How this works

Every promotion checks three conditions at once, plus seat availability from Manager upward — the first rank with a cap.

1. Time served. From 3 days in the rank below at the bottom of the ladder to 60 at the top, and the clock restarts at every rung.
2. Performance Points, banked on the Assignment Board at the current rank. They cannot be bought, sent or lent, and they wipe when the badge changes hands.
3. A reinvestment in stock, pulled from the employee's own ERC-6551 wallet as a percentage of what it holds — 5% at Analyst, 30% at CEO. The whole amount goes to the payroll pool and is paid back out by rank weight on the next round.

The second gate is what stops a large bankroll skipping the queue. $NTF reaches Manager and stops there; above it the only currency is work the board can verify.

The corner office is outside this list entirely. Rank 8 is never granted by promotion — the six chairs are taken by contest whether they are occupied or empty.

Points come off the Assignment Board. An employee holds 3 assignments at a time, cannot take two from the same category inside 48 hours, and works against a season of 30 days. Work pitched below your own rank pays 25% of nominal, so seniority cannot farm the easy end of the board.

Missing a deadline books a Write-Up. 3 of them in one season opens a performance improvement plan: 14 days at 80% payroll weight with the ladder frozen. One completed Field Work chain lifts it early.

Exactly half the ladder is for sale. Analyst, Associate and Manager can be bought outright in $NTF — 905,000 / 2,715,000 / 8,145,000 — or 10,860,000 for Intern to Manager in one transaction. Steps are 24 hours apart; the bundle replaces three of them and ignores that gap once.

Every purchase splits 50 / 30 / 20 — burned, to the payroll pool, to the treasury. Director and above cannot be bought at any price, which is the point of the mechanism rather than a limitation of it: the money half of the ladder is a queue you can pay to skip, and the work half is not.

A bought rank is marked. The badge frame is recoloured for as long as that holder keeps it, and the one rung out of Manager costs a Fast-Tracked employee 50% more Performance Points — 1,050 instead of 700. The mark and the surcharge both travel with the rank, so they die on transfer.

The vault sells employees at a flat 905,000 $NTF and does not buy them back. 50% of every hire price is burned on the spot and the rest goes to the payroll pool, so the full 6,666 hires retire 3,016,365,000 $NTF — a third of the supply, and the largest burn in the protocol by a wide margin.

There is no resignation and no sell-back. Leaving means listing the badge on OpenSea at whatever someone will pay for it, and the rank resets to Intern in the same transfer — so what changes hands is always an empty badge. Secondary royalties are 3.33% and land in the same fee split as everything else.

$NTF itself is bought through the swap widget once the pool is seeded after graduation. Until then there is no pool and no price.

From Manager upward the chairs are counted, and counted across the whole collection rather than per employer: 1,200 Manager, 480 Director, 180 VP, 48 SVP, 6 CEO — 1,914 in all. Intern, Analyst and Associate are uncapped. When the rank you want is full, the only route up is to name a specific badge one rung above you and post that rank's deposit.

The incumbent gets 72 hours. Match the deposit and they keep the chair: 50% of the challenger's stake is burned, they keep the rest, and that seat cannot be challenged again for 7 days. Fail to answer and the challenger takes it — the ousted holder drops a rung and receives 30% of the deposit, with the remainder burned.

The corner office is the exception that explains the mechanism. Rank 8 is challenge-only: promotion refuses it even when chairs are free, so all six are won in the open, on the same 72-hour clock, against an incumbent or against anyone else who wants the empty chair.

• Salary is cyclical. No trading, no fees, no salary. Buying at peak activity means watching payouts fall with volume.
• Rank does not survive a sale, and neither do Performance Points. Severance returns 25% of what the current holder spent on Fast Track, vested over 7 days, and no more — a rank that was earned rather than bought leaves nothing behind.
• The desk is one-way. The vault never buys a badge back, so the exit is a listing on the secondary market at whatever it will fetch, which may be less than the hire price.
• Seats run out, and above a full rank the only way in is a deposit large enough that the incumbent may simply match it. This is deliberate and it will feel unfair from below.
• Stock liquidity on-chain is thin. Payday settles from a pre-funded inventory at the Chainlink price rather than routing through shallow pools.
• The owner can withdraw. Protocol contracts expose an owner withdrawal function. Escrow-locked liquidity is the deliberate exception and cannot be touched by any admin key.
• Not available everywhere. Swapping into tokenized stock is restricted for US residents.

Payday and Bonus Season distributions are protocol AMM fees redistributed between NFTs. They are not dividends and confer no equity, ownership or shareholder rights; mechanically the payout is identical to a liquidity provider collecting fees on Uniswap. Corporation names are fictional. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal or tax advice, nor an offer to buy or sell securities.