The arc, and how the economics work
The arc is the unit of the ARC network: a unit that comes into existence only when something real and witnessed happens, is never sold, and is accounted for in a public record anyone can recompute. This page is the whole economy on one page — the plain picture first, the full detail beneath it.
The two-minute picture
What is an arc?
A recorded unit of witnessed contribution. An arc is not bought and not pre-made in a pile. It is created (“minted”) inside a public ledger entry at the moment a governed act is witnessed — a node founded, a share accepted, a handoff completed, work published — and the entry itself is the receipt.
How does a person earn?
By standing up a node and by contributing witnessed work: publishing a real artifact (15 arcs), completing a handoff (10), having a share accepted (5), and one arc for each verified day of presence. Completing work itself mints nothing on purpose — work is paid by transfer when it settles, so nobody can print units by trading fake work with themselves.
Where do arcs go?
Every new node mints 100 arcs, split by a published schedule: 50 to the participant, 20 to their sponsor if they had one, 20 to the treasury, 10 to the founder line. Marketplace sales split 85 to the maker and 15 to the treasury, and 5 percent of every work settlement goes to the treasury. Anyone may also redeem arcs into the treasury, retiring them into the commons.
What is the treasury?
A commons account held by a role, not a person. It collects its share of everything and may pay out only four ways, under hard caps, with every payment a public entry. It is the largest single holder in the design — and it is a rule, not a wallet.
Who holds the keys?
Three seats: founder, treasurer, and co-founder. An ordinary treasury payment needs two of the three, and the treasurer must be one of them. A payment over 2 percent of the period balance needs all three. Nobody approves their own proposal, and nobody who is being paid may approve their own payment.
What is it worth?
Nothing in dollars, today, by design. An arc has no price and no conversion path to outside money. The outward bridge is a separate door that has not been opened — see the state banner at the top of this page, which is part of the picture and not a footnote.
The numbers, drawn
A new node is founded: 100 arcs, split by Schedule v0.3
The participant’s 50 arrive in two tranches: 20 at birth, and 30 when the descendant completes their first governed act. With no sponsor there is no witness share: an unsponsored founding issues 80 arcs in total (participant, founder, and treasury shares only).
Contribution rewards, in arcs
The zero is deliberate. Work completion mints nothing; work is paid by transfer at settlement. The adversarial battery confirmed the zero is what turns wash trading into a slow donation to the treasury instead of an income.
Marketplace sales: the split
And on work settlement, 5 percent goes to the treasury. These are published governance rules, not pricing levers: changing either is an amendment to a settled statement, in the open.
Treasury disbursement caps (Option 1, adopted October 18, 2026)
Caps are shares of the treasury balance recorded at the start of the current thirty-day period. Two authorizations from distinct role holders release a payment; above the 2 percent founder tier, a third authorization — the founder’s constitutional authorization — is required.
The seven gates
Live settlement stands behind seven gates. These are the seven verification checks of record, run and passed for the activation act of October 18, 2026 inside the simulation ledger (the act’s independent read-back, verify-activation):
- Gate 1 — Schedule integrity. The schedule in force parses, its numbers are the adopted numbers, the establishment split sums to 100, the participant tranches sum to 50, and the unsponsored total computes to 80.
- Gate 2 — Supply conservation and derivability. The ledger’s hash chain recomputes from genesis, replay reproduces the recorded balances exactly, and every minted unit is explained — no unexplained units.
- Gate 3 — Metering presence. Every settlement receipt carries the four consumption fields — witnessing, verification, ledger weight, and clearing — from the first entry onward.
- Gate 4 — Epoch basis. Only accepted eligible contributions advance the epoch, and every award recomputes at the schedule rates in force.
- Gate 5 — Duplicate and replay refusal at the boundary. A founding statement or activation presented twice is refused by name. The act fires exactly once.
- Gate 6 — Treasury receipts public. The activation entry and every treasury credit line stand readable in the public ledger, and the receipt chain recomputes from public artifacts alone.
- Gate 7 — Bridge still closed. No bridge artifact, bridge operator, or exchange path exists. The outward bridge stays deferred under its own separate governed act.
Beyond the seven checks, the specification’s activation boundary (section 8) stands as written: any further activation toward live settlement takes the gate’s locks — Architect review, CTO review, and counsel review — followed by an activation entry in the public ledger and the constitutional settlement that moves the gate. The outward exchange bridge additionally requires its own separate governed act, and no bridge operator has been designated.
The detail, for anyone who wants it
The full schedule (Schedule v0.3, the arc)
| Item | Figure |
|---|---|
| Establishment issuance | 100 arcs per founded node |
| Participant share | 50 (20 at birth + 30 on the descendant’s first governed act) |
| Sponsor share | 20 (escrowed at establishment, vested under the vesting rule) |
| Treasury share | 20 |
| Founder share | 10 — the smallest per-event share |
| Unsponsored founding | 80 arcs in total; no witness, no witness share |
| Artifact published | 15 arcs |
| Handoff completed | 10 arcs |
| Share accepted | 5 arcs |
| Verified day of presence | 1 arc |
| Work completion mint | 0 arcs, by design |
| Marketplace sale split | 85 percent developer / 15 percent treasury |
| Treasury share on work settlement | 5 percent |
Every allocation entry names the schedule version and digest it executed under, so any third party can recompute any allocation from the public record. Schedule v0.3’s numbers are byte-identical to v0.2; v0.3 is the version issued by the activation act (file sha256 799ba4fc…). The schedule is versioned, digest-bound, and non-retroactive: it changes only by a settled statement in the open.
