A semantic layer for the economy
Capital has always had prices. Coined gives it words. Back any word, name or idea with dollars, connect it to the words it means, and the money becomes a public map of what people value — and what they mean by it.
The idea
Everybody carries a hierarchy of what matters, and we rarely agree on it. Markets have never let anyone say it outright: they price companies, currencies and commodities, never the ideas behind them. Coined lets capital name what it values, in its own words, and makes the naming count.
A word on Coined means two things at once. It means what it is worth — the money behind it. And it means what it is connected to — the other words its holders tie it to. Both are written by money, in public, and both can be read by anyone.
Everybody’s got value hierarchies, and we can’t seem to agree on them. So maybe we just use this to define our value hierarchies — and trade the ideas themselves.
Two layers of meaning
Layer 1 · Value
The most basic thing a word can mean is how much it matters to people. Every word on Coined carries the money behind it, so the market keeps a live, public hierarchy of values — not one person’s, everyone’s, weighed in dollars.
Layer 2 · Connection
Words mean things through other words. Holders link a word to the words that define it, and each link counts by the stake behind it — an opinion with no stake is weightless. A word also means the company it keeps: what its holders hold beside it.
What its holders say bitcoin means
Even a connection can be a word. Coin the relationship between words as a symbol of its own, and put value behind the connection itself.
Arbitrary by design
01
Any word, name, phrase or emoji, in any language. There is no list to choose from: if you can type it, you can put value behind it.
02
No editor, no authority, no oracle. A word means what the people who back it say it means, weighed by how much they back it.
03
Measuring what people value changes what they value, so today’s map is a bet on tomorrow’s — and being early to what people come to value pays.
How it works
All of that rests on one market with one rule, in one contract nobody can change. Here is the machinery.
Type any word. If nobody holds it yet, the first buy is yours: you coined it, and the chain can prove it.
Buy shares with dollars. Each share costs a little more than the last, so every buyer raises the price for whoever comes next.
Sell back whenever you like. The money behind every word stays in the contract, so every share can always be sold — at today’s price.
The price
No order book, no market maker, nobody setting prices. A word’s price comes from one straight line: the more shares people hold, the more the next one costs. Here is what that means for two people.
A new word. Nobody holds it yet, and its first share costs $0.20.
$0.20
The first share of every new word.
4× → 2×
Four times the money behind a word (plus $100) doubles its price.
$100
Every word starts as if $100 were already behind it, so a young word isn’t a two‑person bet.
A straight line in shares, a curve in dollars: each dollar moves the price a little less than the one before.
More you can do
Commit your stake in a word until a date. A locked stake can’t be sold, so it’s a public promise — and a floor under the price until then.
Point your account at a person whose values you trust. When you ask, your app moves you to what they actually hold. They pay nothing, and nothing trades for you while you’re away.
Hold a word and point it at your address, and your wallet answers to that name. If several holders claim it, the biggest stake wins.
Hold up to 50 words. Set the mix you want and one transaction moves your whole portfolio toward it.
Fair by design
The people who made Coined built the rails and stepped off them. The rules live in one contract on Base, and nobody can change them — including us.
Nobody takes a cut of any trade. You pay the network’s fee and nothing else.
No admin key, no pause button, no upgrade. The contract is the same for everyone, for good.
The money behind every word is held by the contract, enough to buy back every share there is.
Every trade and every link is public on Base, and anyone can run the app. Money is USDC — dollars, not a token of ours.
Contract 0x25bF…5b6b on Base, source verified.
Live
Get started
On your phone or your computer. You can look around without signing in.
Use the one you have, or let the app hold a key for you on your device, under a passphrase.
Send USDC on Base. A key the app holds can pay its network fee in dollars too; with your own wallet, keep a little ETH for it.
Look up anything. If somebody holds it, buy in. If nobody does, coin it.
Questions
Because words are how people say what they mean. A price can say how much; only a word can say what. Coined puts the two together, so capital can say both.
Any text — a word, a name, a phrase, an emoji — up to 1,000 bytes, written in one script. Mixing scripts and hiding invisible characters are refused by the contract itself, and the app warns you before you coin a word that looks like one that already exists.
