Genesis Auction

1. Overview

The Whop Name Service (WNS) establishes a persistent on-chain identity for every Whop account, past, present, and future. Every new Whop signup receives a .whop name as their native identity Object on Aptos. The Whop Name Genesis Auction is the reconciliation event for the approximately 21 million accounts created before the Aptos integration: a one-month process that notifies existing users, gives them the opportunity to claim their .whop name for free, and opens unclaimed names to public bidding with escalating economics and confidential sealed bids.

The event serves two ordered goals: user reactivation (primary) and namespace price discovery (secondary). Every mechanism, notifications, escalating bid increments, the 28-day claim window, USDT activation credits, is designed to maximize dormant user winback. For users who never return, the auction finds the market value of their unclaimed name and settles it to the highest bidder, capitalizing the Whop treasury as a byproduct.

The event aligns Whop and Aptos. Whop reactivates dormant users and transitions all accounts onto an on-chain identity layer. Aptos gains structural demand: every claim consumes 1 APT, every bid locks APT, every renewal consumes APT annually. The genesis produces a new tradable asset class, .whop names, available exclusively on Aptos, with a secondary market that generates ongoing trading volume and transaction fees.

The genesis auction establishes the .whop name as the foundational identity Object on Aptos, the root primitive that all subsequent Whop commerce attaches to. Once a user holds a .whop name, that Object becomes their on-chain identity for everything that follows: trading usernames on the Whop Name Market, holding revenue split positions in Whop-native businesses, obtaining licenses for digital products and tools built on the platform, and receiving royalty streams from content and attribution. The Object model (Token V2) is composable by design, additional assets, rights, and revenue streams attach to a .whop name without modifying the name itself. The genesis auction is not an endpoint. It is the precursor event that establishes on-chain identity for all Whop accounts, creating the foundation for an expanding commerce layer.

2. Timeline

One month. Four weeks of open auction. Three final days: sealed bidding and settlement.

Open auction: days 1-28. Owner claim/sell window: days 1-28. Soulbound tokens mint at first interaction (days 1-28). Sealed bids: days 29-30 (owner locked out). Day 31: reveal, batch settlement, name configuration, genesis data preserved, Whop Name Market launch.

3. Three outcomes for the original owner

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  Outcome A, Claim for free: owner claims via Keyless wallet anytime during days 1-28. Whop sponsors 1 APT. Auction cancels. All bidders refunded minus accumulated fees. Owner immediately receives .whop name + soulbound account token + USDT activation credit. The soulbound mints at this moment, not on day 31, so the user can configure their disclosure settings and begin displaying verified competence badges from the day they return.

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  Outcome B, Sell to highest bidder (deferred settlement): owner opts to sell during days 1-28. A listing that finalizes after the sealed phase on day 31. The owner chooses a replacement username. The old name transfers to the winner at settlement, the new name mints in the same transaction (Whop sponsors 1 APT). Owner receives the final bid minus a graduated marketplace fee (TBD). Selling is a trade, not an exit, seller keeps a Whop account, soulbound token, USDT credit, and a named identity.

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  Outcome C, Absent: owner never returns. 100% of winning bid to Whop treasury.

4. Week 1: open auction + first retouch (days 1-7)

The auction opens on day 1. Bidding and claiming happen simultaneously, no separate exclusive claim window. The original owner can reclaim free through day 28 (Whop sponsors 1 APT), so there is no urgency to separate the two. Every user who interacts, whether claiming, bidding, or signing up new, receives their soulbound account token immediately upon first authentication.

Getting 21M users on-chain

Aptos Keyless (AIP-61) via Google or Apple auth. No seed phrase, no extension. All transactions are gasless, Whop sponsors gas via sponsored transactions, completely abstracted from the end user. For non-OAuth providers, IBE from the UTT paper extends coverage. Dual-linked accounts (email + phone) prioritized in early notification batches.

