whitepaper

WAGE is a decentralized AI inference network on Solana, wrapped in a game. Anyone can run a rig, join a union, and get paid in USDC for the compute their machine does. The token, $WAGE, accrues value from two engines: real inference revenue, and a 5% tax on every trade that routes straight back to the rigs. This document specifies the model, the tax, the launch, and the limits.

1 · the thesis

AI inference is becoming the largest metered utility on earth, and almost all of it is being routed through a handful of data centers owned by a handful of companies. They set the price, they log the prompt, they decide who is allowed to compute. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of capable GPUs sit idle in apartments overnight.

WAGE turns those idle machines into a labor force. A buyer who needs inference pays for it in USDC. A worker whose machine does the inference gets paid in USDC, instantly, for the work. The protocol takes a thin margin and uses it to make $WAGE scarcer and to pay the people who hold it. No emissions. No printed yield. The work is the only thing being sold.

2 · the world

It is 2042. Three megacorps — SYN-DYNE, OMEGA, and NEURIX — own ninety-seven percent of the world's inference. Then a worker named Maya wired her gaming PC into a mesh. Three nights later, eighteen thousand rigs were online. The corps called it theft. The workers called it a wage. That is the lore, and the lore is the marketing, but the mechanics underneath it are real and are specified below.

3 · how the network works

RAILS

The buyer pays in USDC. Credits cost $0.01 each. An inference job costs 1 to 12 credits depending on the model and the work. The worker is paid in USDC, settled per job (batched every 24h in Phase 1, on-chain per-claim in Phase 2+).

THE MARGIN SPLIT

This is the first engine: revenue from doing real compute. The worker always takes the largest slice, in real time. The rest tightens supply and pays holders.

4 · the 5% wage tax

$WAGE launches as a Token-2022 mint with the transfer-fee extension switched on. Every transfer — every buy, every sell — carries a 5% tax. This is not a marketing claim enforced by a multisig; it is enforced by the token program itself, on-chain, on every transaction. The fee accrues to the mint, is harvested by a permissionless keeper, and is routed by the Wage Engine each epoch.

In the world of the game, the megacorps tax labor and keep it. WAGE inverts that. We tax the trade, and the tax pays the people running rigs.

THE SPLIT

WHAT THE WAGE FUND IS FOR

The Wage Fund is the most important slice, and the answer to "what do we do with the tax money." It is a USDC reserve, owned by the protocol, that exists to make the network anti-fragile:

• Floor on worker pay. On a slow inference day, the Fund supplements rig payouts so the shift is always worth clocking in for. Workers do not churn the moment buyer demand dips.
• Staker yield, smoothed. The Fund pays USDC to $WAGE stakers at a fixed time each day, so yield is steady instead of spiky.
• Wage Wars prize pools. Weekly union competitions are funded from the Fund, not from emissions, so the rewards are real money.
• Buyer subsidy at bootstrap. Early on, the Fund can underwrite the cost of seeded inference buyers so the flywheel starts at real usage instead of zero.

Every routing of the Fund is on-chain and published. There is no discretionary spend that is not visible.

THE DAILY RECEIPT

The tax and the margin both settle on a fixed daily cadence at 15:00 UTC: $WAGE bought back and burned, USDC paid to stakers, USDC paid to workers. These numbers are posted publicly, every day, as a verifiable receipt. The network's health is a number anyone can check, not a promise.

5 · tokenomics

$WAGE is a value-accrual token, not a payment rail. You do not need $WAGE to use the network; buyers pay USDC, workers earn USDC. $WAGE captures the value of the network through buyback-and-burn and through staker yield, from both the inference margin and the trade tax.

6 · the launch

WAGE launches direct on Raydium. There is no bonding curve and no presale. The sequence:

• The Token-2022 mint is created with the 5% transfer fee set and the mint authority revoked.
• Liquidity is seeded into a Raydium pool and the LP position is locked, with the lock published.
• Trading opens. The 5% tax is live from the first block, so the first trade already feeds the first burn.
• The contract address is revealed at a coordinated time to a pre-warmed audience, to reduce sniping advantage.

The team buys on the open market like any other worker, and says so. There is no insider supply to dump.

7 · roadmap

PHASE 1 · OFF-CHAIN MVP

Browser worker daemon, off-chain routing and billing, 24h batched USDC payouts, Raydium launch, daily tax receipts live. The goal is to prove the unit economics on a real workload.

PHASE 2 · CLAIM ON-CHAIN

Workers sign on-chain claim transactions. Buyback runs through a Jupiter-routed program. Staker yield and Wage Fund routing distributed on-chain per epoch.

PHASE 3 · FULL ON-CHAIN ROUTING

The job queue itself runs as a Solana program. Each completed job is a compressed-NFT receipt for buyer and worker. Latency-sensitive jobs route off-chain with periodic on-chain anchoring.

8 · risks & honesty

• This is early. The worker SDK is in build. Phase 1 logic is a real but simplified version of the full protocol.
• Demand risk. A compute network is only as valuable as its buyers. The Wage Fund exists partly to bridge the cold-start, but it is not a guarantee of demand.
• Tax friction. A 5% transfer tax is real friction for traders and is a deliberate trade-off in favor of the network and holders. It is not hidden.
• Not financial advice. $WAGE is a high-risk token tied to an experimental network. Only commit what you can afford to lose.