Ownership can be arithmetic

The studio shares ownership one way, everywhere it shares ownership at all: one hour is one point, cash buys down points, and ownership is your points divided by the pool. Here is the whole of it, in public, on purpose.

There is one way the studio shares ownership, and it is the same way every time. One hour of human time is one point. All equity is points. Everything else is bookkeeping.

Contributors earn points for hours worked, at a points-per-hour rate fixed by the schedule they elect when they join. The founding, full-risk, zero-cash schedule earns one point per hour. Schedules that include guaranteed cash earn points at a reduced rate — cash buys down equity, continuously, per hour. Ownership at any moment is simply your points divided by all points. Nobody’s hour is worth more points than anybody else’s on the same schedule — not the founder’s, not the specialist’s. When a project formalizes, control splits off from all of this: one member, one vote, regardless of how many points anyone holds.

That’s the entire model. It fits in a paragraph because it is meant to — a spreadsheet a nineteen-year-old can audit in five minutes, not a cap table that needs a lawyer to read.

The receipt

We run this on our own work first. The XJ Music founders pool is published in full — every contributor’s hours, schedule, cash, points, and ownership — because a model you can’t check is just a claim. It’s the studio’s own ledger, opened by XJ’s own vote, so that nobody else’s books ever have to be: every project’s ledger is visible to its own members always, and public only if that project’s members vote to publish it.

The pieces

This is a standing vein, not a campaign. Each piece is another turn of the same argument — that ownership can be arithmetic instead of negotiation.

• Cash buys down points — how the schedules work, and why the more certainty you take in cash, the less of the upside you accrue. Built on the real XJ schedule book, with one person’s four ledger lines as the proof.
• The tradition we turned out to be part of — the model was invented from first principles at hour eight of a decade-old project, and only later did we learn it has a name and a lineage measured in centuries: patronage, time banking, and the worker-cooperative studios building games right now.
• The XJ pool is public — the first pool drop. Each time the studio’s own published ledger updates, it ships with one of these: one shipped thing, one honest number, one ask.

This describes how the studio shares ownership. It is not legal, tax, securities, or investment advice, and nothing here is an offer or solicitation to buy or sell a security or to invest money.