Days 1-3: notification wave + auction open

Launch notification hits all 21M users. Bidding open on all unclaimed names at 1 APT. No reserve prices. 1% minimum increment. No APT pre-airdropped, treasury spends 1 APT only on actual claims.

• ›USDT activation credit: conditional credit (amount TBD. Calibrate against Whop CAC). Usable for content, trading, WPN payments, friend invitations. Whop pays only per verified conversion event, the credit activates on meaningful platform engagement (first purchase, first subscription, first trade). Unused credits auto-refund after X days (AIP-125). The refund mechanism ensures Whop's reactivation spend is purely performance-based: no conversion, no cost.

Days 4-7: performance notifications

Bid activity triggers performance-based notifications with dollar values. First bid, velocity spikes, 10/100/1K APT thresholds. Max one per 24 hours. Channel escalation: email at first bid, +SMS at 10+ APT.

5. Weeks 2-3: public price discovery (days 8-21)

Week 2 (days 8-14): 2% increment

Casual bidders stop. Contested names cross 10 and 100 APT thresholds, triggering the "sell" wave, users who ignored "claim your name" respond to "your name is worth $800." Early sellers benefit from the graduated fee.

Week 3 (days 15-21): 5% increment

Griefing becomes irrational. Midpoint notification (day 15): "[X]M names claimed." Premium names find their open-phase ceiling. Active bidders drop to 3-5 per name, setting the floor for the sealed phase.

6. Week 4 + sealed bids (days 22-30)

Days 22-28: final open auction (10% increment)

Compound anti-grief cost ~40x week 1. Increment schedule, 1% → 2% → 5% → 10%, compresses the Sotheby's/Christie's pattern into four weeks. Hard deadline notifications: 72h, 48h, 24h to lockout.

Days 29-30: sealed bid (48 hours)

Owner locked out. Single-shot valuation via AIP-143 Confidential Assets: amounts encrypted with ZK proofs and homomorphic encryption. Contract verifies bid exceeds open floor via range proof. Dominant strategy is to bid true value, no reason to shade when competitors' bids are invisible. Winner's fees refunded.

7. Soulbound account token

The soulbound account token mints the moment a user first interacts, not in a batch on day 31. When a returning user claims during weeks 1-4: the .whop name and the soulbound mint in the same transaction. When a new user signs up: both Objects mint immediately after username selection. By day 31, most soulbound tokens are already on-chain, minted incrementally as users returned across the 28-day auction.

Two Objects, two purposes

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  The .whop name Object is the tradeable identity. It carries the name string, genesis auction history, and metadata. It can be transferred, sold, listed, or auctioned on the Whop Name Market. When a .whop name sells, the buyer gets the name, community, URL, payment endpoint, and search ranking. The .whop name is WHO you present as, your brand, storefront, and public face. Composable via Token V2: revenue split positions, licenses, royalty streams, and commercial primitives attach over time.

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  The soulbound account token is the permanent receipt. It cannot be transferred, sold, or listed. It carries three fields: the Whop signup order (static u64, #4,271 means the four-thousand-two-hundred-seventy-first account ever created), the join date (static timestamp, September 2023), and verified earnings (a cryptographic composite that accumulates over time). The soulbound token is WHAT you've done. It follows the account regardless of which .whop name is attached. Sell your name, keep your proof of competence.

Soulbound earnings verification

The earnings field is not a number Whop wrote into a database. It is a cryptographic proof structure with two independent verification paths, using primitives designed by Alin Tomescu (Aptos Labs Head of Cryptography) and already deployed on Aptos.

Off-chain earnings: Groth16 via Shelby

Revenue generated before or outside the Aptos integration, Stripe payouts, Klarna transactions, course sales, Discord subscriptions, tips, affiliate commissions, is stored on Shelby as immutable, erasure-coded blobs with Merkle roots committed on Aptos via the Shelby smart contract.

The user generates a Groth16 zero-knowledge proof demonstrating that the sum of all transaction records attributable to their account across all Shelby-committed epochs equals their claimed total. Using the BGM17 commit-and-prove extension, the verifier sees only a Pedersen commitment to the total, not the total itself, and confirms the proof is valid against the known Shelby Merkle root.

