Discovery mechanics

Auteur rewards two distinct forms of discovery. They operate at different layers and can coexist on the same funded cast.

1. Discovering an auteur

The first confirmed funded discovery of an author gives that author's casts a 2x curator-budget weight. The weight decays by 0.125x per epoch until it reaches 1x.

The multiplier is fixed for the entire epoch. Adding a cast to the funded list or preparing a settlement does not start the decay. The author's history changes only after successful onchain finalization.

This multiplier redistributes the fixed curator pool between funded casts. It does not mint extra rewards and does not multiply the author's direct allocation.

2. Discovering a cast early

Entry discovery asks two questions about a curator's selection:

1. How little eligible foreign power was already present before the curator entered?
2. How much eligible foreign power arrived afterward and confirmed the selection?

Being first is not sufficient. A cast selected early but never confirmed receives little or no discovery advantage.

Exact formula

For curator i on a funded cast:

pᵢ = eligible balance / all selections by curator i in the epoch

Bᵢ = foreign curator power already present before i
Aᵢ = foreign curator power that arrived after i

The epoch derives a meaningful evidence scale:

final post power = sum(pᵢ) for eligible non-self curators on the cast
S = median final post power across funded casts with rewardable power

Then:

confirmationᵢ = Aᵢ / (Aᵢ + S)
earlinessᵢ    = S / (Bᵢ + S)

discovery scoreᵢ = confirmationᵢ × earlinessᵢ
effective weightᵢ = pᵢ × (1 + β × discovery scoreᵢ)

The current default is β = 0.5, so entry discovery can increase a selection's relative weight by at most 50%, from 1x up to 1.5x.

If there is no meaningful sample from which to calculate S, the bonus is disabled for that epoch and every selection uses 1x.

Example

Assume S = 10M.

Alice enters when there is no prior power and 70M arrives after her:

confirmation = 70 / (70 + 10) = 0.875
earliness = 10 / (0 + 10) = 1
discovery score = 0.875
weight multiplier = 1 + 0.5 × 0.875 = 1.4375x

Bob enters late, after most of the power is already present, and nobody follows him. His confirmation is zero, so his discovery multiplier remains 1x.

The late whale can confirm Alice's judgment, but cannot use its own weight to confirm itself.

Fixed-pool behavior

Both discovery mechanisms are relative. If every curator on a cast has the same multiplier, their proportions do not change. A bonus matters when one eligible selection has stronger discovery evidence than another.

For the same reason, a positive discovery delta for one participant may correspond to a smaller share for another. The total cast budget remains fixed.