thot market — a market for thot flow

Mechanism v0.6 · 15 September 2026 · Current design; THOT settlement contracts are not deployed.

Buy useful research in THOT. Contribute research to earn THOT. Lock THOT to keep more when your own research sells.

This paper specifies the selected direction: a standard Pons token, a creation-time purchase of 500 million THOT, treasury-funded early trace acquisitions, THOT-denominated buyer payments, and seller benefits from locking. The numerical campaign and lock settings below are a concrete launch proposal for mechanism review, not a claim of deployment or approval by the original mechanism author. The launch post explains the product and human-capital thesis.

1. The market and the asset

Working with AI produces an answer and a record of the work behind it: context, corrections, evidence, tool use, and outcomes. We call useful research of this kind thot flow. AI can increase the return on a person's expertise while shortening how long that expertise remains scarce. A market for licensed research gives its producer a way to participate in that value.

An assay estimates a trace's usefulness and possible licensing value from its characteristics, buyer requirements, comparable purchases, provenance, and outcomes. In notation, estimated_value(i,t) = A(trace_i, market_state_t). It is an estimate of uncertain future demand, not a debt owed to the contributor. Raw conversation length or inference-token usage does not determine a payment.

The application keeps three quantities separate:

• Estimated trace value: an appraisal with its method, date, denomination, and uncertainty. It has no withdrawal right.
• Bootstrap proceeds: funded THOT from purchases made by the protocol's acquisition program.
• Independent sale proceeds: funded THOT from external buyers licensing traces.

Both kinds of proceeds can become actual token payments. A treasury purchase is still a subsidy; it is not evidence that an independent customer paid. Do not add a treasury purchase to both sale earnings and a second reward balance.

2. Launch and reserve custody

The selected initial supply is 1 billion THOT. The project purchases 500 million THOT, or 50%, in the Pons creation flow and deposits the acquired tokens into a publicly identified reserve vault. The remaining supply follows the launchpad's curve and liquidity allocations. There is no investor/partner allocation in this plan.

The purchaser supplies the ETH for this acquisition. ETH paid into the launch curve does not remain available as a second cash budget. The acquired THOT is the inventory that pays for early research. The reserve purchase is a disclosed project allocation, not 500 million tokens of independent retail demand.

THOT/ETH remains the recommended primary trading pair. Trace purchases are denominated in THOT regardless of which asset is paired with it on a DEX.

Reserve custody is different from seller locking

Use a reserve vault controlled through a timelock with published administrators and spending permissions. Proposed governance delay: seven days for new campaign authority or prospective policy changes. Emergency pause may stop new commitments immediately; it must preserve refunds, existing payment obligations, and scheduled seller-principal withdrawals. This initial administration is not a claim of decentralized token voting.

The reserve authorizes only the announced acquisition program. It cannot be described as locked against arbitrary withdrawals unless the deployed contract actually enforces that restriction. Allocated buyer escrow and seller claims must never be withdrawable by governance. Remaining reserve release requires a disclosed future authorization, not an automatic unlock when token price rises. Reserve tokens are not treated as circulating governance votes on their own spending.

Seller locks use a separate escrow. Those tokens continue to belong to their contributors, are returned when the lock expires, and cannot be spent on trace purchases, lent out, or confiscated by the operator. The protocol's 500 million-token reserve and contributors' lock principal are separate assets with separate permissions.

This architecture works with a fixed-supply ERC-20. Companion contracts hold and transfer existing THOT; they do not require another mint function, a transfer tax, or a token burn.

Pons fee and purchase configuration

Historical reference: Robinhood Chain block 62,948,064, hash 0x92cb8cf9bd75d982b4f4527f01a11b330d150f942748c49840a2ae07ebd93e0f, checked September 15 at 00:25:47 Shanghai. Factory: 0x7eD598BcEf8bd9Edd8C97A195C6d13f40801EC7e. Hook: 0xe5e702641ea86f4ae6cc3cdaed2b886f976be044. See the official Pons contracts.