Individual transactions, which platform, which payment processor, which customer, which product, which amount, are all inside the private witness. They never appear on-chain. The proof is 128-192 bytes. Verification takes 1.2 milliseconds. The Groth16 verifier is already deployed on Aptos (it powers Keyless accounts via AIP-61). Proofs are re-randomizable per Groth16.Rerandomize, the user can share different unlinkable proofs with different verifiers.

On-chain earnings: AIP-143 Confidential Assets

APT and USDT received via WPN, trading usernames, selling assets, subscription payments, content rewards, clipping revenue, accumulate in a Confidential Asset balance on the soulbound token using AIP-143 Twisted ElGamal encryption. Every incoming payment is homomorphically added to the encrypted balance without decryption. The account holder decrypts with their private key. A designated auditor (Whop, for compliance) can decrypt via the auditor key. Everyone else sees a verifiable ciphertext they cannot read.

The wallet address generated for each user is held inside the soulbound token and remains private. The .whop username handle does not publicly expose the underlying wallet address, under the Confidential Assets framework, the link between a user's public identity (@username) and their actual Aptos address is never revealed on-chain. Payments route through the name's resource account to the soulbound, which privately forwards funds to the real wallet. An observer can see that alex.whop received a payment but cannot determine which wallet address holds the funds.

Combined display

The soulbound token presents a unified credential: off-chain earnings (Groth16 proof against Shelby Merkle root) + on-chain earnings (AIP-143 encrypted balance). Both independently verifiable. Neither requires trusting Whop. Over time, as commerce moves on-chain, the Shelby-proven portion stays fixed while the on-chain portion grows. Post-integration accounts have 100% on-chain earnings from day one.

Selective disclosure: competence without doxxing

Privacy is the default, not the ceiling. Every creator starts with a fully-private soulbound, signup order and join date visible (non-sensitive), earnings showing only as "Verified" with no amount or category. The competitive advantage goes to creators who CHOOSE to reveal more because their signal is clean. Disclosure is prompted immediately after username selection, the user configures their trust posture during onboarding, not after the auction concludes.

Disclosure tiers

• ›Threshold badge: "Earned more than $X on Whop." A simple range proof. Proves you're above a meaningful threshold without revealing the number.
• ›Total display: open the Pedersen commitment and show the exact total. Same information Whop already displays, now cryptographically verified.
• ›Category breakdown: independent Groth16 sub-proofs per revenue category, trading P&L, course sales, subscriptions, affiliate, tips, content rewards, marketplace transactions. The user selects which categories to reveal and which to keep private.
• ›Ratio badge: "Verified trader: >80% from trading P&L." "Verified builder: >80% from product sales." Computed from the category sub-proofs. The highest-signal disclosure, tells the market not just what you earned but how you earned it.
• ›Time-bounded proof: "Earned $400K from trading in the last 6 months." Recent performance, not lifetime cumulative. Proves the skill is current.

Why this matters for Whop's business

Whop's growth engine runs on aggressive promotion. Creators with large audiences drive massive top-of-funnel traffic by selling the dream. Some are genuine. Many are not. Both types drive signups, a creator with 500K YouTube subscribers who drives 10,000 signups per month is an acquisition asset regardless of whether their trading P&L is real.

The problem is downstream. Users who sign up based on hype discover the course is recycled content, the calls are wrong, the community is dead. They leave. Churn climbs. The soulbound selective disclosure solves this without outing anyone. The promoters keep their default privacy, opaque "$2M earned" badge, no category breakdown. They keep driving signups. Top of funnel stays intact.

But the genuinely talented creators, the trader who makes money from markets, the developer with 5,000 paying customers, the community builder with verified tenure, now stand up from the noise. They opt into category disclosure. They show "85% of my revenue is from trading P&L." The grifter can't show the same because their numbers tell the opposite story. The market learns: opaque means unwilling to prove. Disclosure becomes a competitive weapon for the people with real signal.