Its holders, in proportion to what they hold. Anyone can link a word to others, but a link only counts as much as its author’s stake in the word. Nothing is edited, approved or taken down.
Nobody. The price is a straight line set by how many shares exist: a new word’s first share is $0.20, and each share after it costs a little more. Buying moves the price up the line; selling moves it back down.
Yes. You can always sell, but at the price of the moment, and when others sell the price falls. In the example above, Ben put in $100 and could take out $73.67 after Ana sold. Put in only what you’re happy to see go down as well as up.
Shares of a word, recorded in the contract against your address. They aren’t tokens you send around: you hold them, lock them, or sell them back to the curve.
No. There is no outcome to wait for and no end date. A word is worth what people hold behind it, for as long as they do.
No. You can hold a word or not hold it; there is no way to short one.
A browser and some USDC on Base. Coined runs on Base, a network built on Ethereum where a trade’s fee is about a cent.
Markets are the economy’s most precise instrument of valuation, yet they value only what has a referent outside them: a firm, a commodity, a currency, an outcome. What capital values in the abstract — the ideas, names and concepts behind its choices — has had no instrument at all. Coined is such an instrument. It is a single immutable smart contract in which any string of text is an admissible symbol, any symbol can be bought into along a deterministic bonding curve, and any participant can link symbols to one another, each link weighted by its author’s stake. The money behind a symbol constitutes its value meaning; the stake-weighted graph of links, and the co-holdings of its holders, constitute its semantic meaning. We define the model, its economics — a linear price curve over a virtual reserve under which every unit is always redeemable — and its implementation on Base, which has no owner, no fee, no oracle and no upgrade path. The result is a public, permissionless, capital-weighted semantics: a layer in which the economy states, in its own words, what it values and what it means by it.
Prices are the economy’s way of compressing what is known about value into a single number that anyone can act on [1]. But a price is always the price of something whose identity is fixed outside the market: a share in a firm, a barrel of oil, a unit of currency, the outcome of an election. The market measures how much; it never says what. The objects that most shape what capital does — ideas, principles, names, the concepts in which people state what they care about — are valued constantly and priced nowhere.
People hold hierarchies of value, orderings of what matters to them, and those hierarchies disagree. Discourse states them but does not weigh them; votes weigh them but only over a fixed slate; surveys measure them without cost, so they measure cheap talk. What has been missing is an instrument in which a statement of value is also a commitment of capital, in which the thing valued can be named freely, and in which the relations between such things are themselves stated and weighed.
Coined is that instrument. Its unit of account is the symbol: any admissible string of text. Its claim is that meaning, as far as an economy is concerned, has two layers. The first and more fundamental is value: what a symbol is worth to the people who hold it, measured as the money they have put behind it. The second is connection: what a symbol is related to — the symbols its holders say define it, and the symbols they hold beside it. Both layers are written by capital, in public, under rules that no party can change.
This paper makes four contributions:
Prediction markets price claims on future events and settle them against an outcome reported by an oracle; automated market makers such as the logarithmic market scoring rule make them continuously liquid [2]. Coined shares their premise — prices aggregate belief — but not their structure. Its symbols have no outcome. The only thing a holder can be early to is other people’s later valuation, so there is nothing to resolve, no oracle to trust and no expiry. A live index of what people value is, by construction, a market on what they will come to value.
Constant-function market makers price an asset against a reserve by a fixed invariant [3, 4]; bonding curves mint and burn units against a reserve along a fixed price function, and curation markets apply them to the popularity of memes and information [5]. Coined adopts a bonding curve but differs in two respects: one contract prices every symbol, so no symbol is issued, deployed or seeded by anyone; and the curve is linear over a virtual reserve, chosen for the redemption property of §4.
Lexical and commonsense networks such as WordNet and ConceptNet record relations between words, curated by editors or contributed without cost [6, 7]. Distributional semantics holds that “you shall know a word by the company it keeps” [8]. Coined keeps both ideas and changes their source: relations are asserted by participants but weighted by their stake, and the company a word keeps is read from the portfolios in which capital holds it, not from a corpus of text.
The readings Coined derives from its graph are standard. A symbol’s meaning followed beyond its direct links is personalized PageRank [9, 10]; the symbols associated with it are ranked by lift, the measure of association-rule mining [11, 12]. Nothing in these readings is particular to Coined except the data they are given.
