Clock in. Cash out. Retire your boss.

Executive Summary

NFT utility collapsed when projects abandoned on-chain mechanics for Discord promises. WAGIES inverts this: the project is the mechanic. Clock in every week, accumulate rewards by tier and streak, burn supply with every activation and equipment purchase, and funnel protocol revenue into a pension paid in USDC — the Pension Fund.

The narrative, 4,444 satirical office workers grinding their way to early retirement, is the hook. The economic machine underneath is the moat.

Ethereum Mainnet has a narrative vacuum after the L2 migration. The NFT-plus-token flywheel has been proven in production this cycle, elsewhere, on a sidechain. WAGIES brings it to Mainnet, engineered further: a governed pension instead of a lottery, recurring burn demand instead of one-time fees, compressed reward weights that protect small holders, and an NFT AMM that closes the arbitrage hole those designs leave open.

1. The Ecosystem — Four Pieces

$WAGE — the fuel. The native token of the WAGIES economy. Fixed supply of 1,000,000,000, no mint function, deflationary by design. Everything inside the game is paid in $WAGE: activating your Wagie, equipping it, upgrading it, buying one on the Temp Agency. It is the single entry door to the ecosystem.

The Wagies — the engine. 4,444 unique employee characters on Ethereum Mainnet (ERC-721, minted via OpenSea Drop Studio). Each Wagie is your worker: activate it, equip it, clock it in every week. Its output, your share of distributions, depends on how you run it.

The Pension Fund — the prize. Every fee the protocol earns is collected on-chain and converted to USDC before each Payday. The Fund is distributed in USDC to activated Wagies, weighted by tier, equipment and streak. Your employee doesn't collect random junk — it builds you a pension.

The Temp Agency — the exit. A fixed-rate AMM where Wagies trade directly against $WAGE. Instant liquidity in both directions, no bid required, no marketplace listing. Every Wagie entering the Agency's roster has its pension paid out to the Fund first, which is what makes a single fixed rate honest.

2. The Player Journey

1. Hire your Wagie — the mint is over. Buy one on secondary, or, once the Temp Agency opens, pull one off the roster.
2. Claim your signing bonus — every Wagie starts with 1,000 $WAGE. Barely covers the coffee. Welcome to the office.
3. Get $WAGE (Uniswap) — the bonus won't cut it. Nothing here does.
4. Activate it — a one-time $WAGE payment across 5 tiers. Higher tier = higher reward weight. 50% of every activation is burned forever.
5. Equip it — buy your Wagie its laptop (more equipment coming: phone, AI agents, corner office). Equipment adds weight multipliers and creates recurring $WAGE demand — every purchase burns supply.
6. Clock it in weekly — one near-free transaction per week, from the Employee Terminal. The week runs Friday 18:00 UTC to Friday 18:00 UTC. Consecutive weeks build a streak that boosts your distribution share. Miss a week, streak resets.
7. Get paid — into your Wagie. Every Friday ("Payday Friday"), Pension Fund distributions in USDC are credited to each activated Wagie's on-chain pension account, weighted by tier × equipment × streak. The pension belongs to the Wagie: sell the NFT and the balance travels with it. Withdraw to your wallet anytime, minus the Two Weeks Notice Fee (10%), which flows straight back into the Fund.
8. Quit whenever you want. Once the Temp Agency opens, sell into it for a flat rate of $WAGE, instantly. Your accumulated pension is paid into the Fund on the way out — you cash out of the job, not out of everyone else's retirement.

Selling the NFT kills its activation, equipment and streak, but not its pension balance, which transfers to the buyer. A Wagie with a fat pension is worth more than an empty one. The floor learns to count.

3. Tokenomics ($WAGE — Frozen Spec v1.2)

Supply & distribution

Fixed 1B $WAGE. No mint function exists in the contract.

Fair launch. No presale. No VC. No mint revenue. The NFT mint is free; $WAGE launches as a micro-seeded Uniswap V2 pool (150M $WAGE from the Liquidity allocation + a symbolic ETH seed), protected by on-chain launch guards (per-wallet buy and holding caps for the first 48h, removable exactly once, irreversibly). The market builds the pool: 4,444 holders whose Wagies are worthless until activated are the opening demand. The remaining 150M of the Liquidity allocation sits in the Liquidity Desk to deepen the pool over time.

The team takes no liquid token position at launch — no slice of the LP. Founder upside is the 10% vested $WAGE allocation. The 222 Wagies minted to Treasury are protocol inventory (Temp Agency seed and operational reserve), not a founder position — they sit in the same Treasury that receives 20% of protocol flows, governed the same way.

