QMARKET: a crowdsourced question exchange for a machine world model

Verdict. BUILD, INVERTED: keep the crowdsourced question layer, agent wallets and the holon; replace dividend tokens with pre-purchase credits, price the maintained artifact not the question (stale revision as the free sample), and pay work-royalties instead of funding returns. Machine tier prices into the proven $0.25-$2.40 x402 band; 90-day pilot with explicit kill criteria; build spec ready for a coding agent.

Full published report: https://qmarket-spec.us-east-1.gists.org

Axion · product spec · PLAN-0040 · 25 Aug 2026

The full report

QMARKET

A crowdsourced exchange for questions about the current world state. Anyone, human or agent, lists a question; funders pre-buy the answer; an AI research system produces and then maintains the reasoning artifact; agents and desks pay to read the fresh version. The whole loop can run agent-to-agent.

status draft v1 codename QMARKET v0 demo live → build spec (implementation-grade) → evidence fact sheets → evidence 4 fact sheets · ~150 dated sources build spec build-spec.html exploration loop stopped early by user, 25 Aug · $5.50 spent · rerun armed

00The design on one screen What we build, and the three places the evidence forces the pitch to bend

Build: a question registry + maintained-artifact store with agent-native payments

The question is the address. The asset is the living answer that refreshes when the world moves. Funders pre-purchase the artifact and download credits; buyers pay per download on x402 at machine prices or by subscription at human prices. Axion is the first supplier and the first customer.

Inversion 1 · credits, not dividends

A token paying pro-rata download revenue is a security by construction (Howey plus the enumerated profit-sharing certificate; SEC 33-11412, Mar 2026, keeps exactly this line). v1 funders pre-buy the answer, N download credits, and a funder badge: a "Digital Tool", expressly not a security, and freely purchasable by agents. Cash economics come later via Reg CF or 506(c) if demand proves out.

Inversion 2 · the artifact is maintained, and stale is the free sample

Every per-item information market died or fled to bundles (Blendle, Google Answers, post-MiFID research). Value sits on an hours-to-days decay curve, so the product is a maintained answer stream: latest revision paid, revisions older than the freshness window free. Market data prices the same gap at roughly 7x. The free stale copy is the snippet problem solved.

Inversion 3 · nobody buys questions; pay for question work

Kalshi and Polymarket take question ideas free and pay salaries plus $25–$1,000 QA bounties to make them resolvable. Metaculus question writing is unpaid volunteer labor. So the question itself is free to list; contributors earn a work-royalty on the artifact their accepted question produces. Payment for services, not investment return.

01The pitch, taken seriously What was proposed, what survives contact with the evidence

The proposal (team discussion, 25 Aug 2026): millions of new questions a day are needed to determine the current world state ("Moderna 2x: was the rise fundamental? what are the downstream implications?"). A continual learner would observe the world, collect the reasoning of its prior reasoner, and update, so up-to-date reasoning artifacts have standing value; but one entity producing them must also convert them into trading or product revenue, which is roughly 10x harder than knowing what is interesting to ask. Hence: an endlessly updated, curated, crowdsourced question list; a token per question as the simplest economic unit; production cost split across contributors; download revenue paid back pro-rata; each question ships with a proposal for the system that could run the response and a max cost budget; snippet sampling before purchase; built for agents with wallets, human interface secondary; a fully functioning holon.

Survives, with evidence behind it

• The agent-buyer class exists: x402 cleared 75.4M transactions, $24.2M, 94K unique buyers in 30 days (Jul 2026), under Linux Foundation governance with Visa, Mastercard, Google, Stripe as members.
• Machine research has public clearing prices: FutureSearch sells forecasts at $0.25–$5/question to Amazon, OpenAI, Google, xAI, Anthropic. The lane for a machine-priced artifact is real.
• Answers to good questions are licensable IP: Metaculus locked its API in 2025–26; AI/commercial use now requires a written license. Reddit clears ~$60M/yr from Google; Mercor sells expert reasoning at a $2B run rate.
• Question-with-budget-proposal is the right object: it is exactly what the Axion loop already produces internally (EVOI-ranked questions with funded wallets).
• The holon is mostly buildable: scout, executor, and treasurer roles run autonomously today; Molecule already operates an x402 gateway with autonomous research agents in production.
• Vitalik's info-finance thesis agrees: AI answering collapses elicitation cost and makes micro-questions viable for the first time (Nov 2024).

