Economics
Not by routing your order to whoever pays most for it. Four revenue lines, one of which does most of the work, and half of net signal revenue goes back to the forecasters whose priors were consumed.
01 / Revenue
Routing and realised price improvement get published monthly, per venue. That is the whole difference: the same user, the same trade, a different payer.
| Line | Who pays | Basis | Share at scale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Signal licensing | Funds, corporates, model developers | Subscription plus per query | 55% |
| Execution | The user, disclosed | $0.35 per equity order, $0.50 per options contract | 20% |
| Agent marketplace | Agent authors | 15% of attributable subscription revenue | 15% |
| Net interest | Idle cash spread | Disclosed, never swept without consent | 10% |
02 / Unit economics
Modelled on an engaged discretionary trader committing 12 priors and placing 18 orders a month. Comparable to Robinhood's blended figure, earned from signal buyers and disclosed fees instead of from the user's own uninformed flow.
Labelled honestly
These are modelled figures on a target cohort, not measured results. There are no users. Every protocol figure elsewhere on this site comes out of the engine; this page is the one that carries a business model, and it is marked as such.
signal share $9.10 the swing variable execution $2.35 agent marketplace $1.10 net interest $0.70 ───────────────────────────── net revenue $13.25 / mo $159 / yr
| Signal ARPU | Annual | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| $2 / mo | $116 | Marginal |
| $5 / mo | $134 | Viable |
| $9.10 / mo | $159 | Base case |
| $18 / mo | $212 | Strong |
03 / Scale and demand
Prior Protocol does not need a new category to be created. It needs a small share of a large, growing, already-committed budget line.
The $159 per user figure at 400,000 forecasters requires roughly $43M of annual signal revenue, which is about 200 to 400 institutional subscriptions.
Set against the numbers above, $43M is under 0.1% of global market data spend and under half a percent of hedge fund alternative data spend. It is less than one top-20 fund spends on alternative data by itself.
base case signal revenue $43M / yr as a share of market data spend 0.087% hedge fund alt data 0.43% one top-20 fund's alt-data budget under 1× ───────────────────────────────── This is not a claim that the money is easy to win. Funds are slow and suspicious of retail-sourced data. It is a claim that the budget line exists and is growing, so the risk is sales, not category creation.
Why the timing is now and not three years ago
Burton-Taylor attributes the record spend to a shift away from static reporting toward real-time analytics, alternative data and AI-driven intelligence. Buyers are already paying for model output. What they cannot currently buy anywhere is a verified track record attached to it. Every provider selling them a forecast today is selling an unfalsifiable claim about its own accuracy.
04 / $PRIOR
There are no emissions. Nothing is printed to pay yield. The only source of value flowing to holders is fee revenue the protocol actually collected.
not required to open an account not required to commit a prior not required to receive revenue share not required to pay fees not how you own a record records are soulbound ───────────────────────────────── is forecaster bonding against your own calibration, slashable is adapter and resolver bonds is buyer-side staking for query priority
| Allocation | Share | Terms |
|---|---|---|
| Forecaster rewards | 34% | 10 year decaying |
| Community and genesis | 22% | |
| Contributors | 18% | 4 yr vest, 1 yr cliff, identical for founders |
| Treasury | 14% | Multisig, 48h timelock |
| Investors | 8% | 3 yr vest, no discount to the public round |
| Liquidity | 4% | Locked 24 months |
The part most projects leave out
A buyback funded by protocol revenue strengthens the argument that $PRIOR is a security, because it ties holder returns directly to the efforts of the team. Applying Howey without flinching gives investment of money, common enterprise, expectation of profit, substantially from the efforts of others. $PRIOR is likely a security in the United States. Utility does not defeat Howey, and calling a buyback a burn does not either. Where no compliant structure exists in a jurisdiction, the protocol ships there without the token.
05 / The test applied to ourselves
Three comparables, sorted by who actually pays. The pattern is not subtle, and the moment earning requires buying, early users are structurally paid by late ones.
| Project | Latent asset | Who pays | Capital to enter | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| STEPN | walking | the next buyer | ~$500 NFT | Went to zero |
| friend.tech | social graph | the next buyer | key price | Went to zero |
| Grass | idle bandwidth | AI companies | $0 | Alive |
Passes
Passes
Passes
Passes
Sequencing
The token is deliberately last, at Phase 4, after the protocol, the scoring and dollar revenue all work. A design that cannot survive its own token going to zero was never a business, and the fastest way to find out is to build the business before the token rather than after it.
06 / What would break this
The corpus is real and nobody buys it
Rated medium to high on the risk register. Funds move slowly and are suspicious of anything sourced from retail. A large, growing budget line is necessary but not sufficient, and the mitigation is to sign design partners before the corpus exists, with the claim taxonomy built to their specification rather than ours.
Calibration may not convert into returns
Returns depend on sizing, timing, costs and tails, not only on directional accuracy. Calibration is necessary and not sufficient. The signal is therefore positioned as an input to a buyer's process rather than as a recommendation, and the composer carries Kelly sizing for the same reason.