The three ladders
Production is multiplied three times over. Two of those are earned by choosing well and one is bought — and they compound, which is why each is deliberately narrow.
Both earned ladders are constant-sum
This is the property worth understanding before anything else. What one industry gains another loses; the ladder pays by rank, never by the size of the move. A market-wide rally makes nobody richer for having done nothing, and a crash ruins nobody.
A company up a hair and one that doubled take the same first place. What you are betting on is the order, and today’s leader is not tomorrow’s.
The weekly ladder — industries
At each epoch boundary the five industries are scored on how their members moved, then ranked against each other. First place produces 1.3x, last 0.7x.
The epoch in progress has not been ranked yet, so it pays at the previoussettlement, fixed the moment the epoch begins. That is what stops a player sitting on a bad week in order to accrue it later at a good week’s rate.
The daily ladder — companies
Every company is ranked daily on its own twenty-four hours. This is where choosing NVIDIA over AMD is worth something: two players holding identical dollars in the same industry produce differently if they picked different names.
It is averaged over the days being paid for, not read at the moment you claim — so a company that led for six days and slipped on the seventh is paid for six days of leading.
The bought ladder — staking CDLT
Stake CDLT against your city and everything it produces is multiplied, up to 1.2x. This is the only multiplier you buy rather than earn, which is exactly why it is capped well below the other two. Full detail on the boost.
What they come to together
worst 0.7 x 0.75 x 1.00 = 0.52x best 1.3 x 1.25 x 1.2 = 1.95x
The weekly ladder was deliberately narrowed from a wider spread when the daily one was added, for exactly this reason: two constant-sum ladders multiply, and at the old width the combined range was something no player could plan against. The bought ladder is capped on the same logic — past 1.2x it would start to outweigh both earned ones, and the game would stop being about the market.
| Ladder | Range | Earned or bought | Cadence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Industry ranking | 0.7x – 1.3x | Earned | 7 days |
| Company ranking | 0.75x – 1.25x | Earned | 24 hours |
| Staking boost | 1.00x – 1.2x | Bought | Continuous |
When a company cannot be priced
- A pool too young or too quiet to serve the one-hour TWAP window is dropped from its industry’s index for that epoch rather than taking the whole settlement down.
- The sixteen companies on Uniswap v4 have no observation history of their own; their oracle keeps its own accumulator, which must be poked at least twice before it can answer. They are unpriced for a short warm-up after any deployment, not permanently.
- An unpriced company falls back to a neutral multiplier. It does not produce zero.