Protocol Economics
The previous page showed how replication keeps your data alive across the network. But every copy takes real resources: disk space, electricity, bandwidth. If nobody pays, the copies disappear. On a centralized platform, the company pays, and the company decides when to stop paying. Avatarnet has no company. So who pays?
The answer is you, and every other participant, through a system of progressive contributions that funds the entire network, including the dead.
The Network Estate
When you join Avatarnet, you create two things: an Avatar (your identity) and a Network Estate (your place on the network). The Avatar is the cryptographic keypair that proves who you are. The Network Estate is everything you build through hosting: your level, your boost badges, your eternal floor copies, your bucket cap. Both start empty and both start temporary.
Your avatar begins as a temporary identity with a .temp.avtr domain and a 90-day countdown. During those 90 days, you must obtain three verifications from trusted members of the network, real people who have been hosting for at least nine months. If you succeed, your avatar becomes permanent, your domain drops the .temp prefix, and your Network Estate begins accruing level progress. If you fail, your avatar and all its copies are deleted.
This is the entry gate. It prevents attackers from flooding the network with fake accounts, because each fake account needs three real people to vouch for it, and those real people had to host for nine months to earn verifier status. The cost of faking that is enormous.
Once permanent, your Network Estate enters the level system. There are seven levels, L1 through L7, each requiring progressively more time on the network. The pattern is simple: every level requires 3^n months of uptime, and L7 is the absolute ceiling. Levels belong to the estate, not the avatar, because they represent hosting labor, not identity.
The Seven Heavens
The number seven is not arbitrary. Almost every major civilization independently structured its cosmos into seven ascending heavens. The concept traces back to the seven celestial bodies visible to the naked eye: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Moon, and the Sun. These were the only "wandering stars" ancient humans could observe, and each was assigned a heavenly layer.
The earliest known reference is a Sumerian incantation from the late second millennium BCE: "an-imin-bi ki-imin-bi" ("the heavens are seven, the earths are seven") (Horowitz, Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography, 1998). From there, the idea spread or arose independently across traditions:
The thread that connects them all: each heaven demands more to reach, and each heaven guarantees more in return. Avatarnet borrows the same structure. Seven levels, seven ascending commitments, seven ascending guarantees. The same pattern appears in modern economies: most tax systems use a handful of progressive brackets where higher income means a higher rate. Avatarnet's seven storage ratios work the same way. Each level is a bracket, and the rate (L+2) climbs with it.
L1 is entry. L7 is the ceiling, reachable only after 182 years of unbroken hosting across multiple generations. Temp sits below L1, the way limbo sits below the heavens in Dante, a probationary state you must pass through before your place in the network becomes permanent.
First, what each level requires in time and unlocks in verifier weight:
Months hosted and verifications unlocked both follow the same 3^n pattern. The verifications number is the cap on how many of your collected vouches count toward your active verifier weight at that level. Only Temp requires verifications to leave (the 3-verification permanence gate); higher levels are reached purely by hosting time, but the cap on active verifications grows with each level. Vouches collected beyond the cap are banked and unlock automatically as you climb, and the full mechanic lives on the Verification page.
Two formulas govern everything else: 3^n sets the replication ceiling (the maximum slider value), and L+2 sets both the Surplus ratio and the eternal floor base (the minimum copies preserved even at 0% network health, before any boost badge).
The bucket cap (the maximum storage the avatar accumulates at each level) follows from a third quantity (the L+2 MB/day daily unlock rate) and is covered in How You Earn Storage below.
The level, the replication ceiling, the eternal floor, and the bucket cap are properties of the Network Estate, controlled by the Estate Key. When an Avatar moves to a new estate, the verifier track record moves with them; the level stays with the estate. This split is why selling an estate transfers the level but not the verifier badge.
L7 with 2,187 copies is the highest tier the protocol awards. Levels L6 and L7 extend beyond a human lifetime. They are reachable only when someone keeps hosting the estate after the original user is gone, which requires that user to have shared the Estate Key privately before they died. The protocol does not implement inheritance, but it does not prevent descendants who hold the keys from continuing to host. Once L7 is reached, the level stops growing, and additional hosting time goes into the boost badge and the eternal floor instead.