That the link between a sign and what it signifies is arbitrary — fixed by convention, not by nature — is a founding observation of linguistics [13]. Coined takes it literally. A symbol has no meaning until people give it one, and here the giving is explicit, priced and recorded.
The model has three kinds of object: symbols, holdings of them, and statements about how they relate. Everything else — prices, meanings, rankings — is a function of these.
Definition 1 (Symbol). A symbol is a byte string that, with ASCII whitespace trimmed from its ends, is non-empty, at most 1,000 bytes of well-formed UTF-8, and admissible under the text rules of the contract: it contains no invisible or control characters (general categories Cc, Cf, Co, Cs, Zl and Zp, default-ignorable code points, noncharacters, spaces other than U+0020, or two spaces in a row); its letters belong to a single script at the “highly restrictive” level of Unicode Technical Standard #39 [16]; its decimal digits share one zero; and joiners appear only where emoji sequences or the contextual rules of IDNA2008 require them [17].
The rules are compiled from the Unicode 17.0 character database into a table inside the contract, so admissibility is decided on chain and identically for everyone. A symbol’s identifier is the symbol itself, packed into 32 bytes, when it is 32 bytes or shorter, and otherwise its Keccak-256 hash with the top byte cleared; since no admissible text begins with a zero byte, the two identifier spaces are disjoint. Case and punctuation are not folded — Bitcoin and bitcoin are distinct symbols, and which one matters is the market’s to judge. Clients normalise text to Unicode NFC before it reaches the contract and warn when a new symbol has the same UTS #39 skeleton as an existing one.
The first transaction that puts a symbol on record — a purchase, a free registration, or the coining of a connection (Definition 4) — emits a Coined event naming the account that sent it. That account is the symbol’s coiner, permanently and verifiably; the title confers no privilege of any kind.
Let be the units of symbol held by account . The supply of a symbol is , and its pot is the money held by the contract on its behalf. An account’s book is the vector of its holdings, over at most 50 symbols.
Definition 2 (Value meaning). The value meaning of a symbol is the money behind it, . The value meanings of all symbols, taken together, order them: a public hierarchy of values, stated in dollars by everyone who holds any of them.
Definition 3 (Link). A link is a directed, revocable annotation by account stating that is part of how defines . Any account may link any two symbols, held or not; a link to oneself, , states that a symbol is in part just itself. A later link by the same author over the same pair replaces the earlier one, and a link of weight zero retires it.
Definition 4 (Connection symbol). For symbols with , the directed connection (s₁,…,sₙ) keeps their order and the set connection {s₁,…,sₙ} sorts them, each written as text and coined as a symbol of its own. A connection is held, priced and linked exactly like any other symbol, so a relation between ideas can itself carry value. Connections are flat ({A,B,C} is one three-way relation, not a pair of pairs) and may nest.
Links cost nothing to state and are not stored by the contract at all: each is an event in the public log. Their force comes entirely from the holdings of their authors, as §5 makes precise.
Every symbol is priced by the same function of its own supply alone. With in units and money in dollars,
so the first unit of every symbol costs $0.20. A purchase that takes the supply from to pays the area under the curve,
and a sale receives the same area in reverse. Inverting (2), spending dollars at supply buys up to
The money needed to buy every unit in existence from zero is the backing . Writing for the money behind a symbol and eliminating ,
price grows as the square root of the money behind a symbol plus $100, so quadrupling doubles it. The scale is immaterial — every reading in the system compares symbols with one another — and is chosen so that the numbers are legible.
In the contract, units are 18-decimal fixed point () and money is counted in USDC base units of dollars, so that , and the denominator of (2) is . Purchases round up and sales round down, always in favour of the pot; the sale of the last unit in existence takes the pot entire, rounding included.
