Vibe Token
A Revenue-Indexed Contribution System for Small Software
Token systems introduced sound economic primitives: programmable ownership, automated distribution, permissionless participation. What failed was not the mechanism but its deployment. Speculation displaced contribution. Financial games crowded out builders, referrers, and early believers who told their friends.
This paper describes a different application. Vibe Token is designed for small, high-margin software businesses—the kind now trivially cheap to create but still difficult to distribute. It gives early contributors a direct stake in future revenue without speculation, venture financing, or secondary markets.
The Problem
Software creation costs have collapsed. A competent developer with access to language models can ship a working product in hours. But distribution remains expensive—not in money, but in attention and trust. The people who spread software early—referrers, evangelists, early adopters who file bug reports—create real value. They rarely capture it.
Traditional equity solves this for venture-scale companies. Vibe Token solves it for everything else: the micro-SaaS, the tool for a niche community, the app that serves six friends for one summer and then fades. Human-scale software deserves human-scale economics.
The Invariant
20% of net revenue is continuously allocated to contributors.
Fixed. Non-configurable. No tiers, no negotiation, no exceptions.
Bonding Curve Design
Vibe Token uses a revenue-indexed bonding curve to price entry and exit. Unlike speculative curves priced by demand alone, this curve anchors to realized business performance. Revenue generates tokens. Exits burn them. Price is deterministic—no order books, liquidity pools, or market-makers required.
R cumulative revenue· dR new revenue· α share (0.20)· S supply· P price· k constant
Token Pricing
P = k × √R
Price rises with cumulative revenue, but at a diminishing rate. The square root gives early revenue more weight than late. Growth never locks out participation; entering a proven business simply costs more than entering an unproven one.
Token Issuance
tokens = (α × dR) ÷ P
Revenue mints tokens; the system distributes them to contributors. No tokens exist before revenue exists. No pre-sales, no bonus schedules, no multipliers. Contribution earns tokens—referrals, purchases, verified participation. The curve handles everything else.
Token Exit
When a holder exits:
- Their tokens are burned
- Their future revenue share ends
- Total supply decreases
Remaining holders receive a larger share of future distributions. The curve re-prices automatically. Exits consolidate ownership rather than destabilize it. No secondary markets exist. The curve itself defines entry and exit.
Revenue Distribution
D = α × dR
payout = D ÷ S
Revenue accrues to holders proportionally. Payouts accumulate as balances, not instant transfers. Withdrawals occur when balances exceed practical minimums. Settlement uses traditional or stablecoin rails. The system promises no dividends, no guarantees, no fixed yields.
System Properties
Closing
New approaches to software architecture makes this possible. When applications run on user devices, with isolated with data synced rather than centralized, operational costs collapse. A single developer can serve thousands of users. Communities can have their own isolated worlds—their own databases, their own economies, their own fates.
Vibe Token is infrastructure for this future. Not a movement, not a platform, not a promise. A mechanism: connect contribution to revenue, let the math handle distribution, see what people build when early support finally means something.