Season one is live. It is the first season on the live platform: the actions that keep Vibestarter working now that it exists are tracked onchain, on Base and Robinhood Chain, and counted on your Starter Card. Back a raise. Back it early. Back the whole wave. Hold $VIBES, stake it, swap it. Bring a founder in. Every one of those is read from the chain and banked to your card.

This post is the long version of the announcement: what a season is, why this one counts for more than the testnet did, how the score is kept, what the season tracks, and how Wave 1 sits inside it.

Why a season

The incentivized testnet ran through the spring and closed in May. It did the job a testnet is for: it showed us who turns up, and it put a Starter Card in the hands of everyone who did. Those cards did not reset. Every point from the testnet is kept and already counts toward your level today. Season one adds to that record; nobody starts from zero.

Season one shows us something the testnet could not. Testnet points came from testing. Season one points come from live capital going into live raises, which is the whole point of the platform. When you back a wave-1 raise, a founder gets funded. When you hold or stake $VIBES, the platform's own token has a holder. The season tracks the actions that carry weight, and it counts them in proportion.

How the score is kept

There are no forms, no screenshots and no self-reporting anywhere in the season. Every credit is bound to an event in a transaction receipt.

1. You act onchain. A backing, a stake, a swap, a balance you hold. Each one is a transaction from your wallet on Base or Robinhood Chain.
2. The chain writes the receipt. The escrow emits ContributionMade, the staking contract emits Staked, the pool emits Swap. A receipt cannot be edited after the fact.
3. Vibestarter reads the receipt. Credit is bound to the event, not to who sent the transaction. A backing credits the moment it lands; an hourly sweep catches anything that skipped the app. Holdings are read live from your balance, wallet plus staked.
4. Your Starter Card banks it. Points set your level, your rank on the leaderboard, and the card itself.

The two social quests are the exception, and they are verified rather than trusted: you paste your own post, we confirm it is from your linked X account and that it says what the quest asks.

Levels, and the card

Levels are open-ended. There is no cap on the ladder and no threshold printed anywhere; the level is the level, and it moves in one direction only. The repeatable quests keep counting, so the ladder keeps going.

Capital is the generator. Every ETH you back across the wave scores 400, uncapped, and that is the only road to the top levels. A backer who spreads one ETH across the cohort lands well past the middle of the ladder; the levels above that are reached with capital, not with a checklist.

The Starter Card is the record of all of it. It carries your level, your global rank, your Ethos score and your class, and its plate changes as the level does. The lower plates are on the account page today. The upper ones stay sealed until someone reaches them.

What the season tracks

Four things, in the order they weigh.

• Backing. Which wave-1 raises you backed, how early you were, how much ETH you put across the wave, and on which chains. Capital counts without a cap; backing every raise in the wave counts on its own.
• $VIBES. What you hold, wallet and staked together, in three one-way tiers; whether you stake; whether you swap. Two more open with the multi-chain announcement: bridging $VIBES to Robinhood Chain, and swapping it there.
• Bringing people in. Founders who apply with your code, and the community you join and verify with.
• Saying so. Quoting the season announcement, and posting that you backed a raise, each from your own X account.

The account page lists every quest with its value and its state. This post is about the shape of the season, not the arithmetic.

Wave 1 inside the season

Wave 1 is the first set of raises in the season: playMAYHEM on Robinhood Chain, and Loyal Spark, Corvo Edge and Onetoken on Base. The founders and their projects are introduced in the Wave 1 post.

Every raise in the wave runs on the same mechanism the $VIBES raise has run on since June. Of the ETH raised, 15% pairs the token's liquidity, and that position is locked in a soulbound claimer for good. The other 85% goes to escrow and is released by time, not by milestone: 10% at launch, then 15% a month for six months. Each monthly release opens with a 72-hour window in which backers can challenge it; a challenge that is upheld freezes the escrow and returns it to holders, and one that is rejected lets the release through.

More waves follow. The season keeps score across all of them, so a full sweep of Wave 1 is a start, not a ceiling.

$VIBES in the season

Holding is tracked in three one-way tiers, read live from your wallet and your staked balance together, so moving tokens into the staking contract never costs a tier. Staking is its own quest, and staking does something beyond points: a staked position is eligible for a fixed 2.5% token allocation from every raise that finalizes after it is active. That is an allocation, not a yield; there is no rate and nothing is emitted.

Two quests on the account page are marked soon: bridging $VIBES to Robinhood Chain, and swapping it there. They open with the announcement they belong to.

What the score is for

The card is the record of the season, and the record is kept for a reason. The season is being scored; what the score is measured against comes when it closes. Until then, the honest advice is the simple one: back what you believe in, early, and let the card keep count.

How to start

1. Open your account page. If you do not have a Starter Card yet, it takes a minute.
2. Link your X account in the header; the two share quests need it.
3. Back a raise. The rest of the deck opens from there.

Season one is live on vibestarter.xyz.