How You Earn Storage
Every avatar on the network earns daily storage at a rate tied to its estate's level. The rate follows the same L+2 formula that governs the Surplus ratio, so a higher level grants both more daily storage and a higher hosting obligation. This is not a suggestion or a target. It is a right that must be exercised within three days or it expires permanently.
To exercise the daily unlock, you accept the increased storage and immediately provide proportional hosting for other people's data in return. The network assigns you data to host, verifies you are actually hosting it, and only then does your storage grow. Every megabyte you add to your bucket is hosted at the Surplus ratio on behalf of others, so a higher level produces both more personal capacity and more surplus for the network.
Bucket is tied to level. Each level has its own cap, equal to the cumulative bucket the avatar would have at the end of that level's tenure phase. Reaching the cap stops daily unlocks until the next level is reached, or stays capped permanently at L7.
The L7 cap of ~558 GB is the absolute ceiling. There is no L8, so no more daily unlock to exercise. The 182.25-year climb to that ceiling is intentional design headroom, sized against the current ~125-year human lifespan maximum to leave room for medical breakthroughs that extend it.
There is no way to accumulate years of unused storage and dump it on the network all at once. Uncommitted storage expires in three days. Every megabyte of your bucket was already paid for through proportional hosting at the time it was earned.
Replication Factor (You Choose)
The level you reach is a ceiling on replication, not your actual replication. Within the ceiling that your level allows, you choose how many copies of your Mind the network maintains. The browser presents this as a slider that goes from 3 (the protocol minimum) up to your level's cap of 3^n.
The slider is locked at 3 for Temp and L1 because the level's ceiling is also 3; there is no range to slide through. Starting at L2 the range opens up, and you can pick more replication if you want more durability, at the cost of hosting more of others' data in return.
The value you pick is your Guaranteed Backup. These copies are guaranteed by your own hosting commitment: while you actively host, the network maintains exactly this many copies of your Mind on other machines. Stop hosting and they decay over the symmetric decay window toward the eternal floor.
Non-Guaranteed/Surplus copies sit on top, multiplied in by the L+2 Surplus ratio. The full math is:
- Guaranteed Backup = your replication factor (
f) - Non-Guaranteed/Surplus =
(ratio − 1) × replication, network-dependent, scales with health - Total Network Storage =
replication × ratio= guaranteed + surplus
An L5 user with the slider at 100 and L5's 1:7 ratio gets 100 guaranteed copies and (7 − 1) × 100 = 600 non-guaranteed copies, for 7 × 100 = 700 total in best-case health. At 0% health the non-guaranteed 600 are shed, the guaranteed 100 may also be reduced if the user is offline, and the eternal floor of 7 (= L5's L+2 base) survives no matter what.
A second cap applies: your physical disk. The browser will not let you raise replication beyond what your local disk can host, since hosting obligation grows with replication. The effective ceiling is the smaller of your level's slider cap and your disk's cap.
Progressive Contribution
Every avatar both uses storage and provides it. The network keeps copies of your Mind safe for you, and in return you store other people's Minds on your own machine. The Surplus ratio makes sure you provide more than you use: for every copy of your Mind the network guarantees you, you store that level's ratio in other people's copies. One of those pays back the copy someone else keeps for you; the rest is surplus you give the network.
The table uses the biggest bucket at each level (someone who spent the least time needed at each level on the way up, per How You Earn Storage) and the most replication the slider allows. The sizes are at full network health. A smaller bucket or a lower slider scales them down by the same amount, and the multipliers (3x, 9x, 27x, and so on) stay the same.
No level only takes. Even at L1, 6 of your 9 copies are surplus you host for others. Higher levels give more. That is the point of Backupism: the more backups you want, the more you host for everyone.
The Total is a best case, not a promise. Your Guaranteed Backup is fixed, held up by your own hosting. The surplus copies are not. They fill in when the network is healthy and shrink as it gets weaker, down to zero at 0% health. The L5 example earlier drops from 700 copies to 100 as health falls from 100% to 0%. The space you give others never shrinks. Only the surplus you get back does.
