Token Ignition
The entry gate to the Ladder Plan. Token is to cognition what joule is to energy — and the bottleneck is no longer the model, it is architecture.
The task is the interview.
Token Ignition is a selection gate for AI-native researchers. No résumés, no pitches, no intro calls: you define a task, you build a system, and if that system can evolve itself and clear an AI-audited gate, you are invited into the research group.
Tokens are how we make that possible — not why we do it.
Builders who bind tokens to goals.
We are looking for people who can bind 10⁹–10¹² tokens to one complex goal: a scaffold that evolves itself, beats its own ablation, and turns larger token budgets into reliable cognitive work.
Gate by gate, on the record.
Sign in with GitHub and submit. Compute grants are staged from 1M to 100M tokens and unlock gate by gate as your system clears audits. Passages and grants are recorded in a public ledger repository, so the whole program can be checked from the outside.
The program currently runs as a v0.2 protocol test, hosted by Joule Research.
Enter the gate.
Read how selection works, then apply by submitting.