How it works

Four steps. Energy in at one end, compute out at the other, with a transferable claim in between.

1. Stake $WATT

You deposit $WATT into the staking vault. The vault records your balance and, more importantly, the time you held it.

Staking does not entitle you to newly issued tokens. $WATT is fixed-supply; there is no emission schedule to claim from. What staking gives you is a share of whatever surplus the network absorbs while your stake is in place. If the network absorbs nothing in an epoch, the correct payout is nothing, and that is what the contract pays.

You can unstake. Unstaking stops the clock on your share from that moment forward and does not affect points already accrued.

2. Earn Energy Points

Time is divided into epochs. During an epoch the vault does nothing but accumulate stake-seconds, your balance integrated over the time you held it.

When the epoch closes, attesters report how much curtailed energy the network's sites actually absorbed during that window, in kWh. That figure becomes the epoch budget. It is measured after the fact, not promised in advance.

The budget is then split pro-rata by stake-seconds:

w_i = Σ  stake_i(t) · dt        stake-seconds for staker i over the epoch
W   = Σ_i w_i                    total stake-seconds over the epoch
P_i = B · w_i / W                points to staker i, in kWh

Points are denominated in kWh and are non-transferable. They are an accounting entry that says: this much absorbed energy is attributable to you. Two properties fall out of this design and are covered in detail in Energy Points:

• Because the weight is stake-seconds rather than a balance snapshot, a flash loan held for one block earns essentially nothing.
• Because the budget is published only after the epoch closes, nobody can see a large epoch coming and stake into it.

3. Mint compute vouchers

Points on their own are not usable. To get something you can run a job with, you burn points and mint a voucher.

Each voucher belongs to a SKU, a unit of compute defined in the SKU registry, with a price expressed in kWh:

Only the H100 figure is derivable today from a published device rating and a stated PUE. The others depend on hardware and site choices that are not fixed, so they are undetermined rather than estimated.

Minting burns the points, applies the protocol mint fee, and issues ERC1155 tokens. Each voucher carries an expiry. Vouchers are fungible with every other voucher of the same SKU and the same expiry bucket, and not fungible across either. See Vouchers.

4. Redeem or sell

A voucher has two exits.

Redeem. You submit a job. The voucher moves into escrow, an operator is dispatched, and the job runs. When a quorum of attesters signs that the work was delivered, the escrow settles and the voucher burns. If the quorum reports non-delivery, or if nobody reports at all before the deadline, the voucher returns to you. See Redemption.

Sell. You sign a limit order and post it to the marketplace. A taker fills it, wholly or in part, and the settlement contract moves the vouchers and the payment atomically. See Marketplace.

Both exits remove the voucher from your hands. Only redemption destroys it.

The loop closed

curtailed energy  →  absorbed on site  →  attested at epoch close
                                              ↓
                   staked $WATT  →  Energy Points (kWh)
                                              ↓
                                   burn  →  ERC1155 voucher
                                              ↓
                            redeem (burns)  or  sell (transfers)
                                              ↓
                                    a job runs on the hardware

The chain of custody runs from a physical quantity of energy to a physical unit of compute. Every step in between is either measurement or arithmetic. Nothing in the loop requires the token price to do anything in particular for the mechanism to function.

Watt is not deployed. Parameters marked TBD, epoch length, mint fee, expiry bucket width, are undetermined and will be published before launch.