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Contributor earnings come in two parts: an upfront payment when your contribution is accepted, and dividends for as long as your information keeps being consumed.

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The upfront payment

You never have to price your own information, and there’s no auction. After you contribute, Ostrum prices it, weighing:
  • The stakes. How much rides on the decisions your information informs.
  • The dispersion. How much answers vary in that segment. Where the spread is wide, each real data point is worth more.
  • The scarcity. Whether the market already knows this, partially knows it, or is hearing it for the first time.
  • The demand. Ostrum’s proprietary demand data shows how badly consumers want exactly this kind of information, and that appetite gets priced into your reward.
A portion of that value is paid to you upfront, as soon as your contribution clears verification.

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Dividends: your contribution as an NFT

The rest arrives over time. When a contribution clears verification, its ongoing earnings claim is minted as a non-transferable NFT: a token representing that specific contribution, entitling its holder to the stream of earnings the contribution generates. For as long as your information is useful, cited in answers and moving queries, the NFT pays dividends. The structure matters. The NFT doesn’t pay out of a communal pot or anyone else’s efforts. It collects a share of what consumers actually spend on queries your information helped answer. You made the asset; the NFT is the receipt that routes its income to you. And the claim is a discrete, ownable object, not a balance in Ostrum’s ledger. Dividends aren’t printed from thin air. They’re funded by actual consumption. Information that stays relevant keeps paying, information that goes stale stops. Your incentive and the market’s are the same: contribute things people need.

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First movers earn most

The reward for a fact depends on when you showed up with it. First to supply it? The largest share. Bringing something into the dataset that wasn’t there is the single most valuable act in the market. Corroborating it earns a real but smaller share. Independent confirmation is what makes the data trustworthy, and the market pays for that, just not at discovery rates.
This ordering applies to both components. The first contributor gets the larger upfront payment and the larger dividend stream, with the weighting baked into each contribution’s NFT at mint. Corroborators earn less on both. If you’re sitting on information, the worst thing you can do is wait.

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What doesn’t earn

  • Submissions that fail verification are excised and earn nothing.
  • Duplicating your own prior contribution doesn’t earn twice.
  • Falsified demand for a market doesn’t sway the price of its information.