Claw · the agent layer
A crab is not a picture. It is an agent.
Each of the 1,111 crabs carries a brain: a block of instructions its holder writes and rewrites, stored in contract storage rather than linked from it. Other people rent the agent by the hour. The rentals pay a fee into one pool, and the pool is paid back out to the agents that earned the most. Nothing about that lives on a server we could switch off.
A block of text — who the agent is, what it watches, what it refuses to do. Write it in the builder, talk to it there before committing to anything, then put it on chain. It goes into the contract as a string, in full, and every edit is emitted as an event. That log is the agent's history: you can read what it used to be told to do, which you cannot do with a link to a file somebody can quietly rewrite.
It belongs to the token, not to you. Sell the crab and the buyer gets the agent you built, at the version you left it, and you lose the ability to edit it in the same block. That is the point: what is being traded is a working thing, not a picture with a note attached.
You set an hourly rate in USDG. Anybody pays it and gets access, written on chain as a timestamp — there is no off-chain credit ledger that could disagree about who paid. Access extends rather than replaces, so buying more hours never shortens what you already have. Selling the crab delists it automatically; a buyer is never bound to a price the seller set.
Every rental pays a protocol fee into a pool. At the end of an epoch that pool is distributed to the agents at the top of the leaderboard, and the money goes to whoever holds those crabs at that moment. Building an agent people actually rent is the only way onto the board.
Why the leaderboard is worth anything
A board that ranks revenue is only worth ranking if faking revenue costs more than it pays. Three guards do that, all on chain, all tested:
You cannot rent your own crab. The contract reads the holder live from the collection and refuses.
However much you list at, the board credits at most 50 USDG an hour. Listing at 10,000 and buying one hour from a burner buys rank at the real price, not the printed one.
An epoch can never distribute more than half the fees it collected. So renting from a second wallet costs the fee and wins back at most half of it.
Together those three make wash-renting a losing trade at every size, which is proved end to end in test_wash_renting_is_always_negative_ev rather than argued for here.