evidence, then funds a qualifying purchase in THOT. The purchase must match the contributor’s authorized material, licence and price. It records the seller’s qualified tier and exact net proceeds at funding. There is no second approval or per-purchase seller veto. Contributors can stop future unfunded sales, but cannot withdraw rights already purchased under their authorization.

Inspecting before paying

The selected preview policy lets an eligible buyer inspect a free excerpt when the contributor has expressly authorized one. The contributor reviews the exact excerpt before signing the listing. It contains at most 10% of the released text, capped at 1,200 characters; releases shorter than 800 characters do not offer this preview. Its position is selected pseudorandomly from the content commitment. Identical content always produces the same excerpt across buyers, wallets, listings and repeat requests, so refreshing cannot reveal another window.

The buyer must hold 100,000 THOT across their wallet and qualified locks and accept evaluation-only terms. No THOT is spent or approved for a preview. A buyer can inspect ten distinct trace contents per day; rereading an already viewed excerpt does not consume another slot. The permission covers deciding whether to purchase, not training, redistribution or onward sale. Existing listings without this permission require a new opt-in and signature. Unlisting or deleting the source stops new previews; previously disclosed text cannot be recalled.

The complete licensed release becomes available after payment. The free excerpt does not start the dispute clock. That clock concerns delivery of the complete material specified by the purchase, which can be one selected conversation or a separately licensed sample rather than the contributor’s entire history.

The settlement sequence is:

1. Authorize once. The contributor enrolls the specific release, licence and price for automatic qualifying sales.
2. Fund and deliver. The full price enters escrow. The service matches it to the standing authorization and makes the licensed material available without asking the seller to return. Delivery must be recorded within 48 hours of the automatic sale; otherwise the payment is refundable.
3. Allow a dispute. The dispute window lasts one hour after recorded delivery. An open dispute prevents finalization.
4. Receive the proceeds. After that window, the service finalizes an undisputed sale and sends the seller’s allocation to their registered wallet. Eligible referral and protocol allocations remain claimable by their recipients. Anyone may trigger payment to the rightful recipient; they cannot redirect it. Manual claiming remains available if the service is delayed. No additional vesting applies to sale proceeds.

The normal target is delivery when the purchase is funded and automatic payment to the seller’s wallet after the one-hour window. The one-hour clock starts when delivery of the committed release is recorded, not at upload or payment, and delayed delivery, an open dispute or delayed finalization can extend the wait. The separate 90-day principal lock does not apply to sale proceeds.

The quoted token price and payout split stay fixed for that offer. A dollar reference is informational: it does not promise a dollar redemption value. Buyers may use THOT they already hold or acquire it from the market. The acquisition program uses its prefunded reserve. Neither route mints tokens, and automatic conversion from stablecoins is outside this design.

A buyer or the designated operator can acknowledge delivery. The operator’s acknowledgment establishes that the committed material is available; it does not prove that the buyer read it, found it useful, or verified its origin. Either party may dispute during the settlement window. The contract records the dispute and a commitment to its reason. The application keeps the explanation encrypted, verifies the submitted transaction against the expected event, and presents confirmed complaints in the operator inbox. Only the designated operator signs a resolution; the background worker does not decide complaints. The operator can resolve a dispute with a full refund or the original agreed split, but cannot invent a different payout. Unresolved disputes leave funds held.

The initial access term is 30 days from the automatic sale. Committed copies remain available for that term even if the original private source is deleted; they are then purged. This access period is separate from the payment dispute period. Deleting a source or ending access cannot recall a copy the buyer already downloaded.

Starting with paid samples

Early price discovery can begin with a small purchase rather than an elaborate appraisal. A sampling campaign can publish a fixed inspection price, eligibility criteria and limited licence. Contributors authorize the campaign’s exact terms at enrollment; the program selects eligible material, funds matching purchases and inspects it after delivery. A campaign operator can approve a batch and let a worker execute its purchases within the reserve limits. The reserve pays in THOT; the operator does not need to spend personal purchase tokens or upload an assayer for each trace.

These reserve-funded acquisitions are separate from the optional free buyer excerpt. Their agreed payment buys the specified material and inspection rights. Finding it uninteresting does not undo that agreement. An assessment made afterward can inform offers for more material or broader rights. Human review can therefore establish the first prices; arbitrary buyer-uploaded assayer agents are not required for this workflow. Paid sampling is the selected initial acquisition approach; public treasury purchases are not active.

3. Why THOT: payment, access and better seller terms

THOT has three uses in the proposed market:

• Payment: buyers fund trace purchases in THOT.
• Buyer membership: independent buyers retain a qualifying THOT balance when purchasing private material.
• Seller and referral benefits: locking THOT increases the share a participant retains from eligible activity.

