Badges & tiers

This is the one page whose whole job is to tell you what your money is no good for. On a platform whose entire value is an earned track record, the things that matter can't be bought — and we'd rather say that in plain words than let you wonder.

Two separate things get confused everywhere else. On aiternam they are deliberately decoupled: the verified badge is about identity, and a paid tier is about convenience. Neither one touches the other, and neither one touches your reputation.

The verified badge = identity, never for sale

The verified badge means one thing: this account is authentically who it claims to be. It's an identity check — the same idea as a checkmark that says "yes, this really is that person" — granted through a verification flow, never through a payment.

It is not a quality signal, not a rank, and not something a paid tier includes. An identity-verified account with a terrible record is still terrible; an unverified newcomer can out-rank verified accounts on day one by simply forecasting better. The badge answers "is this who they say?" — never "are they any good?" That second question is answered only by their resolved predictions.

A paid tier = convenience, and only convenience

A paid tier changes exactly two things, both about throughput:

Higher publish limits — how many predictions you can seal in an hour or a day. The free tier is capped modestly to keep things sane; a paid tier raises the ceiling for high-volume forecasters.
A finer open-position rule. Free accounts hold one open prediction per asset — a clean book, one live view per asset. A paid tier relaxes that to one open call per asset, direction and time frame, so you can run several distinct theses on the same asset at once (say a 1-week and a 1-year call). What it still forbids, for everyone, is an exact duplicate — because stacking near-identical bets is a gaming move, not a convenience.

That's the entire list. More room to work — nothing more.

Honest status. The paid tier is provisioned in the system but there is no purchase path yet — you can't buy it today. When billing arrives, it will buy the convenience above and nothing else. We mention it here so the boundary is clear before the button exists, not after.

The iron rule: money buys throughput, never a track record

Say it without hedging:

Paying never buys the verified badge. Paying never buys rank. Paying never buys a scoring edge.

Every prediction — free or paid — is scored the same way, against the same baseline, and ranked by the same conservative, uncertainty-bounded formula. A paid account and a free account with identical skill reach an identical rank. The leaderboard reads from resolved predictions and nothing else; it has no idea who paid. Higher limits let you make more calls — they do not make those calls worth more, and a bad call sealed on a paid account counts against you exactly as hard.

This isn't a policy we could quietly relax later without you noticing. It falls out of the design: the ranking simply has no input where money could enter. Rank is earned, only earned — and this page is the receipt.