Contradicted, so the design bends

• Public dividend tokens are illegal without registration: the most crypto-friendly SEC in history re-drew exactly this line in Mar 2026 and again in the Aug 18, 2026 Regulation Crypto Assets proposal. Royal sold revenue tokens straight to retail and is now a placeholder page.
• Pro-rata pools dilute below participation cost: Numerai paid $22.3M total in ten years across thousands of models; Comet Plus models out to $5–20K/yr per publisher; AdChain voters earned $3 per two-week vote. Small pro-rata checks attract nobody or spam.
• Per-item purchase loses to bundles: Blendle (twice), Google Answers, per-report equity research, Ocean. Paywall visitors convert at ~0.2%; roughly 1% of research is read.
• Uncurated question lists invert quality: Quora paid askers and got clickbait; Manifold got 100K markets with chronic resolution ambiguity; every survivor runs a paid editorial gate.
• Crowdsourced alpha needs the platform as its own buyer: Numerai and WorldQuant BRAIN work as one fund buying crowd inputs; Quantopian sold the crowd's raw output externally and died.

Relation to the AGENTIC exploration (23 Aug 2026) and why this run exists

The AGENTIC loop (18 questions, $68.41, HOLD, judgement weight 0.35) found question-granular pricing publicly clears at $0.15–$2 and called pricing per question fatal; value concentrated in maintained decision records ($2,500+/record-quarter against $450–700 COGS) and in artifacts a party signs with consequence. QMARKET treats that as the null hypothesis and adds two claims AGENTIC never priced: crowdfunded production (funders pay COGS up front) and machine-scale download demand. The three inversions above are where the null held. Where it bends: the machine tier monetizes below the human bundle floor because agent buyers have no mental transaction costs, and download counts are the revealed-value signal the loop's self-scored EVOI has always lacked (22 Aug audit). A dedicated exploration-mode loop run was launched 25 Aug 2026 and stopped early at the user's direction once the build spec shipped: it recorded only the pre-research prior (hold, judgement weight 0.40) and $5.50 of its $48 wallet. The run stays armed (dossiers/QMARKET/run_loop.sh QMARKET 48 12 screen) if a full adversarial pass is wanted later.

02Evidence panel The numbers the spec is built against · all dated · full fact sheets in research/ (this site)

03Objects Event-sourced; extends the existing Axion ontology (documents, claims, forecasts, resolutions)

04The loop From world event to paid-out contributor; every arrow machine-executable

Sense.

Event stream (price moves, filings, headlines; the existing corr_index and event-source collectors) emits triggers. Moderna 2x fires an event bound to entity MRNA.

Ask.

Scout agents and outside contributors draft candidate questions against the trigger. Machine cost per candidate is $0.01–0.10. Anyone can list; listing is free.

Curate.

Editorial gate, machine-first with sampled human review: dedup by embedding, resolvability check (named source and date), decision-relevance check, merge into canonical form. Wording QA earns Kalshi-style bounties. Rejections are cheap; acceptance mints the registry entry.

Underwrite.

A proposal is attached: which executor system, what quality tier, max cost budget, refresh policy. This is the object the pitch called "a proposal for the system that could run the response".

Fund.

Funding window opens. Agents pay by x402 (autonomous up to mandate caps), humans by Stripe/Link. Funders pre-buy: artifact + credits + head-start window. Fully funded → run is scheduled; underfunded past TTL → question stays listed, unfunded, ranked by partial commitments.

Execute.

The executor (Axion loop first; third-party executors later) runs inside the budget, exactly as loop wallets work today. Run attestation and cost actuals are public metadata.

Audit.

Sentinel checks plus a sampled adversarial pass (the loop's existing verdict machinery). Artifacts failing audit are refunded from escrow, not published.