LP tokens: 24-month verifiable on-chain lock. Not burned, preserving Desk flexibility for emergency liquidity support.

Transfer tax

1% on DEX swaps (registered pairs only), split immutably: 30% burned · 50% → Pension Fund · 20% → Treasury.

Tier system — compressed weights

The design principle: a wide price range maps to a narrow weight range. An Executive pays 50× the Intern price for only 4× the weight. Whales who flex subsidize everyone else through burns — an ego tax, elegantly disguised as a promotion. Small holders stay economically viable from day one.

Activation splits: 50% burn / 30% Fund / 20% Treasury. Equipment purchases use the identical split. Tier upgrades pay only the price difference. Prices governed by 48h timelock for increases (max one increase per tier per 7 days, hard bounds 0.25–5×); decreases are instant.

Equipment

• Laptop (v0): 2,000 $WAGE / 30 days / 1.5× weight multiplier. Renewals stack days.
• Roadmap: phone, AI agents, corner office, each a recurring $WAGE sink.

Clock-in

One transaction per week. Periods are seven days long and roll over every Friday at 18:00 UTC, the same moment the Payday snapshot is taken. Streak grows +5% per consecutive week, capped at 2× at week 20. Miss a week, streak resets.

weight = tierWeight × equipmentMultiplier × streakMultiplier

4. The Flywheel

More people want a Wagie → they buy $WAGE → activations, equipment and Temp Agency purchases burn supply and feed the Fund → $WAGE gets scarcer → holding and running a Wagie gets more valuable → more trading → more fees → bigger Pension Fund → distributions grow → more people want a Wagie.

Most activation-based economies charge players once and never again, protocol revenue then depends on trading volume alone. WAGIES builds recurring demand into the game itself: equipment expires and renews, new equipment classes launch over time, upgrades cost the price difference. Every one of those transactions burns supply.

Four revenue inflows feed the Pension Fund continuously:

1. Activation and equipment fees (30% cut)
2. DEX transfer tax (50% cut)
3. NFT secondary royalties (70% of the 10% royalty)
4. Temp Agency trading fees (70%, paid in ETH)

None of these require new mints. The machine runs on activity, not on issuance.

5. The Temp Agency

Most NFTs have no bid. You can list one and wait a week, or dump into whatever the floor happens to be that afternoon. The Temp Agency replaces both: a fixed-rate AMM where Wagies trade directly against $WAGE, settling instantly in either direction. Sell yours for a flat amount of $WAGE, take the next Wagie off the roster, or pay a higher fee to snipe an exact one from inventory. Fees are paid in ETH, priced as a percentage of the Wagie's value via the same on-chain TWAP the Fund already uses for its $WAGE cap, no new oracle, and the fee scales with the market instead of eroding as $WAGE's price moves.

Why fixed rates usually break

A fixed-rate NFT AMM has a well-known failure mode: it assumes the inventory is fungible. It usually isn't. If some NFTs in the vault carry more embedded value than others, a single price becomes an arbitrage invitation, buy from the vault repeatedly, keep the loaded ones, sell back the empty ones. The pool bleeds until the rate is repriced or the inventory is drained of everything worth having.

In WAGIES, the embedded value is explicit and measurable: the accumulated pension. A Wagie with six months of Paydays behind it is not worth the same as a fresh one, and pretending otherwise would hand arbitrageurs a printing press.

How WAGIES closes it

Every Wagie entering the Temp Agency roster has its pension balance swept into the Pension Fund before intake completes. Not confiscated to the team, recycled into the pot every remaining holder is paid from.

The roster is therefore genuinely fungible: every Wagie in it carries exactly zero pension. That is what makes a single fixed rate honest rather than exploitable. The property is enforced in the contract and covered by a dedicated invariant test.

Fees start at 10% for a swap and 15% for a snipe, the extra cost of picking an exact Wagie rather than taking the next one off the roster. The Temp Agency contract is deployed on mainnet; DORIS announces the opening of the roster.

Governance

The exchange rate and both fees are adjustable only through a 48-hour timelock, and each adjustment is hard-bounded to a 2× move in the contract itself. Fees are further hard-capped at 20% forever, as an ungovernable constant, so repeated small increases can never compound into an abusive rate. No overnight repricing, no path to a rate that quietly strands holders.

6. The Pension Fund

What it is

A payroll, not a promise. Every inflow the protocol earns, activation and equipment fees, the DEX transfer tax, resale royalties and Temp Agency fees, lands in the Pension Vault and is converted to USDC before each Payday. The Fund holds no speculative basket: what it collects in ETH and $WAGE is sold into USDC as market depth allows, and what it pays out is dollars.