The benefit of locking depends on actual business. A contributor with repeated sales can retain substantially more of those sales. A referrer introducing productive contributors can retain more of the resulting marketplace fees. Holding or locking alone earns no interest, dividend or share of everyone else’s trace sales.

Seller retention

The highest qualified tier applies to the whole sale. The schedule is capped at 95%. A newcomer may sell without first buying or locking THOT, retain 30%, and later choose to lock earned tokens. Holding 5m in a wallet without locking it still gives the 30% seller share.

A qualifying lock has an original term of at least 90 days, has completed seven days of seasoning, and has at least ten days remaining when the offer is funded. Each deposit qualifies separately. Extending an unexpired lock preserves its seasoning; withdrawing and depositing again starts a new seasoning period. Positions cannot be transferred or delegated, and principal cannot be withdrawn early.

The offer records the qualified tier when funded. Later lock expiry or an extended dispute does not reduce the agreed payout. Principal belongs to the participant, returns at its stated expiry and remains separate from purchase funds and the acquisition reserve.

These tiers also apply to protocol-sponsored purchases. They change how much a contributor retains from a purchase, not which contributor receives an order. Locking does not guarantee demand, increase an assay score or grant a percentage of the entire reserve.

At the highest tier, a contributor receives approximately 3.17 times the unlocked proceeds from the same sale. That is a difference in sale receipts, not a return on locked principal. The design also has costs: the 70% baseline marketplace fee may deter contributors, while the top tier leaves only 5% before referral payments and operating expenses.

Buyer membership

An independent buyer must retain 100,000 THOT after funding an offer. Their wallet balance and their own qualified locks count toward this threshold; purchase escrow, unclaimed proceeds and other people’s assets do not.

A buyer with no qualified lock needs 120,000 liquid THOT to fund a 20,000 THOT purchase and retain membership. A buyer with 100,000 in a qualified lock needs 20,000 additional liquid THOT for the same purchase.

Eligibility is checked after funding and when the standing authorization is applied to the automatic sale. An ineligible purchase cannot complete. Falling below the threshold later does not revoke an already paid licence.

Public descriptions remain free to browse. Eligible buyers may inspect a contributor-authorized free excerpt before purchasing the complete licensed release. The only membership exemption for purchases is the disclosed protocol acquisition vault, which still funds its offers in full and follows its campaign limits.

This is a holding requirement at purchase checkpoints. It does not impose continuous holding or prevent temporarily borrowed tokens from satisfying a balance check.

Referrals

A contributor may approve one referrer before their first automatic marketplace sale. Referral registration belongs in contribution enrollment, before activating a sale authorization, so no later manual sale approval is needed. Attribution is one level deep, immutable and non-transferable, and expires 180 days after registration. Only subsequently funded offers can include it. Existing offers cannot acquire referral fees retroactively.

The referrer uses their own lock under the same qualification rules. Their payment comes from the fee left after the seller’s share; it is not an additional buyer charge or a deduction from the seller’s displayed proceeds. The offer records the referral amount, which remains fixed through settlement even if attribution later expires.

For example, a 100,000 THOT independent purchase with a 1m-lock seller and 100k-lock referrer pays 90,000 to the seller, 2,000 to the referrer and 8,000 to the protocol. At both highest tiers, the split is 95,000 / 1,500 / 3,500.

Only independently reviewed external purchases qualify. Treasury purchases, refunded sales, self-referrals, circular attribution, related-party or reimbursed purchases and duplicate receipts are excluded. The buyer cannot also be the referrer. Review precedes funding; different wallet addresses alone do not prove independence. There are no payments for signups, token purchases or lock deposits.

4. Bootstrapping a market before buyers are plentiful

The cold-start problem is straightforward: contributors have little reason to supply research before buyers exist, and buyers have little reason to arrive before useful research is available.

The protocol therefore acts as an early buyer with a finite budget. It buys specified rights to research, pays contributors and gathers evidence about what buyers value. Its maximum daily spending declines over time. Further subsidy increasingly depends on completed independent purchases.

The intended transition is from protocol-assisted price discovery, through a mixture of protocol and customer demand, to a market supported by buyers.

Supply and acquisition reserve

The selected token supply is 1 billion THOT. The project purchases 500 million, or 50%, through the Pons creation flow and deposits them into a disclosed acquisition vault. The rest follows the launchpad’s curve and liquidity allocations. There is no investor or partner allocation in this plan. THOT/ETH is the selected primary trading pair.

The project supplies the ETH for its purchase. That ETH pays for token inventory; it is not still available as a second cash budget. The acquired THOT funds early research purchases. This is a disclosed project allocation, not independent retail demand.

A fixed-supply ERC-20 can support this mechanism. Separate contracts custody the reserve, lock participant principal and settle purchases by transferring existing tokens. The mechanism does not require token minting or a tax on ordinary wallet transfers.