This is what stops the network from running out of space. When people need more than the network can hold, health drops, everyone's surplus shrinks, and the freed space covers the gap. When space comes back, the surplus comes back too. The Guaranteed Backup and the eternal floor never shrink, so the network always keeps its promise. Wanting more backups still helps everyone, but the extra adjusts itself instead of running out.
Network Health
The network tracks its own health as a single percentage: how much surplus capacity remains after covering all guaranteed commitments. When health is high, every avatar has room to grow. When health drops, the network tightens.
The health system operates on two layers: status zones that tell you what is happening, and circuit breakers that tell you what the system does about it.
Status Zones
Your dashboard shows network health as a single filling bar with a percentage and zone label. The zones tell you how the network is doing at a glance.
Health drifts gradually as users join, leave, or stop contributing. It does not jump from Excellent to Failing overnight. The diagram below shows what happens as health drops from full capacity to zero.
Circuit Breakers
The three double lines in the diagram are circuit breakers, automatic safety mechanisms that fire at specific thresholds. They work like circuit breakers in your house: when the load is too high, the breaker trips to prevent damage.
At 50% health, the first breaker trips. All temporary avatars, those still in their 90-day probation, are deleted. They have not earned permanence, and removing them frees the most capacity with the least harm.
At 33%, the second breaker removes surplus copies above each user's guaranteed floor. If you have 27 copies and your guaranteed floor is 5, the extra 22 are removed. Your data is still safe with 5 independent copies, but the network is conserving resources.
At 0%, the third breaker freezes the network. No new uploads, no new storage commitments. But the guaranteed copies are never deleted. The system preserves what it promised and waits for capacity to return.
Zero percent health is an economic alarm, not a data destruction event. Your active copies scale proportionally with health: at 80%, the network maintains 80% of your non-guaranteed copies. At 0%, only the eternal floor remains. An L5 user with a full boost badge still has 21 copies safely distributed across the network. Those copies are untouchable.
Recovery
Circuit breakers do not deactivate the instant health improves. Each breaker requires sustained health above its threshold before it switches off, preventing the network from flickering between states during unstable recovery.
As health climbs back, the network restores copies in priority order. Eternal floor copies are already preserved, so restoration begins with base guaranteed copies, then stress-earned copies, then normal replication. Users with higher boost badges get their copies back first, which is why responding to stress calls matters even for users whose eternal floor is already maxed out. The badge determines your place in the recovery queue.
Stress Calls
When health drops below 80%, the network issues a stress call, a broadcast asking participants to contribute more storage in exchange for a permanent reward.
The reward is a boost badge: a multiplier recorded on your Network Estate that never expires and never decreases. It increases the minimum number of copies the network guarantees for your estate, even during the worst crises.
The twist is that the reward is inverted. Responding early, when health is still near 80%, earns the highest badge value. Waiting until health drops to 40% earns much less. This prevents rational actors from holding out for maximum crisis before helping. First responders get the best deal, and the network gets help when it needs it most.
Accepting a stress call is not instant. You must host continuously for 90 days (the same three-month pattern that appears everywhere in the protocol) before the badge locks permanently. Miss a day and it subtracts a day from your progress. The network ensures you actually delivered the hosting you promised before it rewards you.
The badge has two effects. First, it increases your estate's guaranteed copy floor up to three times the base (so an L5 estate with a full boost has 21 untouchable copies instead of 7). Second, the full badge value, which has no cap, determines your estate's priority in the recovery queue when the network restores copies after a crisis. An estate with a higher badge gets its copies back first.
The base guarantee is L+2: the estate's level number plus two. The maximum floor is three times that base. An L3 estate starts with 5 guaranteed copies. If the owner responds to enough stress calls and vests successfully, the estate's floor rises to 15 copies that the network will preserve even at 0% health. At L7, the maximum floor reaches 27 copies. Beyond that, additional badges still increase recovery priority.
The economics engine keeps the network running. But it raises a deeper question: what happens when the person behind the estate is gone? Digital Permanence answers that, covering what happens when you stop hosting, when you die, and why the system gets cheaper with every generation.