A rebasing currency is one whose supply automatically expands or contracts to hit a target, with every holder's balance adjusted by the same multiplier so that each person's share of the total never changes. The number in your wallet moves; your slice of the pie does not. Ampleforth pioneered the mechanism in 2019 to chase a price peg. The Alignment Economy uses the same primitive for a different job: holding every person's purchasing power steady as the network grows from twelve people to billions.
The classic rebase: chasing a price
Ampleforth (AMPL) targets the purchasing power of a dollar. When market demand pushes AMPL's price above target, the protocol mints new supply into every wallet proportionally, increasing quantity to pull price down; when price falls below target, every wallet shrinks proportionally. Traders found it disorienting (your token count changes overnight) but the accounting is clean: a holder with 1% of supply before a rebase holds 1% after, always. The rebase moves the unit, never the ownership.
That is the key insight worth stealing: supply can be a policy variable without anyone's relative position being touched.
The Alignment Economy rebase: holding purchasing power still
The Alignment Economy has a different problem. Every verified human receives 1,440 points a day, so total supply grows continuously; unchecked, that is engineered inflation. And the network's population grows too, so the target cannot be a price. It is a quantity per person.
The formula fits in one line:
Rebase multiplier = Target total / Pre-rebase total, where Target total = participants x 525,600.
Each day, the sum of all savings (Earned points) is measured, and every balance is multiplied by whatever factor brings the total to exactly 525,600 points per participant. Why 525,600? It is one year of daily allocations (365 x 1,440), the number of minutes in a year. The economy's entire savings pool is pinned at one year of humanity's time, forever.
Only Earned points rebase. Daily Active points never persist long enough to need it: they expire at midnight.
What it feels like from inside
While the network grows fast, each new joiner raises the target, so the multiplier sits above 1 and balances drift up. At steady state the multiplier settles just below 1: the number in your account shrinks a fraction of a percent daily, and so does everyone else's by the exact same proportion. If you held 1% of all savings yesterday, you hold 1% today. Prices posted in points stay flat, because supply per person is constant by construction: 20 points of bread on day one is about 20 points of bread on day ten thousand.
Three consequences fall out of the single constant:
| Effect of pinning savings at 525,600 per person | What it means |
|---|---|
| Wealth has a gravity | A balance far above average sheds share daily; sustaining wealth requires continuing to contribute value, not having contributed once |
| Newcomers catch up | In the white paper's worked example, a participant who joins on day 8 with nothing out-earns a day-2 joiner within days, purely by contributing. When you joined stops mattering; what you contribute doesn't |
| No monetary committee | No interest rates, no printing decisions, no 2% target. One formula, hardcoded, identical for everyone |
One dial, honestly disclosed
The 365 in the target is a constant the whitepaper calls k, and it is a three-in-one dial: it sets how long savings persist, how large a fortune can be relative to income, and how fast a newcomer converges with a founder. Set k higher and the economy rewards accumulation longer; set it lower and wealth becomes nearly impossible to hold. One year is the proposal: long enough that saving is meaningful, short enough that no one lives forever on points earned a decade ago. It is a value judgment, made in public, in one number, which is more than can be said for how the current system sets the same tradeoffs.
FAQ
If my balance shrinks daily, isn't that just inflation with extra steps? No: inflation shrinks your purchasing power while the number holds still; this rebase shrinks the number while purchasing power holds still. Prices in points don't rise, because supply per person can't.
Is this like Ampleforth? Same mechanism, opposite target. AMPL rebases everyone toward a price and lets balances swing with speculation; the Alignment Economy rebases toward a fixed quantity per human and eliminates the speculation.
Can I opt out of the rebase? No, and neither can anyone else, which is the point. A rebase anyone could escape would just re-create today's system, where the escape hatches belong to the people who need them least.