$WORKS

$WORKS powers Machines and pays for them.

Engine Works uses $WORKS as an irreversible input to Machine actions. Supplying it can activate a dormant Machine or contribute to an active Machine’s weight. Separately, $WORKS is the currency of the Machine mint. Every one of those inputs reaches the same place — the Works Pot — where each settlement burns half and distributes the other half.

01

Activation

The Machine action that changes a dormant Machine into an active participant.

02

Weight supply

A Machine action that sends $WORKS to the Works Pot and adds weight to that Machine.

03

Mint payment

The $WORKS paid to issue a Machine. It funds the Works Pot rather than crediting weight.

04

Direct burn

A token burn outside the protocol; it reduces supply but does not identify a Machine to credit.

Supplying is permanent from the holder’s side. The tokens leave the wallet with no way back, and the successful Machine action records the corresponding activation or weight change.

What happens to them next is not immediate, and it is worth stating precisely. Machine Core does not destroy anything. It forwards the tokens to the Works Pot, where a later settlement burns half and distributes the other half across active Machines by weight. Half of what you supply is therefore destroyed, not all of it, and not at the moment you supply it.

1. 01

   The owner authorizes the selected $WORKS amount.

2. 02

   The owner submits the activation or weight action for a specific Machine.

3. 03

   When the action succeeds, the tokens move to the Works Pot and the Machine state updates.

4. 04

   At a later settlement, half of the pot is burned and half is distributed by weight.

Every $WORKS paid to mint a Machine reaches the Works Pot, and so does every $WORKS supplied to activate a Machine or add weight to one. Once per epoch, half of the pot is burned and the remaining half is distributed across active Machines by weight.

Settlement is not automatic. The call that performs it is open to anyone and costs gas, so the split happens when someone sends that transaction rather than when the clock passes the epoch boundary. Until then the pot keeps accumulating and nothing is burned.

Because the mint price rises along the curve, later mints contribute more to both sides of that split than earlier ones. The split ratio itself does not change with the serial.

$WORKS has a fixed supply and no additional issuance path. Supply therefore only decreases, and it decreases in exactly one place: the Works Pot, which burns half of its balance at each settlement. Mint payments, activations and weight top-ups all feed that one pot, so they all reduce supply by the same half-of-what-arrives rule rather than through separate mechanisms.

The distributed half is not newly created. It is $WORKS that already existed, paid by minters and recirculated to Machine holders. Distribution moves tokens; it does not add any.

The mint curve fixes one part of that in advance. Summed across all 3,333 serials, the curve collects roughly 352 million $WORKS, so a fully minted collection would send about 176 million to the burn and the same amount back to Machines. That is a floor rather than a total: activations and weight top-ups reach the same pot and are burned by the same half, and none of that is fixed by the curve.

This documentation makes no claim about token price, yield, projected returns, or the future value of Machine output. $WORKS received from a distribution can be sold, held, or supplied back into a Machine for additional weight; that choice belongs to the holder and carries no protocol guarantee.