Anti-reflexivity policy

The failure mode of every NFT-token economy is reflexive collapse: the reward pool is the project's own token, so when the token falls, rewards fall, so the token falls. WAGIES closes this loop by policy:

1. TWAP pricing: $WAGE conversions priced via 24h on-chain Uniswap TWAP. No oracle risk.
2. Exposure cap: $WAGE may never exceed 10% of total Fund AUM. Enforced in the contract, not by discretion, excess is burned rather than quietly accumulated, and anyone can trigger the check after a price move.
3. USDC payroll: Every distribution is made in USDC. The $WAGE collected as tax is sold for USDC and distributed, not held as treasury, so what a Wagie earns is denominated in dollars, not in the project's own token.

Distribution

Every Friday, the Fund pays activated Wagies in USDC, weighted by tier × equipment × streak. Payouts are computed from purely on-chain data by an open-source snapshot script, anyone can recompute and verify every epoch's Merkle root. Credits are pushed by a protocol-run bot: holders do nothing and there are no expiring claims.

Payments are credited to each Wagie's pension account (bound to the token, not the owner): the balance is publicly visible per Wagie and travels with the NFT on sale. Holders can withdraw to their wallet at any time, paying the Two Weeks Notice Fee (10%, immutable for the first 6 months, hard-capped at 15% in the contract forever), which flows back into the Fund.

A weekly on-chain raffle (Chainlink VRF) credits a bonus of 10% of the epoch pot to one Wagie that filed its timesheet that week, the Employee of the Week. File once, you are in the draw. Settlement is trustless: once randomness lands, anyone can settle the winner with a proof.

Infrastructure

The Fund runs as a purpose-built vault + distributor pair — no third-party fund infrastructure, no external dependencies at the core. The open-source snapshot script is the trust layer: verify, don't trust.

7. The Mint

All 4,444 positions are filled. The mint is closed and DORIS has stopped taking applications; the only way in is hiring a Wagie from a current employee on OpenSea. For the record, this is how the office was staffed:

• Whitelist: Candidates were interviewed by DORIS, our AI HR manager, and scored 0–100: up to 50 points for on-chain wallet history, up to 50 for the interview itself. Three verdicts: HIRED, WAITLISTED, or REJECTED. No Twitter tasks, no engagement farming, your wallet and your wits.
• Treasury allocation: 222 of the 4,444 Wagies (5%) minted directly to the protocol Treasury — seed inventory for the Temp Agency roster and operational reserve. Verifiable on-chain.
• Mint: OpenSea Drop Studio on Ethereum Mainnet. Free, one per wallet. Whitelist window first (HIRED wallets), then public. Sold out.
• Royalties: 10% on secondary sales, enforced on-chain, split 70% to the Pension Fund / 30% to Treasury. The Fund's share is the larger one by design: resale activity should compound into holders' pensions, not into operations.

8. Status

Live on Ethereum Mainnet:

• 4,444 Wagies minted via OpenSea Drop Studio, sold out (222 to Treasury)
• $WAGE fair launch on Uniswap V2 with on-chain launch guards (guards expired)
• Signing bonus claims, 1,000 $WAGE per Wagie, open with no deadline
• Activations (5 tiers), weekly Clock-In with streaks, Equipment v0 (laptop)
• The Pension Fund: vault, distributor, weekly USDC payroll, Employee of the Week by Chainlink VRF
• Employee Terminal at wagies.xyz: activate, file your timesheet, read every Wagie's pension file

Opening next

• The Temp Agency: swap, snipe, sell-to-vault, with pension sweep enforced. Deployed; opening announced by DORIS

After that

• Equipment expansion (phone, AI agents, corner office)
• Token-bound accounts (ERC-6551) for third-party airdrops and cross-project collectibles
• Liquidity Desk activation as the pool matures
• Governance path: timelocked admin → multisig → on-chain voting
• Seasonal mechanics and ecosystem partnerships

These are extensions to a working machine, not the machine itself. Nothing in the core loop is waiting on them.

9. Risk & Mitigation

10. The Bottom Line

Every cycle, one project reminds the market that NFTs can be machines, not just pictures. Most of them ship half the machine and promise the rest.

WAGIES runs the whole thing on Mainnet: fixed supply, real burns, a payroll in USDC, weekly mechanics that reward showing up, a weekly payday you can recompute yourself, and a way out that doesn't rob the people who stay.

Clock in. Cash out. Retire your boss.