The Vertical Challenge is where the public stops being an audience and becomes a structured design force.
Submissions are not freeform. Each proposal is forced into a canonical template so it can be clustered, deduplicated, compared, and moved into engineering without noise.
Full Design: A complete vertical proposal. Thesis, logic chain, arithmetic, platform interfaces, feedstock sourcing, output streams, failure modes, circularity, governance. This is what wins the slot.
CapEx / Economics: You've seen a proposed design (submitted by someone else or your own earlier submission) and you can sharpen the numbers. Cost drivers, unit economics, scaling path, bottlenecks.
Circularity: You've seen a proposed design and you can close a loop. Heat recovery, byproduct routing, waste-as-feedstock, emissions elimination. Show where material or energy leaves the system and how to keep it inside.
Your submission
Charter constraints
No debt dependency
Bound to Charter constraints (non-negotiable)
Energy basis is fixed: 0.08 cents/kWh ($0.0008/kWh) internal transfer price
Auditable, measurable, enforceable
No identity surface required
These are system gates enforced by schema validation and review. If any gate is false, the submission is rejected.
Winner oversight
The winning designer does not hand off the specification and disappear. They hold a core oversight role during implementation to protect design intent and platform integration.
Continuity: Proposal to build stays under the original technical authority.
CapEx discipline: The build must fit $1B to $10B CapEx, and every $10M must be explicitly accounted for.
Integration: Platform interfaces, governance rules, and failure-mode mitigations must match the winning spec.