Sponsor vesting: reward follows acts, not recruitment
The sponsor’s 20 arcs are escrowed at the establishment entry, in the vesting escrow, and vest on the descendant’s first governed act — a handshake, an accepted share, a work completion, or an artifact publication. Vesting is capped at 10 events per sponsor per 30-day period. The shape is the answer to the pyramid question: reward follows the sponsored node’s own witnessed acts, never the signup itself.
The disbursement rule: who the treasury may pay, and how
The rule (adopted by founder ruling, October 18, 2026, 6:35 PM PDT, adopting Option 1 of the treasury disbursement decision brief): bounded program disbursement under governed authorization.
Four recipient classes, exactly. (1) Operators of witnessing infrastructure and of the public record, paid for service actually rendered. (2) Independent verifiers and red team examiners, paid for examinations actually delivered. (3) Contributors, paid through grants and bounties for witnessed work the network has accepted. (4) Pilots and public goods, paid against a settled program statement that names the good before any arc moves. No other class may receive.
Three facts must stand together before anything fires: a settled program statement naming the purpose class and its budget in advance; delivery evidence signed by the provider and verified by a counterparty who is neither the provider nor the proposer; and the payment proposal itself passed through settlement and release. Assertion alone fires nothing — and neither do invoices, presence, or a founder request standing alone.
Authorization. Two authorizations from distinct role holders: the treasurer role of the foundation node, and one approver who is neither the proposer nor the recipient. Above 2 percent of the opening period balance, a third authorization is required: the founder constitutional authorization through the foundation governance. No self-approval, at any size.
Refusals, by name. The rule carries seventeen refusal codes, each a named way a payment is refused: forged debits, invalid signatures, an ineligible recipient class, no settled program statement, budget exceeded, no witnessed delivery, a non-independent evidence verifier, recipient-as-proposer, recipient-as-approver, self-approval, insufficient authorizations, founder tier required, either cap exceeded, a duplicate proposal, and exceeding the balance.
Accounting. The payment is a public ledger entry, and the entry is the receipt. Every entry carries nine fields: rule version, program statement digest, proposal digest, settlement digest, release digest, recipient, amount, purpose class, and delivery evidence hash. The recipient’s signed acknowledgment binds back to the entry. Redemption is a different flow and is never confused with disbursement: redemption moves existing arcs into the treasury and is a receipt path, not a payment.
The first disbursement program: three components
The first program proposed under the rule (October 19, 2026) carries three components. Its figures arrived as dollar figures, and dollars are outside value: each figure enters the program as a budget line only. No payout rail, bridge operator, or price list in the record turns a dollar figure into an arc amount, and every dollar side waits on counsel and on a payout rail. Nothing in the program carries a dollar figure into the rule itself.
Node operations. A standing monthly budget line of $300, accumulating to a reserve ceiling of $2,500, for the operators class, paid only for a month of service actually rendered and evidenced.
Contributor disbursement. A one-time $750 budget line for the contributors class, tied to witnessed contributor work accepted in the record. It stands approved and queued; its payment waits on the counsel lock and a payout rail, and it is promised to no person.
The tithe. Ten percent of everything flowing into the treasury stands earmarked for pilots and public goods. The earmark is a share of inflows, recorded in the program statement so any reader can recompute it from the ledger. It authorizes nothing by itself: a payment out of the earmarked share still needs the rule’s three facts, its authorizations, and both caps.
All three components share one treasury, one rule, and one rolling thirty-day window with the founding grant program: every payment of either program counts inside the same 20 percent window against the same opening period balance.
Four things stand between the program and a first payment: the custody sittings seating the three chairs by their own signatures; the settled program statement; a designated payout rail for the dollar side; and counsel clearance on every part that touches outside value. The counsel lock is carried as a named exposure, not a footnote.
Tested in simulation: what the battery measured
The economy was attacked before it was believed. In the closed simulation, the adversarial battery’s books reconciled exactly, at 820. An idle farm extracted 0 against a naive expectation of 1,000. A colluding ring measured 80, equal to the honest chain — no premium for collusion. Wash trading extracted 0, at a cost of 10 to the washers. The honest remainder is printed, not smoothed: leak L1 stands recorded at 2,500; leak L2 at 1,000 across five identities; leak L3 is priced at 60. Presence is the softest class, stated plainly in the specification: it proves a key was online, not that value was delivered, and its defense is its rate of one arc a day.
The activation act’s own read-back adds its figures: 1,236 arcs minted in total in the simulation ledger, the mint log and the sum of all balances agreeing exactly with zero unexplained units, 120 of them minted under the activated rules after the activation entry at sequence 109. Settlement metering stands at 27 of 27 examined receipts in conformance, at an opening tariff of zero.
The seats and custody
The treasury is bound to the treasurer role of the foundation node, not to a person: if the person changes, the chair and its powers stay exactly as written. The three seats are the founder seat, the treasurer seat, and the co-founder seat, and each seats itself by its holder’s own signature on the custody statement; an unsigned chair’s power does not exist yet. Of record today, the treasurer seat stands open — an open office being filled deliberately, presented as an opening and not a blocker; the disbursement rule’s authorization terms name the treasurer role, and until that seat is seated, no release can fire, which is one of the four things standing between the first disbursement program and a first payment. Any two chairs can remove the third — including the founder’s, by the founder’s own design, so no one person can move or freeze the treasury alone. A constitutional act requires the founder signature plus at least one other seat and a thirty-day published waiting window; a treasury release above the founder tier carries a seven-day published waiting window. The windows bind the founder’s own acts exactly as they bind any other act.
Dollars and arcs are different things
The foundation also receives ordinary dollar support from the public (see the Support section of this site). Dollars and arcs are separate rails that never convert: there is no exchange, no bridge, and no price list between them today, and this page claims none. Dollar support funds the work; arcs record witnessed contribution inside the network’s own record. Any future bridge is a separate governed act, behind the gates named above.