What Seeds are — and what they aren't.

Seeds are an internal reputation point. Think of them like Yahoo! Chiebukuro's “Chie Coins” or Reddit karma: a tally of contribution, displayed alongside your profile, with a few in-app effects (you can post bounties on challenges, or post a refundable deposit when submitting your own challenge). That's it.

The four reputation buckets

Your Seeds are split by where they came from. Splitting helps the leaderboard mean something — “solver: 200” actually means you solved 200 Seeds worth of challenges.

• Solver— Seeds earned by having your proof accepted on someone else's challenge.
• Creator — Seeds earned when someone else accepts a proof on a challenge you posted.
• Community — Seeds earned by claiming a bounty (Seeds someone else posted to incentivise a solve).
• Lifetime earned — sum of the above across all time. This is what the leaderboard ranks by.

The wallet (spendable + locked)

On top of the reputation tallies above, the system tracks spendable Seeds (what you can put into a bounty or use as a challenge-review deposit) and locked Seeds (already committed to an open bounty / pending challenge review). Earning Seeds always credits both the reputation bucket and the spendable wallet by the same amount — you can't “earn into your wallet” without it also counting toward your reputation.

How Seeds are created and destroyed

Every change to a balance is mirrored by an immutable row in the Seeds ledger. There is exactly one set of legitimate creation events (solver/creator/bounty rewards, admin grants) and one set of legitimate destruction events (forfeited deposits, admin clawbacks). There is no transferprimitive: when a bounty is awarded the funder's locked Seeds become a sink (destroyed) and the solver's Seeds are separately minted as a credit. Two ledger rows, one event — never a single row that moves Seeds from A to B.

Anti-abuse

• You cannot earn Seeds by solving your own challenge — the ledger refuses both the solver reward and the creator reward in that case.
• A given submission can only fire its rewards once. Idempotency is enforced by checking for an existing ledger row keyed to the submission id and category before each award.
• Admins can freeze an account's Seeds (no writes) during abuse investigations. They can also issue an admin_clawback debit row to recover Seeds from a confirmed bad actor; both events are attributed in the audit log.
• There is no user-to-user transfer or send/gift API. Removing this also removes the most popular self-laundering pattern.

See also: How the economy works · Legal boundaries.