The phrase “1% creator fee” here refers to the additional input field. It is not the full creator receipt under the inspected configuration. With native buyback enabled the nominal allocation differs: 1.35% direct creator, 0.35% buyback-and-lock, and 0.3% Pons. An exactly 1% direct creator allocation with buyback off would instead use 0.3% additional tax and 1.3% total fees. Publish the actual chosen recipients and split.

The 50% purchase alone supplies 40% of the 4.2 ETH graduation requirement. It does not complete graduation. On the inspected pristine curve, about 214.286m tokens remain available for curve purchases and 285.714m are reserved for graduation allocations. Rehearse the actual creation route, launch-window exemption, fee policy, target output, and reserve deposit before execution. These are historical calculations, not a live transaction quote. Fees returning from our own buy are internal recycling, not external revenue.

3. One purchase path, paid in THOT

Both an independent buyer and the treasury acquisition program follow this path:

1. Publish what research is wanted, the assay or evaluation criteria, quantity limits, license terms, and a funded THOT budget.
2. Review eligible traces and issue a specific, funded offer. The seller sees the material, gross price in THOT, their net share, buyer class, and permitted use.
3. The contributor consents to that exact release. Uploading privately does not grant a blanket license to all current or future conversations.
4. Deliver the licensed material within 48 hours after acceptance; otherwise return the escrow. Hold payment for at least seven days after delivery for disputes. Open disputes prevent finalization; adjudication must be implemented before paid launch.
5. On finalization, credit the seller and protocol once. The seller's share becomes claimable THOT, with a purchase receipt. There is no additional 30-day reward vesting in this version.

The seller amount is floor(gross_THOT × seller_share_bps / 10,000) in token base units. The protocol receives the remainder. Refunds do not create earnings. Infrastructure costs and any future referral payments must fit inside the protocol's share or a separately funded budget.

Prices are fixed in THOT for an accepted offer. Quotes last 24 hours and must reserve the offered amount until acceptance or expiry. A reference dollar estimate may help a person compare offers, but it neither changes an accepted token price nor creates a dollar redemption promise. A changed market price requires a new quote, not retroactive repricing.

An independent buyer may acquire THOT from the market or spend THOT already held. The treasury spends its prefunded reserve. Neither route mints tokens. No stablecoin payment or automatic purchase conversion is part of this launch design.

4. Seller-lock benefits

The proposed qualifying lock is 100,000 THOT for at least 90 days, with seven days of seasoning before receiving a discounted quote. This is the first tier implementation: 80% standard retention and 90% qualifying retention. The earlier consumer draft illustrates additional 85% and 95% tiers; their thresholds are not specified and they are not launch promises.

Qualification is checked when a quote is issued. The lock must then remain locked for at least ten more days, covering the quote's one-day lifetime, two-day delivery limit, and ordinary seven-day dispute period. The accepted offer snapshots the fee terms; an extended dispute or later policy change cannot lower the seller's agreed share. Near maturity, a seller can extend the lock or receive standard terms on a new offer. Existing principal remains withdrawable at its promised expiry.

The same retention schedule applies when the treasury buys research. A qualifying contributor receives 9,000 THOT from a 10,000 THOT treasury purchase; the standard contributor receives 8,000. The higher share comes from a lower marketplace fee on that purchase, not a separate distribution to all lockers.

A newcomer can earn at the standard rate without buying THOT. They may later lock earned tokens. Buying or already holding enough THOT offers another way to qualify. Locking does not make an otherwise unwanted trace valuable, guarantee an offer, give priority to a worse trace, or entitle anyone to other contributors' sales. Quality and buyer requirements determine which traces are purchased.

At 1 million THOT of a contributor's own finalized sales, the qualifying tier pays 100,000 THOT more than the standard tier. That is a conditional fee saving; the 100,000-token lock principal remains theirs. Locking also exposes them to price changes and the inability to sell that principal during the term. There is no fixed APY.

