FLOW

The business

We manufacture market intelligence, trade it, and sell the record

FLOW's asset is a network of staked traders whose every claim is verified against the tape. That asset produces revenue two ways.

The edge

Not all price movement is equal.
Most of it is noise.

A single price target is close to a coin flip. The useful information is in the path: how deep the drawdown went, and whether price reached the target cleanly. From that we can see who is using information that tends to persist, and who is only riding the market.

In trading language: alpha is a real edge. Beta is just being long or short the market, often with leverage. FLOW pays miners to trade on their alpha with skin in the game, then scores them on signs of genuine market intelligence.

The mechanism

Every submission is a funded trade, instantly viewable to us, publicly verifiable after a week

A submission is a full position. Skin in the game is required for it to count for rewards after the challenge period. Miners state a direction, a stop, two targets, a horizon, and a Kelly fraction of their stake. They do this across four time bands at once, from 1–24 hours through 1–2 weeks. Outcomes are measured in R — risk-adjusted return, how much the trade made relative to the capital put at risk — before multipliers are applied.

Path adjustment

The drawdown of a position modifies base R. A position where the price cleanly moves towards the take profits outscores a move that wobbled in both directions and eventually hit the TP.

Tail amplification

During periods of high volatility, indicative of regime change or changes in what information is in the market we double scores. This is because strategies which actually understand the market tend to most outperform leveraged beta here.

Kelly weighting

The actual MANTIS token risked is the multiplier. Skin in the game tells us how confident the miner is that their strategy is not going to blow up, but survive and thrive throughout the next periods. This has the dual function of further incentivizing strong miners through the collateral pool.

A statistical significance gate prevents a miner from receiving anything beyond a dust tier to prevent dereg until a T stat of 1.25 is reached. This is deliberately loose. The primary mechanism to penalize weak strategies remains the collateral pool.

Silently we record all of this, positions, sizing, and market microstructure conditions in depth.

The flywheel

Proceeds flow back through the token

The trades that we make, the profits that come in, the proceeds go to buy back TAO and ultimately the alpha token. This is our flywheel, a higher token price brings us better miners, which brings us greater profits, all of this contributing to the dataset silently. A share accrues to the team as a treasury. A share is planned to be directly distributed to miners who we copy trade off of in addition to the emissions they receive.

The token is a claim on the outputs and a key to it: holders get time locked signals that move closer to execution time as held balance grows, and gated access to the dataset as it rolls out. Skilled miners compound stake, noise bleeds out, the dataset appreciates.

Who it is for

Miners earn it. Holders own it. Institutions buy it

The scoring constants are in the release paper and the technical appendix.