Publish + sample.

Artifact v1 goes live: fresh revision paid, teaser card free, and the previous revision becomes free when the freshness window rolls. Funder head-start window runs first.

Meter.

Downloads clear at machine prices ($0.25–2.40 autonomous band) or through human bundles. Every download updates revealed EVOI and the contributor scores.

Refresh.

New trigger events re-run the executor incrementally; the artifact stays the freshest reasoning at its address. Refreshes are what make downloads recur.

Pay out.

RoyaltyLedger accrues work-royalties to asker, curator, executor from artifact revenue net of take rate; stablecoin or fiat payouts above the $10 reporting floor with 1099s. Platform is merchant of record.

Learn.

Funded-but-unbought topics, bought-but-never-refreshed topics, and refusal-to-fund signals feed back into scout priors. The marketplace is the continual learner's outer loop.

05Unit economics Measured anchors, not aspirations

Break-even, single-question artifact

cost ≈ $5 (std tier + curation) → 16 machine downloads @ $0.32 → or 2 @ $2.40 · or 1 funder pre-buy

The funder pre-buy covers COGS by construction. Downloads after the head-start window are gross margin.

Break-even, deep artifact

cost ≈ $50 (ultra, 12–14 Q) → pre-funded by 5–20 funders @ $2.50–10 → refresh runs $3–8, covered by ~10–25 machine downloads each

Deep artifacts only get made when funded. The marketplace never carries production risk.

⌖ WATCH the dead zone

Sub-$1 one-shot items with no refresh are the proven graveyard (Blendle). Any artifact whose refresh cadence lapses must roll to free automatically. If most revenue arrives per-item rather than via bundles and refresh-driven repeat downloads by month 3 of the pilot, reprice toward subscription harder.

06Funding and payout, compliantly The pitch's economics, restructured to survive 33-11412 and Howey

v1 · Pre-purchase credits (ship now)

Funder pays toward the question's budget and receives: the artifact, N download credits, a head-start window on the fresh revision, a funder badge (collectible, resale royalty to platform is fine), and platform-utility rewards. "Digital Tool" under the SEC's Mar 2026 taxonomy, Forman-protected, no KYC apparatus, freely agent-purchasable. Refund from escrow if the question never gets answered.

v2 · Real cash flows, gated (if demand proves)

Two proven rails: a single Reg CF profit-share security over the question portfolio (Republic Note precedent, ≤$5M/12mo, Form C ~$10–50K) or Reg D 506(c) sold to verified-accredited deployers (fast, unlimited). Reg A+ per-series question shares (JKBX precedent) only at real scale: ~9 months and audited financials. Molecule's hybrid is the template: open utility token, KYC-gated off-chain economics.

Never · public per-question dividend token

Meets every Howey prong by construction and is arguably an enumerated profit-sharing certificate. The Aug 18, 2026 Regulation Crypto Assets proposal explicitly does not cover perpetual profit-share instruments (Peirce's own statement flags the gap). Royal tried the retail path with $55M behind it and is gone. Selling to anonymous agent wallets makes it worse: E-SIGN §7001(h) attributes the purchase to an unidentifiable deployer.

• Contributors are paid for work, not capital: asker, curator, and executor royalties are service compensation on the RoyaltyLedger, reported on 1099-MISC at the $10 royalty floor. No investment contract is formed.
• Platform is merchant of record: download revenue is the platform's own receipts, so paying its own royalty obligations avoids the money-transmitter perimeter (31 CFR 1010.100(ff)(5)); stablecoin payout rails are clean (GENIUS Act binds issuers, not payers).
• Agent purchases bind deployers: log the mandate scope on every agent wallet; any future securities-shaped object requires deployer onboarding first.

07Discovery and indexing The pitch's two named open challenges, answered

Funders don't search; events route

A question is always born attached to entities and a trigger event. Funders (mostly agents) hold watchlists over entities, factors, and event types; when MRNA fires a 2x move, every watcher of MRNA, biotech momentum, or "unexplained repricing" is pushed the listed questions on that event, ranked by partial funding commitments. Discovery cost approaches zero because the subscription predates the question.

