The Question Everyone Asks
"What's the formula?" It's the first thing technically minded people ask about Proof of Evolution. The answer is deliberate: we don't publish it, and we don't plan to. This post explains why, and what we commit to instead.
Published Formulas Get Farmed
Any metric with a public formula stops measuring what it was built to measure. Goodhart's law isn't a risk here, it's a certainty: the moment the weights are public, the optimal strategy is to optimize the weights, not to learn. We'd be grading the gaming, not the growth.
There's a second, quieter reason. The formula evolves. As the product grows, what counts as meaningful action changes with it. A published formula would either freeze the design or turn every improvement into a broken promise.
What We Commit To Instead
The formula is private. The principles are public, fixed, and checkable from inside the app:
- Only actions count. PoE is computed from the action ledger: lessons completed, daily training, simulator runs, Oracle forecasts. No self-reports, no surveys, no payments.
- It cannot be bought. There is no purchase, subscription, or transaction with a path into the score. Not a pricing decision. The point of the system.
- It measures the present. Consistency is measured over a rolling 30 days: stop, and the window empties. PoE describes the present, not the past.
- The market verifies. Oracle accuracy feeds PoE, and Oracle verdicts are settled by real prices 24 hours after each call. An external judge that can't be flattered or paid.
- Farming is structurally blocked. Rewards land in an idempotent ledger keyed by event: the same action can't pay twice, daily actions count once per day, and lesson checks explain and retest so guessing never converges on a pass.
The Bands
The score maps to five public bands: Newcomer (0 to 19), Developing (20 to 39), Consistent (40 to 59), Dedicated (60 to 79), Evolved (80 to 100). Bands are stable even as the internals evolve, which is exactly the contract we want: the meaning is public, the mechanism is protected.
Verifiability Without Disclosure
Isn't a private formula a trust problem? Less than it seems. Every input to PoE is an event you performed and can see in your own history. The properties that matter, earn-only, a rolling window, once-per-event, are observable from the outside: try to farm the same action twice, try to buy a point, stop for a month and watch the window empty. The system's honesty shows up in its behavior, which is where honesty belongs.
← Back to BlogPublic principles, private weights. The meaning is a promise, the mechanism is a defense.