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Vibe Tokens are earned, not purchased. When a contributor brings revenue to your business — through a referral, an introduction, or another qualifying action — the system automatically calculates how many whole tokens that revenue event is worth and credits them to the contributor’s account. No payment is required, no invoice is sent, and no negotiation happens. The formula handles it.

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The Earning Formula

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Worked Examples

Example 1: Standard referral at low price
Example 2: Same referral at higher price
The same α and the same relative contribution size yield fewer tokens when price is higher. That’s the bonding curve working as intended — later contributors get fewer tokens per dollar because the business (and thus the token) has already grown.

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Who Earns Tokens

The primary earning path is referral: a contributor refers a customer, that customer pays, and the revenue event triggers the formula above. For other forms of contribution — code, documentation, community moderation, design — the founder can award tokens directly from the treasury as grants. Treasury grants follow the same whole-token rule but are discretionary rather than formula-driven.

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Why No Direct Purchase?

Allowing contributors to buy tokens directly would likely classify Vibe Token as a security in most jurisdictions, triggering registration requirements, investor disclosures, and ongoing compliance obligations that are impractical for small software businesses. Earning tokens through contribution is legally and conceptually distinct: it compensates labor and effort, the same way a commission or a revenue-share agreement does. Contributors receive tokens because they did something valuable, not because they handed over capital.

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Why Whole Integers?

Fractional tokens create accounting complexity without meaningful benefit. A contributor with 3.7 tokens cannot cleanly receive 3.7 × payout_per_token in a system designed to operate on simple arithmetic. Whole integers keep the math transparent and auditable. The floor() function always rounds down — never up, never to the nearest integer.
The remainder discarded by floor() is gone permanently — it does not accumulate, carry over, or apply to the next event. At high token prices, small revenue events may yield 0 tokens. For example: floor(0.20 × $10 ÷ $50.00) = floor(0.04) = 0. If small transactions are common in your business, keep this in mind when calibrating k and α.

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Early vs. Late Contributors

Because price rises with supply, early contributors earn at a lower P. This means more tokens per dollar of attributed revenue: Each of those tokens still earns the same pro-rata share of future distributions — so early contributors hold more influence over the revenue stream, not just more tokens on paper. This asymmetry is the core incentive for contributing early.