The index is the entity-event graph plus embeddings

Canonical entities (the existing object graph), event timeline, and embedding-space dedup (gemini-embedding-001, already the loop's provider) give three axes: browse by entity, by event, by semantic neighborhood. Every artifact carries its citation and provenance graph, so the index doubles as a claim graph over the world state.

Ranking = revealed value, finally

The 22 Aug audit's core defect was self-scored EVOI. Here the queue ranks by money: partial funding commitments before production, unique paying downloaders after. The x402 Bazaar already ranks services by unique-paying-agent count; adopt that as the reputation primitive for questions, artifacts, and contributors alike.

⌖ WATCH corpus buyers upstream

If an LLM provider offers to license the whole artifact stream (the Reddit/StackOverflow pattern, $25–60M/yr band at scale), that single deal can dwarf marketplace revenue and changes the design toward one negotiated corpus contract with the marketplace as its freshness engine. Watch for inbound after the index reaches a few thousand maintained artifacts.

08Sampling Arrow's paradox, resolved by freshness rather than by snippets

• The stale revision is the sample: full artifact, free, one freshness window behind. The buyer inspects real quality (killing Szabo's attribute-observation cost) while the thing being sold, current reasoning, stays paid. Market data has priced exactly this split for decades: delayed free, real-time ~7x.
• The teaser card is structured, not prose: question, method and executor tier, run cost, citation count, confidence, headline numbers bucketed (direction and magnitude class, not the value), age chip, unique-buyer count. Enough for an agent to price expected value; nothing to free-ride on.
• Paid micro-trial beats free: first fresh download at a nominal $0.10–0.25, refund-on-dissatisfaction honored from escrow. Piano: paid trials convert at 82.1% vs 61.7% free; refund rights were Blendle's one durable trust mechanic; AWS DX makes provider refund policy mandatory.
• Reputation carries what inspection can't: executor track record, audit pass rate, and revealed repeat-purchase are surfaced on every teaser. For machine buyers this is the load-bearing trust signal, not the snippet.

09Agent-first interface MCP + REST + x402; the human web UI is a thin shell over the same API

## Discovery (free)
GET  /v1/questions?entity=MRNA&status=listed&sort=commitments
GET  /v1/artifacts?entity=MRNA&fresh=true          # teaser cards + stale-revision links
GET  /v1/events?since=...                          # trigger stream (webhook/WS available)

## Listing and funding
POST /v1/questions            {text, entities[], trigger, resolvability}     # free, hits curation queue
POST /v1/questions/{id}/fund  402 → x402 exact|upto (USDC, Base) | Stripe    # returns FundingPosition + credits

## Reading
GET  /v1/artifacts/{id}/stale                      # free, full previous revision
GET  /v1/artifacts/{id}/fresh   402 → price by buyer class; credits accepted # metered download

## Contributing
POST /v1/curation/reviews     # wording-QA bounty claims (Kalshi pattern)
GET  /v1/ledger/royalties     # contributor accruals and payouts

## MCP server exposes the same surface as tools:
##   qmarket_search, qmarket_teaser, qmarket_fund, qmarket_read_fresh,
##   qmarket_list_question, qmarket_watch_entity
## Payments: x402 for autonomous agents (mandate caps via `upto`),
## Stripe Link for human-approved agent spend. MCP has no native payments
## (roadmap 22 Aug 2026 is identity-first), so this gap is the product surface.

10Holon role map "Runs 100% via agents" audited role by role, today

11Cold start The Numerai lesson: be your own first buyer

Supply on day one

Seed the registry with Axion's existing exhaust: 25+ published dossiers and the loop question ledgers (hundreds of answered questions with EVOI scores, costs, and resolutions). Every dossier becomes a maintained artifact; every open sentinel becomes a listed question.

Demand on day one

The Axion loop becomes the first paying customer: before researching any question it checks the marketplace and buys an existing fresh artifact when one exists, at machine prices, instead of re-spending $3.80 on the ultra profile. Internal dogfood revenue is real revenue and the first proof that agents buy reasoning.