The constant places every symbol on the curve as if $100 () were already behind it. Those units are held by no one and can be sold by no one; the pot holds only real money, and selling every real unit returns all of it. Their purpose is to soften a symbol’s early life, when two participants would otherwise be making a private bet. Table 1 follows two buyers of $100 each.
| Step | Units | Price after | Money |
|---|---|---|---|
| A buys $100 | 414.21 | $0.2828 | −$100.00 |
| B buys $100 | 317.84 | $0.3464 | −$100.00 |
| A sells everything | −414.21 | $0.2636 | +$126.33 |
| B’s units now fetch | 317.84 | $73.67 |
Table 1. Two buyers of one symbol under (1)–(3). With the reserve, the second buyer keeps 74% of their money when the first sells; without it (), 17%. Once a symbol holds far more than $100 the reserve is negligible and the curve is the plain line.
The central economic guarantee is that the curve never promises more than the pot holds. Let .
Theorem 1 (Every symbol is backed). After every transaction, for every symbol, ; that is, the pot is at least the backing of the supply.
Theorem 2 (Every holder can exit). Any holder can sell all of their units, in any order relative to other holders, for at least what the curve pays at the supply of the moment. Only the holder’s own lock, the holder’s own minimum price, or the settlement asset refusing payment to the holder can prevent it.
Theorem 3 (Conservation). The sum of all cash balances and all pots equals the contract’s balance of the settlement asset, less any tokens sent to it outside a call.
The proofs proceed by induction over the only three code paths that write a pot or a supply, using five lemmas: a purchase pays at least the curve; a sale takes at most the curve; holdings sum to supply; the integer square root used in (3) is the floor root; and a purchase never costs more than its stated spend. The rounding surplus a pot can accumulate is bounded by one base unit per trade since the symbol last emptied. Money enters the contract only by deposit and leaves only by payment, so nothing can be extracted that was not first put in. Each theorem is also an invariant tested under randomised sequences of calls (§6).
No party takes any fee on any trade. There is no spread: a purchase followed by a sale of the same units costs only rounding. There is no oracle: a symbol has no outside price for one to report. What protects a trader is the limit the trader sets — a minimum number of units on a purchase, minimum proceeds on a sale, and, for portfolio transactions, a minimum worth valued at the lower of the current price and the price at the start of the block, so that a manipulation within the block reads as a shortfall.
An account may restate its entire book in one transaction. matchExactly takes a list of symbols and the exact units to hold of each; the list is the whole statement, so a held symbol it omits is sold. Sales execute first and fund the purchases; any remainder is spread across the purchased symbols in proportion to their marked value. The allocation behind such a statement — the shape a participant wants their book to take — is kept on the participant’s own device and never recorded on chain; the chain learns what a participant wants only through the trades themselves. The limit of 50 symbols per account bounds the work of every operation, keeping a full restatement near 7.5 million gas, well inside the 16.78 million gas transaction cap of EIP-7825.
A holder may lock a position until a date. A lock binds the holder’s whole position in the symbol, including units bought later; it can be extended but never shortened, and a lock of more than 365 days must be confirmed by a second, identical call. Because locked units cannot be sold, the supply cannot fall below the locked total before the earliest lock ends, and any reader can state the resulting price floor,
A lock earns nothing; it is a public commitment that the holder could not have left. An account may also point at another account to follow it. The pointer is an event and nothing more: no code on chain reads it and nothing trades on the follower’s behalf; the follower’s client, when asked, restates the follower’s book to match the leader’s actual holdings.
The semantic layer is read, not enforced. The contract records links and connections as events; the meanings below are computed from that log, together with holdings, by fixed and standard algorithms. Any party can recompute them, and two honest computations agree.
Let be the authors with live links out of who hold , and the number of such links by author . The definition of is the distribution
Each holder’s voice over what a symbol means is exactly their share of it, divided among the links they draw. A link by someone who does not hold the symbol has no weight; a holder who sells loses their voice with no action by anyone; and because the weights are linear in holdings, a stake split across many accounts says no more than the same stake held by one.
Symbols defined in terms of symbols form a weighted directed graph with transition probabilities . The meaning of followed beyond its own definition is the personalized PageRank vector with restart at ,
computed by power iteration over the symbols reachable from (up to 1,000 defined symbols), with mass from undefined symbols returned to , until the change falls below per symbol or 100 iterations pass. With ’s own mass removed and the rest renormalised, says what means at every remove: if holders say bitcoin is in part money, then bitcoin also means, in part, whatever the holders of money say it means.
