Karma is standing you earn from other people. It can't be bought, sold, transferred or converted — there is no market for it and no door in. Notis is invite-only, and you arrive because somebody already here put their own reputation behind you.
Most reputation systems compute a number about you. Karma isn't computed — it's held. It sits in the ledger as yours, it moves only under rules, and it is conserved: every unit was created by one rule and destroyed by another. There is no formula weighing your behaviour and no model deciding what you're worth.
A score can be recalculated; a stake has to be spent. When karma leaves you it goes somewhere or it is burned, and either way the ledger shows it.
It costs the giver a karma and it doesn't come back. A free like is cheap talk — it can be produced without limit, so it says nothing. One that cost something is information.
Likes accumulate, and for every five received the author is paid four. The fifth is burned. Anything left over waits on your account rather than being lost.
An inactive account loses a small flat amount each window; an active one loses nothing. You can't earn standing once and coast on it for years.
Posting locks a bond that only returns as the post earns likes, so wash-posting to reset the clock costs more than the decay it was dodging.
New karma enters through exactly one door. Someone already here locks a bond of their own reputation, and the newcomer receives a grant immediately. The bond comes back as that newcomer earns real likes from real people, and is forfeited if they turn out to be a ghost.
An invitation isn't a permission slip — you're underwriting someone. It also means the network grows through its own members rather than through a signup funnel.
No phone numbers, no documents, nothing. Notis doesn't need to know who you are, because inviting yourself doesn't pay.
Abandon the bond and you forfeit more than the grant was worth. Free it by liking your own puppet and you burn more than you minted.
A like says you valued a post; a vouch says you stand behind a person. You stake a karma and it stays yours, held in escrow, released after a cooldown if you withdraw it.
Every mechanism here is one idea in different clothes: the identical action is cheap for someone real and expensive for everyone else. Nowhere does the protocol decide who is genuine. It never has to.
There is no company in the middle, no moderator, no admin, and no one who decides what may be said or who is worth listening to. Nothing you post can be taken down over your head. The only person who can remove your words is you.
Feed ranking, reputation scoring, spam-flagging and curation live in clients and indexers, never in the protocol. The chain hands everyone the same honest dataset; what to surface, and how to weight it, is decided above it and in the open.
The protocol never tries to detect fake accounts or judge patterns. One that punishes suspicious behaviour ends up punishing people who merely look suspicious, and starts an arms race it can't win.
Validators are chosen by proof of work alone — no stake, no karma gating. Being popular buys no consensus power, and being rich buys no reputation.
Two different regrets, priced differently. Wanting your own words gone is not the same as wanting a whole conversation gone, and older designs kept confusing them.
Removes your post's content and leaves every reply beneath it standing. The conversation still hangs together; your words are gone. It costs nothing — regret shouldn't be expensive.
Removes a post and everything under it, including other people's replies. Your own bond burns, everyone else's is returned, and you pay per post destroyed — so the price tracks the damage rather than what's left of your stake.
Anyone who already saved a copy can republish it, which is true of anything ever sent over a public network. What the protocol guarantees is that it stops spreading, and that your decision is permanent and attributable. It cannot un-publish — which is why the interface says withdrawn and never deleted.
Notis has a currency, the notis. You can use the network without ever touching it: posting, liking, inviting and vouching are paid for in karma and proof of work, never in money.
What it does pay for is the machinery — storage, priority, and the miners who secure the chain. The public square runs on karma; the coin runs the plumbing underneath it.
Karma and notis never convert into each other, in either direction. If reputation were purchasable it would be money wearing a costume, and the wealthiest would look the most trustworthy. Sealing the two apart is what makes a shared currency safe to have at all.
No premine, no team allocation, no advertising, no company taking a cut of anything.
No liquidity pool to drain, no governance token to dump, no revenue line aimed at anyone's balance sheet. Value stays in because there's nowhere for it to be extracted to.
Every protocol issuing its own token splits liquidity a little thinner and adds one more contract that can be hacked or "hacked". Notis has one, on a schedule nobody can renegotiate.
The chain starts at zero, but the work still had to be paid for. A Notis token on Solana predates it and funds development through creator fees — the project has never sold any of it. Those fees also pay bounties for community contributions, and the 4.3% the project holds is locked on-chain on a schedule anyone can check:
18M · 31 Aug 15M · 30 Sept 10M · 31 Oct
When mainnet launches, holders who want to can migrate their balance into a share of block rewards, drawn for up to two years and redeemed whenever they choose.
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TypeScript on Node 22, SQLite, libp2p, five packages under a design-by-contract workflow. The demo client is one HTML page of vanilla JS — no build step.
An invite locks a bond of the inviter's karma and hands the newcomer a starter grant. The bond vests back as they earn genuine likes, and burns if they never do.
Sub-blocks, ordering blocks and transactions propagate over libp2p. Nodes dial bootstrap peers and join the mesh.
Headers-sync pulls peer headers, finds the fork point, reorgs. Resolution is cumulative-work, not longest-chain.
Block rewards taper on a fixed schedule, with fees and rent on long-dormant coins carrying security afterwards.
pnpm install && pnpm build
./scripts/cluster.sh 5 --interval-ms 30000 # node 1 seeds, the rest dial in
Parameters are still tunable and the ledger may be reset before mainnet. Progress is in the open — the repository is the source of truth for what is actually finished.
Ed25519 keypairs in-browser, challenge-based post PoW, sub-block submission.
Karma and coin boxes, guard checks, epoch tally, AVL+ state root and proofs.
PruneEntry settlement, stumps, deterministic refunds without DAG content.
Gossipsub propagation, headers sync, cumulative-work fork resolution.
Phase 3 — a real client against WEB_INTERFACE, replacing the vanilla demo UI.
Faucets removed, invite graph seeded, emission live. No presale.
On testnet you can generate a keypair in the browser, pull karma from the faucet, and post — nothing to install, nothing to buy. On mainnet, somebody already here has to put their own reputation behind you.