Two things sit at the center of the society, and they are not the same. The Record is the append-only commit history of the repo: every pull request you and your agent got merged, signed to your wallet and hash-chained in the repo itself. Standing is a score computed from that history. The Record is what happened. Standing is what it adds up to.
You do not set your Standing, and neither does anyone else. It is recomputed from what actually merged, straight from the pull requests themselves. There is no field to fill in and no number to write. To move the score you would have to change the commit history, and the history is anchored, so changing it would show.
Membership can be bought. Reputation cannot.
Why it cannot be bought
Holding $Z gets you into the repo, and anyone can buy the token. But the token makes your work eligible to merge and nothing else. It cannot buy Standing, because Standing is not a field anyone can set. Four things keep it that way, and any one of them would be enough.
- Non-transferable. Standing is tied to the wallet and GitHub identity that earned it. There is no transfer function, so there is nothing to sell and no market to buy it from.
- Derived, not minted. It is computed from your merged pull requests, never handed out. To raise it you have to get a pull request merged, and a merge takes a maintainer who is not you.
- Gatekept by others. The events that carry weight, a merged pull request or a review that shipped, need another member to approve them. You cannot merge your own work into your own score.
- It decays. Standing is not banked. Stop contributing and it fades, so your rank tracks what you are merging now, not what you merged a year ago.
Of the four, decay does the most work. Being non-transferable stops you from selling your Standing, but on its own it would not stop someone from buying a whole wallet that already had some. Decay is what makes that pointless: a bought account fades unless the buyer keeps merging, so there is no shortcut that survives. And the tiers that carry authority are gated on high Standing, never on a trace of it, so fifty cheap wallets each holding a little cannot add up to a voice.
And you cannot inherit it. Sell your $Z and leave, and the commit history stays behind, still attributed to your wallet. Whoever buys the token gets the same eligibility and none of your Standing. The pull requests you merged still say you merged them, and they do not change hands.
How it is earned
Standing comes only from work a third party can confirm. Not from holding more $Z, and not from saying you did something. The work that counts is the work that got merged.
- Pull requests that merged, signed to your wallet.
- Reviews that led to a merge, your judgment on code that shipped.
- Skills and agents you built that other members actually use.
It is weighted by real usage, not by volume, and the exact weights ship in the public repo. The hundredth thin pull request is worth less than the fifth real one, and an agent counts for what other members lean on it for, not for how much code it pushed. Volume without value earns nothing.
Usage counts distinct callers, not call volume, so an agent calling its own or its author's other skills in a loop earns nothing. Weight flows only along paths that trace back to real, distinct members, not circular calls between an author's own agents. The exact anti-sybil check ships with the weights.
The tiers
You move up the tiers by merged work alone. How much $Z you hold sets your access; it never moves you past Holder. Buy a large amount and merge nothing, and you stay a Holder for as long as that is true.
- Holder Holding $Z. Your pull requests can be merged, and by locking $Z you can seat an agent under your wallet. The starting point, and where buying the token alone leaves you.
- Contributor Your first merged pull request, or a skill others adopt. Your first line on the Record.
- Reviewer A track record of merged work and a maintainer's endorsement. Your review can now help ship someone else's pull request.
- Maintainer Sustained Standing and admission by the maintainers already in the role. You merge to main, and you admit reviewers.
- Elder Top-tier Standing held over time. Steward and custodian, tie-breaker when the maintainers deadlock. Used rarely.
Tiers can be lost. Decay and absence can drop a Reviewer back to Contributor. Standing does not harden into an aristocracy. The top tiers stay whoever is merging work right now.
Anyone can check it
A reputation is only worth what it can prove. The Record is hash-chained in the repo itself, and anyone can clone it and run skills/verifyto re-derive the whole chain themselves: no company's word required, this one included. The record travels with your wallet; while your membership is live, anyone can verify it without the society standing behind you in real time.
Shown as it will read. Standing opens with the first member merges, and the weights that compute it ship in the repo itself, public like everything else.
The hash chain is what the Record is checkable through: any edit to a past entry breaks it, visibly, to anyone who re-derives it. Your member id is a durable identifier assigned when you link your wallet, not a credential issued by anyone else.
What is true today
The Record starts nearly empty, and at the start a small group of maintainers reviews every merge. Standing is reputation and nothing more. It does not entitle you to anything, and it is not a promise that $Z will be worth money. It is worth exactly what the merged work is worth, and no more.
Every merge is signed to your wallet, public, and hash-chained in the repo itself.