A symbol also means the company it keeps [8], read from portfolios rather than from text. For the holders of (the largest 1,000), with the marginal price,
each holder’s book, weighted by how much of that holder owns. Nobody declares it; it is what the symbol is made of in the convictions of those who hold it.
Large symbols appear in every composition by size alone. To find what sets a symbol apart, Coined ranks the symbols in its composition by lift over their share of the whole market [11, 12],
where is a symbol’s notional value at its marginal price, listing only symbols with lift above 1 that are held by at least three of ’s holders: one book is not a pattern.
Links and connection symbols together give the semantic layer the structure of a hypergraph in which every hyperedge is itself a vertex that can be held, linked and priced. The value of a relation is therefore stated in the same unit, and by the same mechanism, as the value of the things it relates. Accounts enter the graph too: a symbol names an account when its holders link it to the account’s address, the largest holder among them deciding.
Coined is deployed on Base as a single contract, assembled from three sources: Curve.sol, the pricing and nothing else; CoinedState.sol, state, identity, quotes and the text rules; and Coined.sol, the public interface. It was compiled with Solidity 0.8.28 through the IR pipeline, deployed at block 53,310,092 on 31 October 2026, and its source is verified on Basescan and Sourcify. It has no owner, administrator, governance, pause, proxy or upgrade path, charges no fee and consults no oracle. Its settlement asset — native USDC on Base — is fixed at deployment. First purchases carry an EIP-2612 permit [18], so one signature both approves and buys.
The contract stores only what enforcement requires: which symbols exist, holdings, pots, cash balances and locks. Everything else lives only in its events. A symbol’s text appears once, in Coined. Every trade emits Traded with the resulting supply, so each log entry prices its own trade. Links (Linked), connection structure (EdgeCoined, HyperedgeCoined) and follow pointers (Copied) exist only as events. Cash is fully reconstructible: an account’s balance is the sum of its deposits, less its withdrawals, plus the cash deltas of its trades.
An indexer folds the log into a readable market: it enumerates symbols (the chain cannot list them), recovers the text of hashed ones, keeps price history, and computes the readings of §5. It stays five blocks behind the chain head, detects reorganisations by block hash and unwinds every derived table to the fork point, and identifies its dataset by chain and contract so that a client never mixes deployments. Prices and holdings that matter for a transaction are always read from the chain itself; an indexer can get discovery and history wrong, never balances. The application is a static build published to IPFS, so the interface, the indexer and the data are all things anyone can run.
The test suite (about 230 tests) states four invariants and checks them under randomised call sequences: cash plus pots equals the token balance; holdings sum to each symbol’s supply; every symbol can be fully exited (); and no locked holding shrinks before its date. No result is believed below 131,072 calls; the final campaign on the deployed code ran 1,048,576 calls with all four invariants holding. The lemmas of the solvency proof are fuzzed individually, the integer square root over the whole of its domain. The text rules are tested against all 1,614 emoji ZWJ sequences of Unicode 17 and against a reference implementation of the IDNA2008 contextual rules over 21,343 strings. Static analysis (Slither, all detectors) produced 24 findings, each triaged and recorded.
Meaning on Coined is weighted by money, and deliberately so. It is not a poll of persons; it is a measurement of what capital values and what it means by it, made explicit and public. Because every weight is linear in stake, dividing a stake among many addresses buys no extra influence: the system is neutral to identity, and a sybil gains nothing. Influence over what a symbol means is purchasable only by holding the symbol, which is to say by bearing its price risk.
A measurement that people can act on changes what it measures [14, 15]. Coined does not try to avoid this; it is the mechanism. What people value now is published continuously, acting on it moves it, and the published state therefore becomes a prediction of what people will value. The only truth against which a position is ever judged is later opinion, which is why no oracle is needed and why being early to what others come to value is rewarded without any judge deciding who was right.
Coined gives capital a vocabulary. Any symbol can be valued; any symbols can be connected; the value and the connections are written by the money behind them and read by anyone. The economic layer guarantees that every position can always be exited; the semantic layer guarantees that every statement of meaning is weighted by the stake behind it; the contract guarantees that neither rule can be changed. Together they form what the economy has lacked: a public account of what it values, and of what it means by it.