Users arrive because of aggressive promotion (acquisition). Users stay because of verified competence (retention). Both creator types coexist. Neither is punished. The cryptography creates a natural quality filter that routes users toward operators most likely to deliver, without Whop ever making a judgment call about who is legitimate. The soulbound makes the judgment trustlessly.

8. Day 31: settlement, name configuration, and market launch

The genesis auction sunsets. Batch settlement mints .whop name Objects for auction winners. Users with multiple names configure their identity topology. All genesis data is preserved. The Whop Name Market launches.

Batch settlement via Aptos aggregators

• ›Aggregators (AIP-43/47): three sequential bottlenecks in large-scale minting, collection size counter, sequential indexing, token naming, are eliminated by recording deltas instead of read-modify-write, using Aggregator Snapshots for indices, and deferring string formatting. Block-STM executes all mints in parallel. Demonstrated: 1M NFTs in under 90 seconds, 5M in 8 minutes on Aptos previewnet (~10x over sequential).
• ›Account-age indexing: genesis names indexed by original Whop account creation date (pre-sorted CSV), not mint order. Each mint writes a predetermined index as a static field.
• ›Per-name settlement: compare all bids via AIP-143 homomorphic comparison → determine winner → decrypt winning amount → mint .whop Object to winner → mint soulbound token for net-new winners → transfer bid to treasury → refund losers minus fees → refund winner's fees. Scale: ~3.5M names in ~5-6 minutes at previewnet rates.
• ›What gets revealed: winning bid amount per name only. Number of sealed bidders and losing amounts NOT disclosed.
• ›Outcome B finalization: pending sales settle at the sealed-phase winning price. Replacement names mint in the same transaction.

Name configuration

After settlement, users with multiple .whop names configure their identity topology: select primary name, configure public aliases (redirects that aggregate search traffic, publicly declared) or independent identities (separate accounts via HD key derivation from the Keyless master, genuinely independent on-chain, no shared fingerprint). Hybrid configurations available. Single on-chain transaction, Whop sponsors gas.

Market launch

The genesis auction sunsets. All genesis data, open bid histories, sealed winning prices, sealed multipliers, account-age indices, phase transition effects, is permanently on-chain. The Whop Name Market opens: unclaimed/unbid names available for standard registration (any character length, 1 APT Whop-sponsored), secondary trading of existing names goes live. The engagement peak from day 31 is the launch moment for the next product. Genesis sunset is market sunrise.

9. Notification campaign

The original owner can claim their username for free through day 28. After day 28, the name enters sealed bid territory and the owner is locked out. All notifications target the 28-day claim window only, there is no notification after lockout because there is nothing the owner can do.

Time-based (universal)

Performance-based (bid-triggered, dollarized)

Every notification shows the real-time dollar value of the current highest bid, converted from APT at the live market price. The owner sees what they're leaving on the table in USD, not in a token denomination they may not understand.

Maximum 1 message per 24 hours per user. Performance-based notifications take priority over time-based. All messaging must comply with email and SMS anti-spam regulations (CAN-SPAM, TCPA, GDPR where applicable), deliverability is critical because a filtered notification is a lost user. Whop should implement proper sender reputation management, warm-up sequences for high-volume sends, and clear unsubscribe paths to maintain inbox placement rates throughout the 28-day campaign.

10. Post-genesis

New signups

Every new Whop user receives a .whop name and a soulbound token at signup. Name: any available string, 1 APT Whop-sponsored. Soulbound: signup order continues from genesis via Aggregator Snapshots, join date set to creation time, earnings begin accumulating from first transaction.

Renewal tiers

Renewal is priced on scarcity, the total number of possible name combinations in each character-length tier. Shorter names are exponentially scarcer. All transactions are gasless, Whop sponsors gas via sponsored transactions, completely abstracted from the end user.