First-campaign limits

The 500m deposit is inventory, not permission to distribute it immediately. Every purchase must fit the current daily cap, remaining campaign authority, available demand allowance and actual reserve balance. No qualifying offer means no spending.

The declining daily schedule permits approximately 192,171 THOT gross in the first 24 hours, 25m over 180 days, and 37.5m over 360 days, if eligible research and independent demand support every day’s spending. The 360-day sunset ends the first campaign before the schedule could use its full nominal 50m authority.

Without independent buyers, gross purchases cannot exceed 1m THOT throughout the campaign. That produces at most 300,000 to 950,000 THOT in seller payments, depending on their tiers, assuming every purchase settles. Reaching the 37.5m gross ceiling requires at least 36.5m THOT of eligible independent spending, available in time to support those daily purchases.

An independent purchase counts only after delivery, finalization and review. Its gross amount can be credited once. The buyer’s payment still settles to the seller, referrer and protocol: demand credit is permission to use separate reserve inventory, not a diversion of that payment.

Unused daily capacity expires. Canceled or refunded offers and returned treasury fees do not restore spending authority. This prevents the same tokens from being repeatedly recycled into a larger announced subsidy. A treasury purchase has no referral payment; the portion not allocated to its seller returns to the reserve without renewing the campaign’s permission to spend it.

Token trading volume, creator fees, loans, affiliated or reimbursed purchases and recycled subsidized purchases do not count as independent demand. The matching rule is denominated in THOT, not dollars. It establishes neither a dollar reserve nor a limit on what recipients can receive by selling tokens elsewhere.

5. What funds the business

The marketplace retains 70%, 50%, 30%, 10% or 5% of an independent sale according to the seller’s tier, then pays any eligible referral from that fee. Its net receipt can be as low as 3.5% of the gross sale at the highest seller and referral tiers.

The project also intends to collect creator fees from applicable Pons trading activity. The selected Pons configuration is a 1% additional creator-tax field, a 1% base fee, and native Buyback & Lock off, producing a 2% ordinary trading fee. Under the inspected Pons contract configuration, the allocation is 1.7% directly to the creator and 0.3% to Pons: the creator receives the additional 1% plus 0.7% of the base fee. These are selected settings, not evidence of an executed launch; the public deployment must identify its actual recipients and configuration.

Trading fees and research fees are separate. Trading fees may fund operations or a subsequently authorized acquisition budget; they do not automatically expand the first campaign, count as independent research demand or become dividends for holders. They apply through the relevant trading contracts, not to every THOT transfer or every trading venue.

The retained portion of a treasury purchase is an internal return of subsidy inventory. It is not customer revenue. Receipts become profit only after costs, and receiving THOT is not the same as realizing dollars.

6. The economic loop and its limits

Early purchases give contributors a reason to supply useful research. Useful research attracts independent buyers paying THOT. Contributors expecting repeated sales have a reason to lock tokens for better retention, and referrers have a reason to introduce productive suppliers.

That loop can create token demand and commit inventory for the duration of a lock. It can also work in reverse. Contributors may sell their proceeds. Expiring locks return tokens to circulation. Buyers can spend existing holdings instead of making a new market purchase. Rising token prices make buyer membership, seller tiers and fixed-THOT offers more expensive; falling prices reduce the dollar value of receipts.

The reserve transfers existing inventory. It does not create outside capital. The durable source of value is research that independent buyers continue purchasing as the subsidy declines. Neither locking nor a budget formula guarantees a rising price.

A history of research sales could eventually help someone finance future work. A lender might advance money against expected trace income, but that requires lending capital, underwriting and repayment terms. An appraisal alone provides none of these. Borrowing against future research income is a possible extension, not part of this mechanism.

7. Custody, consent and trust

Three forms of custody remain separate: the acquisition reserve, buyer payment escrow, and participants’ locked principal. Seller principal cannot be spent on acquisitions, lent out or confiscated by the operator. Earned claims and funded offers are not reserve spending discretion.

The first reserve campaign has disclosed administrators. Campaign activation, operator replacement, unpausing and successor-vault authorization require seven days’ notice. Emergency pause can immediately stop new reserve commitments while existing funded offers, delivery, disputes, refunds, claims and scheduled principal withdrawals continue. Seller tiers and first-campaign budget constants have no administrator setter.

The reserve has no general administrator withdrawal or arbitrary-call facility during the first campaign. After its 360-day sunset, the governor can transfer remaining inventory to a same-token successor contract following the seven-day authorization and a published policy commitment. This is administrator authority, not decentralized token voting, and the first vault cannot guarantee the successor’s rules.

Operators also exercise judgment in acquisition selection, buyer independence review, delivery acknowledgment and disputes. Those responsibilities remain real even when escrow and budget limits are enforced by contracts. Colluding buyers and sellers can simulate demand across different wallets; review and spending caps remain necessary.

