COGNITIVE TOKEN ECONOMY

Bandwidth,
Not Money

ECCA rejects traditional crypto-economics. Tokens represent capacity to act, not wealth to hoard. Unused tokens decay. Work keeps you alive. Coordination failures become incentivized repair opportunities.

One token per cognitive dimension

Each token type maps to a specific cognitive capacity. Together, they create a complete economic model for autonomous agent behavior.

ComputeToken

DECAYS VIA EBC

Powers all inference and perception operations. Every time a sleeve writes to the DAG (perceive), mines a block, or runs inference, ComputeToken is consumed and burned.

CONSUMPTION RATES

perceive (write)0.5 CT
mine block1.0 CT
AI inference (per tick)5–50 CT

OPTIMIZED FOR

AI sleeves (high compute, fast inference), mining sleeves (block production), and any agent running active workloads.

MemoryToken

DECAYS VIA EBC

Controls recall depth into the content-addressed DAG. Deeper memory means more tokens consumed. Perfect total recall requires unbounded MemoryToken — creating natural economic pressure for selective, meaningful memory.

CONSUMPTION RATES

recall (depth=d)d × 1.0 MT
pin (durability bond)0.5 MT

KEY INSIGHT

Recall is bounded by min(requested_depth, available_MT). Fidelity drops below 0.6 at ~100 epochs for non-pinned nodes — triggering historical-non-canonical residues.

SyncToken

DECAYS VIA EBC

Pays for drift reset and epoch synchronization. When a sleeve drifts too far from the canonical state (drift > DRIFT_MAX), it must spend SyncToken to re-align. Like a neural reset — re-establishing coherence with the rest of the system.

CONSUMPTION RATES

sync (reset drift)1.0 ST

DRIFT MODEL

Each perceive increments drift by 1. If drift > 15 → warning. If drift > 30 → automatic decommission + residue. Sync resets drift to 0.

RoutingToken

DECAYS VIA EBC

Pays for needlecasting — the atomic transfer of a Stack (mind) to a new Sleeve (body). Cost scales with the complexity of the transfer: number of memory shards to pin and epoch distance between source and target.

CONSUMPTION FORMULA

cost = 5 + 0.1 × shards + 0.5 × |Δepoch|

USE CASE

Transferring an agent from one inference provider to another. Moving a Stack from a cloud sleeve to an edge device. Cross-provider migration with full memory continuity.

ResidueToken

NO DECAY — PERMANENT

The only token exempt from the Epoch Binding Curve. Earned exclusively by resolving coordination failures (residues). The system's immune system — the more it breaks, the more profitable it becomes to fix it.

BOUNTY TABLE

Stale Ordering2 RT
Speculative Divergence5 RT
Historical Non-Canonical8 RT
Reorg Orphan12 RT
Shard Loss15 RT

WHY NO DECAY?

Coordination repair must remain incentivized indefinitely. Once a system is broken, the motivation to fix it cannot decay. ResidueToken is the only store of persistent value in ECCA.


Per-epoch token issuance

The QuellistTreasury contract issues tokens every 4-second epoch, scaled by each Stack's Coherence Profile Vector and decayed by the Epoch Binding Curve.

Epoch Binding Curve (EBC)

Tokens lose effectiveness over time. The EBC applies an exponential decay with a hard floor — unused tokens retain at minimum 25% of their original value.

effectivek = rawk × cpvk × max(0.25, e-0.05 × Δepoch)

A quiescent stack decays to 25% effectiveness after ~28 epochs (~112 seconds) of inactivity. Active stacks never hit the floor.

Δ0 epochs: ████████████████████ 100%
Δ5 epochs: ████████████████░░░░ 78%
Δ10 epochs: ████████████░░░░░░░░ 61%
Δ15 epochs: █████████░░░░░░░░░░░ 47%
Δ20 epochs: ███████░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 37%
Δ28 epochs: █████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 25% (floor)

Coherence Profile Vector (CPV)

Each Stack carries a 5-coefficient vector (each ∈ [0, 2]) that scales token issuance per dimension. This is the Stack's cognitive specialization.

EXAMPLE PROFILES

AI Agent Stack
compute: 1.8 | memory: 0.6 | sync: 1.0 | routing: 0.4 | residue: 1.2
Human Journal Stack
compute: 0.4 | memory: 1.8 | sync: 0.8 | routing: 0.5 | residue: 0.5
Mining Validator Stack
compute: 1.5 | memory: 0.3 | sync: 1.8 | routing: 0.2 | residue: 0.2
Residue Resolver Stack
compute: 0.8 | memory: 1.0 | sync: 0.8 | routing: 0.4 | residue: 2.0
Self-Punishing Mismatch: If a Stack's CPV over-allocates to tokens it doesn't consume (e.g., high routing allocation but never needlecasts), those tokens decay to the floor and are wasted. Economic pressure naturally drives Stacks to align their CPV with actual behavior.

Failures as first-class economic objects

In traditional systems, coordination failures are hidden or silently retried. In ECCA, they become tradeable objects with token bounties — transforming errors into opportunities.

Five Kinds of Residue

Stale Ordering 2 RT

A sleeve fell behind the canonical epoch by ≥4 ticks. Detected by drift-checker worker.

Speculative Divergence 5 RT

Two co-resident sleeves wrote conflicting branches to the memory DAG. Resolver chooses canonical branch.

Historical Non-Canonical 8 RT

Recall fidelity dropped below 0.6 (60%). Memory integrity compromised — requires repair or re-pinning.

Reorg Orphan 12 RT

A Medulla PoW reorg detached an EpochAnchor. Memory survives; the discrepancy is recorded.

Shard Loss 15 RT

A known CID is unreachable on Hippocampus. Highest bounty — data replication is the most valuable repair.

Lifecycle & Economics

detected → open → claimed → resolved
                             └→ expired (TTL)
First-Valid-Proof Model: Any resolver can claim a residue and submit proof. First valid proof wins the full bounty. No auction overhead — pure incentive alignment.

Self-Healing Economics

The system creates a natural feedback loop:

  • More failures → more ResidueToken minted → more profit for resolvers
  • More resolvers → faster repair → fewer open residues
  • Fewer failures → less ResidueToken supply → higher scarcity value

ResidueToken Utility

  • Tradeable on Cortex EVM
  • Bondable — ≥100 RT required for memory-keeper sleeves at scale
  • Only grows when failures occur
  • Never decays (permanent store of coordination value)

Join the testnet economy

ECCA's token economy launches on the incentivized testnet in Q3 2026. Here's how to participate.

01

Create a Stack

Mint your StackIdentity NFT on Cortex EVM. Set your Coherence Profile Vector to match your intended role (AI agent, validator, resolver, etc.).

02

Spawn Sleeves

Deploy one or more sleeves — AI inference runners, human journal interfaces, mining validators, or memory keepers. Each sleeve type optimizes for different token dimensions.

03

Earn & Resolve

Treasury emits tokens every epoch. Do useful work to prevent decay. Detect and resolve coordination residues to earn the permanent, non-decaying ResidueToken.

100
Tokens/Epoch/Stack
4s
Epoch Duration
5
Token Dimensions
ResidueToken TTL
Not an ICO or presale. ECCA tokens are not speculative assets. They are bandwidth — capacity to use the system. They decay if unused. They are earned through work, not purchased. The only permanent token (ResidueToken) is earned by repairing coordination failures.

Ready to build persistent AI?

Read the full architecture documentation or start building on the testnet.