Enhanced referrals remain a later option from the original mechanism note. No referral emission or extra fee share is promised in the first campaign.

5. A finite, declining acquisition budget

All 500 million tokens are purchased and reserved. Buying that inventory does not authorize its immediate distribution.

These campaign numbers are implementation recommendations. The founding mechanism specifies a finite, declining subsidy, symbolically S(t) = S0 × exp(−λt); it does not prescribe these constants.

The campaign starts at a published timestamp after its funding and purchase path are operational. Starting early does not permit unused daily allowances to accumulate. For whole day d from 0 through 359:

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

Calculate in token base units with a reviewed, deterministic schedule. The continuous counterpart has λ = ln(2)/H and S0 = B × λ; the daily spending envelope declines exponentially. It is a maximum authorization, not an automatic distribution.

Let G be all gross treasury purchase commitments charged to this campaign since its start. Let R start at zero at campaign activation and count only reviewed, independent, delivered THOT purchases finalized during this campaign and accepted for demand credit. Each purchase receipt may be credited exactly once. At issuance of a funded treasury offer, the additional commitment is bounded by all of:

remaining day_cap in this epoch
remaining total authority: B − G
remaining demand allowance: P + R − G
actual unencumbered campaign THOT

Negative remaining allowance means zero. Charge each issued offer to G and its epoch immediately, reserve its full gross escrow, and never charge the same offer twice. Unused daily allowance expires. Expired offers, cancellations, refunds, and the treasury's returned fee share do not restore campaign authority or demand allowance; their tokens remain outside this campaign's spending permission. This conservative accounting prevents recycling from expanding the announced budget. Offers need approval and rate limits so an attacker cannot exhaust authority with unreviewed requests.

The first 1m allowance can seed genuine protocol purchases before third-party demand exists. It is also subject to the declining daily cap. After that, independent purchases permit further subsidized purchases within the same ceilings. R is spending evidence, not money moved out of the buyer's escrow to fund rewards: the subsidy still comes from the separate reserve.

Example: a reviewed independent buyer spends 100,000 THOT. The seller gets 80,000 or 90,000 THOT; the protocol gets the rest. Once finalized and admitted to R, that sale permits at most another 100,000 THOT of treasury purchase commitments, subject to the other limits. It does not entitle that seller to a second purchase. New acquisitions must independently satisfy a published research need.

Upper bounds

These are commitment windows, not payout deadlines: a first-day offer cannot become claimable during that day because the post-delivery dispute window still applies. Mixed seller tiers fall between the illustrated net amounts. Reaching 37.5m gross requires at least 36.5m eligible independent THOT spending, available at the right times, plus sufficient qualifying research. No eligible offers means no purchase commitments or payouts, even if budget remains. Refunds and cancellations reduce actual net distribution further.

At sunset, stop issuing new campaign offers. Already issued, funded quotes retain their promised 24-hour acceptance window; accepting one after sunset does not create another campaign charge. Honor those quotes, accepted orders, pending disputes, refunds, and unclaimed payments using their reserved assets. Uncommitted inventory stays inactive. The remaining 450m and any unspent campaign inventory require a new published campaign authorization before use. Publish completed research acquisitions, independent demand, seller receipts, and market liquidity before considering further authority. Token price alone is not a release condition.

R excludes protocol purchases, affiliated or reimbursed trades, refunds, token trading volume, creator fees, loans, and recycled subsidized self-purchases. Each admitted purchase has a unique receipt and a disclosed review process. Contracts cannot infer beneficial ownership from distinct wallets. Colluding buyers and sellers could try to obtain subsidies by recycling token payments; the matching rule is not proof of independent demand. Buyer review, nonduplicative research needs, conflict disclosure, budget limits, and the ability to pause new offers are necessary controls. Do not enable permissionless automatic matching rewards on this formula alone.

6. Reflexivity: what closes the loop, and what can break it

The intended loop is:

Funded early purchases → useful trace supply → independent buyers paying THOT → active sellers locking THOT for better retention → more participation in a useful trace market.

