This page exists to be understood, so it is almost entirely plain. The loop has four moves: SWAP, COLLECT, FORGE, REDEEM. The fourth is optional. Every flow is contract math, with no team in the value path.
You trade one asset for another through the protocol's pool. The act of swapping mints one artifact into your wallet, drawn from a weighted field. Each artifact references a real entry in a public catalog of astronomy or the public record of unexplained phenomena.
Over many swaps your wallet fills with observations of varying rarity, scored on the Catalog Scale, 0 to 10. The distribution is heavily skewed: most of what you find is common, and the rarest tiers are statistically almost impossible. Rarity is a number in the game. It is never a claim about the world.
You take a set of observations that satisfy a published recipe and combine them. The ingredients are spent, and a single higher-tier artifact takes their place. Quality matters, not only quantity, because recipes can require rarer ingredients.
You return a forged artifact to the contract. The contract burns it and pays out a share of a shared pool, capped so that no single redemption can drain it. The payout splits three ways, written into the software, in the same transaction.
The larger share goes to you.
A fixed share stays in the pool, to fund future redemptions.
A fixed share is committed on-chain to a Foundation-bound escrow, held for a foundation dedicated to the scientific search.
The contract never promises a fixed payout. It pays a share of whatever is actually in the pool, capped. It cannot fail to pay what it never promised, so there is no number to defend and no run to fear.
A forged artifact you keep is IN ORBIT. A forged artifact you return is REDEEMED. The choice is always yours, and holding is a real option, not a lesser one.
Belief is not the price of entry. Attention is.