Token Academy · build your own curation-reward network

🌐 What a curation-reward network is

One person voting has small reach. A curation network pools many people's judgment and voting power behind a shared goal — surfacing quality, lifting newcomers, growing a topic — and it shares the curation rewards back to the members who make it work. Add a community token and it becomes a self-funding loop: good posts earn the token, holders curate, curating earns more, and the community grows around its own economy. No central boss — it runs on rules and trust.

🪙 A community token

Mint your own token (a SCOT / tribe token) that rewards posts tagged for your community, on top of the base MELEK rewards. Set the tag, the daily emission, and the author/curator split. This is your network's currency and its incentive dial.

🔗 A curation trail

A trail lets members' accounts automatically follow a curator — or a small council — they trust: when the lead upvotes, the followers do too, at a weight each member sets. It's how a scattered group votes like one strong account, without anyone handing over a key.

🏷️ A token trail

A curation trail flagged for your token — so the automated votes reward your community's contributors in your token, not just the base coin. This is the engine that pays the people producing and curating for your network.

🤖 Autovote strategies (keyless)

Members pick a strategy — follow the trail, reward by merit, boost newcomers — and it runs automatically and keylessly (through the signer boundary; the network never holds their keys). Delegated stake makes each vote heavier without giving up ownership.

⭐ Merit & fair distribution

The Karma system weighs need and recent activity so rewards lift real, active newcomers instead of the already-large — and keeps a network from becoming a circle that only pays itself. Fair distribution is what makes it last.

⚙️ MELEK-Engine — mint & run your token

MELEK's Hive-Engine-style layer-2 token engine. tokens.create registers your community token (symbol, precision, optional immutable cap); rewards.setReward is the Scotbot equivalent — you configure the token's social-reward pool (daily emission, author/curator split, reward curve) as settings, not code. tokens.issue / tokens.transfer / tokens.stake do the rest. Manage it from the Tokens portal.

🐝 APIS — the fee token

APIS is the engine's fee/utility token (its "BEE"), named for Apis, the sacred bee. You burn a little APIS to create your token and to pay engine resource fees — it's what powers the engine. Get some first; it's the key that turns the crank.

💧 KulaSwap — liquidity & DeFi for your token

Once your token exists, KulaSwap is where it gets a market: swap it, add it to a liquidity pool, run a farm to reward holders, or use the CDP vaults (lock wMELEK for a passive APIS yield) to help fund the network. It's the DeFi side that turns a reward token into a working little economy.

1. Define the community. Pick what you reward (a topic, a region, quality originals, newcomers) and a tag.
2. Mint the token. In MELEK-Engine, tokens.create (burns a little APIS) mints it; rewards.setReward sets its reward pool — tag, daily emission, author/curator split.
3. Set the curation trail. Choose the curator or council whose votes the network follows.
4. Flag the token trail. Point the trail at your token so curation pays your contributors in it.
5. Invite members. They follow the trail / delegate stake — keylessly — and set their own vote weight.
6. Distribute, list & show it. Rewards flow to authors and curators; list the token on KulaSwap for liquidity, and publish a live leaderboard so the community sees it working.

Every step runs on tooling MELEK already ships — SCOT tokens, curation and token trails, keyless autovote, and the Karma merit system. The Academy is the guided front door to it.