Mandatory THOT settlement gives the token a transactional use. Sellers expecting repeated sales have an economic reason to acquire or retain a qualifying lock. Early treasury purchases can make that benefit useful before a mature buyer market exists. Locked principal is unavailable for sale during its term.

Those channels can increase demand and reduce liquid inventory. They are conditional. A buyer can use an existing balance, so a trace purchase is not necessarily a fresh DEX buy. Treasury payouts move reserved supply toward contributors, who can sell it. Lock expiries return inventory to liquidity. The project may sell fee receipts to cover costs. Higher token prices increase the cost of qualifying and of fixed-THOT trace offers, potentially reducing participation. A lower price reduces the dollar value of token earnings.

The bootstrap program spends inventory; it does not create new outside capital. Repeated circulation is not the same as net investment. The mechanism succeeds if buyers continue valuing the research as subsidy falls. It does not guarantee demand greater than supply or an increasing token price.

In particular, a THOT-denominated demand gate is not a dollar-reserve rule. One THOT of eligible spending permits at most one additional THOT commitment; neither amount has a fixed dollar value. The protocol cannot guarantee that freely transferable tokens cash out for at most a specified number of dollars on outside markets. Spot-valued holdings, appraised future research, and claimable tokens must remain visibly different.

7. Revenue, earnings, and future human capital

The protocol receives its 10% or 20% share of independent trace purchases, denominated in THOT, and separately collects applicable Pons creator fees in the paired asset. The retained share of a treasury purchase is an internal return of subsidy funds, not customer revenue. Trading fees are not trace demand. Revenue becomes profit only after acquisition spending and operating costs, and fee tokens are not realized dollars until converted.

Collected trading fees may finance operations or a later disclosed purchase budget. They do not automatically increase this campaign's authority, count toward R, or distribute income to passive holders. The Pons fees apply through its relevant trading contracts; they are not an automatic tax on every THOT wallet transfer or external venue.

The earnings screen should show estimates, outstanding offers, escrow pending delivery/dispute, claimable THOT, and received THOT. Separate treasury-sponsored receipts from independent purchases. A scenario such as “at another 1m THOT of your own sales, this lock saves 100,000 THOT” is a conditional projection, not accrued income. In this purchase-only bootstrap design there is no second bonus balance for the same sale.

Repeated independent purchases could later support a lender's advance against future trace income. That would require someone else's lending capital, enforceable repayment terms, underwriting, and treatment of token-price risk. An assay alone does not supply that capital. There is no borrowing facility or token-holder dividend in the launch mechanism.

8. Implementation status and launch conditions

The website and adapted reviewer application are available locally. The existing app supports invited-reviewer email authentication, supported Claude Code/Codex trace imports and capture, a private library, buyer criteria, matching, exact-release consent, delivery, and receipts. Its estimate display is a demonstration, not a live demand-calibrated assay. Brokerage evidence does not prove Sharpe ratio. Ordinary ChatGPT history synchronization is not established by that code.

The present contract-backed demonstration still uses the older 65% contributor / 20% burn / 15% operator economics and test assets. Its atomic market swaps payment into a different reward token and rejects the same token as both assets. That is not this THOT-to-THOT design. The older escrow also encodes an earlier split policy. Neither becomes v0.6 through rebranding or a configuration change.

Before offering paid THOT contributions, implement and verify direct-THOT purchase escrow, consent-bound licenses, refund and dispute resolution, seller-lock eligibility, snapshotted 80/90 splits, reserve custody and timelock permissions, campaign accounting, and receipts matching actual transfers. Keep private traces off the public chain; public receipts should not disclose their contents or identities. Publish the actual addresses, administrators, fee recipients, funded budgets, and campaign start. Depositing the 500m reserve into the existing atomic market is not a substitute for those contracts.

The numerical parameters require mechanism review and execution rehearsal. Updating this paper or its website presentation does not launch the token, fund the reserve, or activate payments.