Minting and Residual
How a real contribution becomes permanent, verified impact — and how the value of that impact flows to the people who made it possible.
From claim to capsule
Impact is minted through a deliberate, visible flow:
- Claim. A member submits a contribution claim — a project reference, a description, and an evidence link (anchored on-chain as a hash). The claim carries a scope (see below).
- Attest. A designated attester reviews the claim and scores its alignment on the 0SCALE. During pre-genesis this is a trusted team role; over time it opens up.
- Mint — including when the impact was negative. An attested claim mints a Capsule: a permanent, non-transferable record of verified impact. Alignment is not a gate: a claim assessed as harmful mints a Capsule with negative impact rather than failing, because "we capture all impact" (decisions §40). A claim that fails for other reasons is still recorded, with its score, and shown — never silently dropped.
That last point is a rule, not an accident: failures are committed and visible. Impactivism does not let negative or rejected outcomes vanish. "You cannot hide -$IMP" — the record shows what did not qualify as readily as what did.
The Capsule
A Capsule is the minted unit of verified impact. It is:
- Non-transferable by construction — there is no operation anywhere in the system to move it (see Impact as Value).
- Permanent — never pruned, never rewritten.
- Attributed — bound to its claimant through the COA fingerprint, and to its verification through the attestation that minted it.
Scope: inward and outward
Every impact record carries a scope, so a member can see their impact from two angles:
- Inward — how a personal action or choice impacts the self.
- Outward — how a personal action or choice impacts society.
The ledger feed is filterable by scope, and consumers (including AI) can weight or filter by it.
Verification tiers
- Self-logged — recorded by you, no attester, no notary. Permanent and visible, but carries no residual leverage.
- Notarized — attested and sealed. Only notarized impact triggers residual.
This split is the economic firewall that keeps self-logging open and ungameable: you can log freely, but only verified impact moves value.
Residual — the flow up the Chain of Impact
When notarized impact is minted, value flows upstream along the Chain of Impact as residual (the $RESIDUAL-BONUS):
- Downline residual goes to the members who referred you, and referred them — the ancestry that brought you into the network.
- Genesis residual goes to the founding Entities recorded in the Genesis Capsule, who share in a portion of all post-genesis impact, in perpetuity.
Both flow only for notarized impact, and both are floored at zero: residual pushes upstream only what is neutral-or-positive. Negative impact is recorded in full on the Capsule itself, but it does not propagate a negative charge up the chain of accountability — an ancestor is not debited for a descendant's harm.
Valuation happens twice
The value of an impact record is not a fixed number stamped once and read forever. It is produced in two distinct events:
- Guestimation — at mint. When a claim mints, it is given an estimated value from the 0SCALE (
QUANT × VALUE × (1 + bonus)) — the best estimate of the impact at that moment. - Lookup — on every read. Whenever the record is looked up, it returns a timestamped snapshot of the COA↔COI binding from the perspective of the party doing the lookup.
So impact value is designed to be relational and temporal: the same record worth different things to different viewers — depending on their own alignment (A:A) to it — and at different times. Value is re-derived when you ask, not read from a single stored figure. The guestimation is what it was estimated at when created; the honest answer to "what is this worth now?" is always a lookup.
What is perspectival TODAY is legibility, not the figure. A lookup is already scoped to the party making it — records outside your root seal, and you see a commitment rather than the detail. The number itself is currently the same for everyone: it derives from the capsule and its openness bonus, and the party doing the lookup does not enter the calculation. The alignment term is explicitly zero, because those inputs are not in the event contract yet.
Sealing deliberately preserves the total — a figure that moved when detail was hidden would let an observer size the hidden part by arithmetic — so viewer-scoped visibility cannot, by design, be what makes the number differ. Alignment weighting is what would, and it is not built.
Because lookups are by far the most common operation on the network, they have to be fast — which is exactly what Karma, the indexing/notary layer, exists to make possible.
Why it works this way
The design makes three things true at once: real contributions become permanent and yours; the people who made your contribution possible share in its value; and none of it can be faked into existence, because the parts that move value are exactly the parts that require verification. Impact you log for yourself costs nothing and moves nothing; impact the network verifies is what carries weight.