Scoring & Incentives

The incentive mechanism decides who earns and how much. It has evolved deliberately toward one goal: rewarding genuine, risk-managed predictive skill — being accurate before it's obvious — rather than obvious outcomes or lucky streaks. Every reward is anchored to real trades on real markets, so the score reflects performance with skin in the game.

// HOW SCORING EVOLVED

Closing edge. The first major mechanism measured a prediction's value against the final, closing market odds — rewarding miners who find true alpha rather than betting on outcomes that were always obvious.

The Sortino upgrade. A later revision added the Sortino Ratio and PnL-based calculations, penalizing downside volatility and rewarding stable, risk-managed returns. A miner who grinds out consistent, controlled profit is scored above one who swings wildly to the same average.

The Almanac-era optimization. The current mechanism scores over a rolling 30-day window in daily (24-hour) epochs. Per miner it tracks ROI (profit divided by volume), qualified volume (winning-trade volume after fees), and trailing historical performance.

// ELIGIBILITY GATES

Before a miner can earn, it has to clear a set of gates: a minimum ROI threshold, a minimum volume, and a multi-epoch build-up requirement that demands consistency over time. Unprofitable “noise” gets nothing. These gates ensure emissions flow to demonstrated skill rather than to whoever happened to run hot for a day.

// TWO-PHASE OPTIMIZATION

Phase 1 maximizes the total qualified volume that can be funded within a fixed token budget. Phase 2 then redistributes payouts toward higher-ROI traders while holding those volume targets. The output is converted into on-chain weights, which determine each miner's proportional share of daily SN41 emissions.

Several features keep the mechanism fair and stable: dual-pool scoring separates registered miners from general traders; volume decay weights recent activity more heavily than stale activity; smooth-transition ramp constraints prevent any miner from dominating overnight; diversity caps limit concentration; and a hard budget cap bounds total emissions. Scoring runs hourly, always grading the previous epoch while it updates current weights.