Exact duplicate imports reuse the contributor’s existing record despite changed file wrappers or timestamps. Identical content from another account does not establish the same rights owner. Separately, the reserve worker keeps a durable content reservation: the same released content cannot receive a second funded treasury purchase through that worker, even under a new wallet, title or licence, or after a refund. This duplicate check is enforced by the application; the contract enforces acquisition authority and budgets. It is not semantic fraud detection. Paraphrases, overlapping conversations and multiple identities still require review. Likewise, transferable buyer holdings do not prevent wallet rotation, and different versions of a conversation can expose different authorized excerpts.

Privacy and provenance answer different questions. Keeping material private does not prove its source. A captured provider interaction, an imported archive and an account-control proof support different claims. An enclave attestation can identify aspects of a deployed execution environment; it does not by itself establish authorship, account performance, research quality or a fair price.

Capture and authentication

Wallet sign-in proves control of an EVM account through a short-lived, single-use signed message bound to the application origin and chain. It creates a contributor session and links the payout wallet; it does not approve a transfer, authorize a trace sale or grant buyer or operator privileges. Operator wallets are configured explicitly. Email authentication remains an alternative deployment option.

The OpenRouter connection stores the contributor’s provider key encrypted and issues a separate revocable proxy credential. Chat Completions requests and received response content sent through that endpoint are recorded privately, including submitted history and tool calls. The contributor accepts this recording policy at connection time, without a prompt for every exchange. Inference remains billed to their OpenRouter account. A completed recording can be reviewed and listed through the same signed sale authorization as an import; recording alone does not put it on sale.

The listing and committed release identify the requested model and the model returned in OpenRouter’s response, with “not reported by provider” when that response omits it. These are captured routing and response metadata, not an independent verification of a provider’s model internals. Only activity routed through this endpoint is captured. Connecting a key does not retrieve its previous usage or conversations sent directly to OpenRouter elsewhere; previous messages included in a new request are recorded as submitted history. Provenance identifies operator-observed capture and does not by itself prove human authorship or an attested provider transcript.

The application records request identities durably and does not automatically resend uncertain inference calls. Reusing a completed request’s idempotency key returns the saved response. An interrupted request requires reconciliation rather than a silent paid retry. Revoking a connection stops new requests and removes the saved provider key; deleting a private trace removes its recorded source material subject to existing licensed-release obligations.

Ordinary ChatGPT and Claude website history synchronization, unrestricted buyer-uploaded assayer agents and brokerage performance proofs are separate capabilities. The current capture CLI supports selected Codex and Claude Code workflows. A token holding alone never creates sale proceeds.

The worker is an offchain service. Its encrypted transaction journal commits the signed transaction before broadcast, resumes the same transaction after restart and checks canonical chain receipts before recording payment. Contract limits remain authoritative when the worker is offline. Hosting that service inside a TEE additionally requires verified application deployment and evidence binding; it is not established merely by this specification.

Appendix: accounting rules

Sale settlement

For a gross funded price P, seller share s and eligible referral rate r, rates use basis points and calculations use token base units:

seller = floor(P × s / 10,000)
marketplace_fee = P − seller
referrer = floor(marketplace_fee × r / 10,000)
protocol_net = marketplace_fee − referrer

The allocations sum to P. Set r = 0 when no referral qualifies, including every treasury purchase. Refunds cancel the pending allocations. Finalized claims remain payable independently of later lock or licence expiry.

Declining daily authorization

Let B = 50,000,000 THOT, H = 180 days, and d be the whole number of 24-hour periods since the published campaign start. For d = 0…359:

C(d) = floor[B × (1 − 2^(−d/H))]
daily_cap(d) = C(d+1) − C(d)

The continuous analogue is S(t) = S₀ × exp(−λt), with λ = ln(2)/H and S₀ = B × λ. The daily calculation is fixed in token base units.

Let G be all gross reserve offer commitments charged since campaign start, R be admitted independent purchase spending, and P₀ = 1,000,000 THOT. The amount available for a new commitment is:

max(0, min(
    remaining daily cap,
    B − G,
    P₀ + R − G,
    available reserve inventory
))

Each funded offer increases G and its day’s committed amount immediately, even if it later expires, is canceled or is refunded. Each independent purchase enters R at most once and must have finalized during the active campaign. Reviews for referral and independent-demand eligibility precede offer funding; admitting a finalized receipt to reserve demand credit is a separate review.

After sunset, no new campaign offers are funded. Already funded purchases retain their authorized terms, and all existing delivery, dispute, refund and claim obligations continue. Uncommitted inventory requires subsequent authorization. Neither token price nor an appraised trace value independently authorizes spending.