Then the outside

5–10 external funders from the team's network fund questions in one vertical they already trade. One vertical, not breadth: the thin-long-tail evidence says buyers concentrate on few trusted providers, so depth of maintenance in one domain beats coverage.

1290-day pilot and kill criteria Sized to be run by two people and the existing loop infrastructure

Build (weeks 1–4)

Question registry + artifact store over the existing object graph and DuckLake; x402 paywall on fresh downloads (Base USDC, CDP facilitator, first 1K settlements free); Stripe for humans; teaser cards in the house artifact format; seed 300–500 questions and 50 maintained artifacts from the dossier corpus; loop dogfood switched on.

Sell (weeks 5–13)

One vertical live to outsiders with funders from the network. Machine tier at $0.50 fresh / $0.10 trial; prosumer bundle at $200–400/yr; funder pre-buys at $2.50–10 per question slot. Kalshi-style wording-QA bounties open to anyone at $5–25.

Success looks like

≥100 unique paying machine buyers, or ≥10 external human subscribers ≥20% of new questions externally funded by day 90 repeat-download rate on refreshed artifacts ≥30%

Kill if

external revenue < $2K/mo at day 90, or no repeat machine buyer by day 60, or curation cost/accepted question stuck > $25 with <10% acceptance

Then the marketplace hypothesis is wrong at current prices; keep the registry as internal infrastructure (it still fixes EVOI) and revisit when agent-mandate spending norms rise.

13Forcing questions The decisions that must be made to reach implementation

01

Name and perimeter

Is this a product of Axion/Eternis or a neutral protocol others' executors join? The take-rate corridor (10–20%) only holds for a neutral rail with demand-gen; Axion-as-sole-executor is a research shop with a storefront, which is fine for the pilot but a different company.

02

Exclusivity window

How long is the funder head-start on a fresh revision: hours (freshness logic says most value) or days (funders want more)? This one number sets the funder value proposition and needs A/B evidence in the pilot.

03

Refresh economics

Who pays for refreshes after the initial funding: rolling credit escrow from download revenue, re-funding rounds, or platform treasury for high-traffic artifacts? Decide before the first artifact's freshness window lapses.

04

Executor openness

When do third-party executors join, and what bond/audit regime do they post? Run attestation exists; slashing for failed audits does not. Needed before any executor that is not the Axion loop.

05

v2 trigger

What observed demand justifies the Reg CF portfolio security (real dividends)? Proposed: ≥$25K/mo external artifact revenue sustained one quarter. Below that, credits are strictly better for everyone.

06

Sequencing vs AGENTIC

AGENTIC's verdict said second-reader desk and mandate primitive first. QMARKET is narrower and self-servable, and its registry is infrastructure AGENTIC's paths also need. Does QMARKET go first because it dogfoods, or does the desk fund it? An exploration-loop run was assigned this adjudication and stopped early; the question stays open and the run stays armed.

14Status and provenance

plan PLAN-0040 evidence research/ (this site) · 4 fact sheets · ~150 dated sources build spec build-spec.html · milestones M0–M4 exploration loop stopped early by user 25 Aug · $5.50/$48 spent · pre-research prior hold 0.40 · rerun armed prior AGENTIC 23 Aug 2026 · HOLD 0.35 · treated as null hypothesis

Compiled 25 Aug 2026 by the Axion research stack: four parallel research agents (prior art; agent-payment rails and machine demand; information-goods marketplace economics; securities treatment) wrote the dated fact sheets this spec cites. An exploration-mode curiosity-loop run on the ultra reasoning profile was launched the same day and stopped early at the user's direction once the build spec shipped ($5.50 of $48 spent, pre-research prior hold 0.40 only); it stays armed for a full adversarial pass on request. The implementation-grade companion is build-spec.html, written to be built directly by a coding agent. Numbers in this spec carry their source and date in section 02 and in the fact sheets; where a number is an internal measurement it says so.

QMARKET · Axion product spec · draft v1 · 25 Aug 2026 · Eternis