This multiplier pattern mirrors ENS pricing, where 3-character .eth names renew at $640/yr and 4-character names at $160/yr, a 4x premium for one fewer character. ENS has demonstrated that this step function is sustainable with limited churn: holders of short names renew consistently because the scarcity value of the name far exceeds the annual carrying cost. The WNS tier structure replicates this dynamic across four tiers (1 APT → 5 APT → 20 APT → 100 APT), with each 4-5x step reflecting the exponential reduction in possible combinations and the corresponding increase in scarcity premium.

Exact renewal pricing per tier is TBD. The rates above are illustrative, the cost at each tier is arbitrary and can be set at any level that optimizes across three variables: maximizing annual renewal rates (the percentage of name holders who renew), reducing churn and friction (ensuring the renewal cost never becomes the reason a user leaves the platform), and optimal revenue per user (the highest price that does not degrade the first two variables).

Non-renewal after the 4-week grace period: name enters a 72-hour dormancy Dutch auction on the Whop Name Market. If no encrypted conditional bid (lekker price) is set, the name enters Harberger resolution.

Quarterly runway extension

1-year default expiry. Year-1 platform activity determines usage tier for quarterly renewal assignment. Aptos verifiable randomness distributes the renewal date within the assigned quarter:

Active users get the longest runway. Intra-quarter randomness prevents renewal cliffs.

11. Aptos technology stack

12. Future features

Archon: performance-based validator consortium

An Archon is a validator consortium model where Whop and its strategic partners (Aptos Foundation, Tether portfolio companies, key ecosystem participants) operate a coordinated set of Aptos validators with performance-based incentives. The consortium earns staking rewards proportional to the quality of service they provide to the WNS infrastructure, uptime, transaction inclusion latency, and throughput during peak auction periods.

The performance-based structure means validators in the consortium are compensated based on measurable KPIs: block production reliability during genesis auction settlement windows, sub-second inclusion of sealed bid reveals, and consistent throughput for batch soulbound minting operations. Underperforming validators are rotated out of the consortium based on trailing performance metrics. Outperformers receive a larger share of the consortium's staking allocation. This creates a competitive dynamic within the consortium that directly benefits WNS users through higher reliability during the moments that matter most, auction settlement, name trading, and payment split execution.

The consortium also provides Whop with direct influence over transaction ordering fairness during high-stakes operations. Rather than relying on the general validator set for time-sensitive auction mechanics (where MEV extraction or delayed inclusion could distort outcomes), the Archon consortium guarantees predictable inclusion for WNS transactions. This is not a permissioned chain, it is a coordinated stake delegation strategy that aligns validator incentives with platform reliability.

APT forwards: hedging renewal costs with commodity futures

APT's CFTC digital commodity classification enables regulated futures contracts on APT. For Whop, this creates a hedging instrument: APT forwards allow Whop to lock in the dollar cost of gas subsidies and user acquisition for future quarters. If Whop sponsors 1 APT per new user signup and expects 500K signups next quarter, they can purchase 500K APT forward at today's price, eliminating exposure to APT price spikes that would otherwise inflate the cost of growth.

For the broader ecosystem, APT forwards give more certainty around demand projections. Name service renewals create predictable, quantifiable future APT demand, if 3.5M names renew at a blended rate of ~3 APT, that is ~10.5M APT in demand at a known date. Futures markets can price this forward demand, which provides price discovery that reflects structural utility rather than speculation. When the market can see that 10.5M APT will be consumed in renewal demand 6 months from now, the forward curve reflects that structural floor.

Prefix Consensus makes this fairer. By ensuring censorship-resistant and provably-fair transaction inclusion at the consensus layer, Prefix Consensus prevents validators from front-running large forward contract settlements or manipulating inclusion order during renewal windows. The combination of regulated commodity futures (price certainty) + prefix consensus (execution fairness) gives Whop and its users a reliable framework for projecting and managing APT costs across multi-year planning horizons.

Whop Name Market: ongoing secondary market with three trading mechanisms (listing, Dutch auction, English auction), Harberger resolution for zero-demand names, and the appraisal engine for comp-based pricing. Separate specification.