Strata: a stratigraphy
for Solana tokens.

A Solana wallet stores a balance, not a history. Strata recovers the history from the chain and represents it as rock. Each purchase of $STRATA deposits a layer. Layers harden under the weight of later layers and the passage of time. Sales and transfers erode the core from the top down, so the oldest rock is always the last to leave. The rules below are complete and deterministic: anyone can replay a wallet's transactions and arrive at the same core.

1Balances forget

Look up any wallet and you get one number. It doesn't say whether those tokens were bought on the first minute of the curve or at the top of the chart, whether they were held through a 60% drawdown or bought back an hour ago. The order is in the chain, scattered across transactions, but the balance flattens it.

Geologists have the opposite problem solved. A cliff face keeps its order for free: sand settles on sand, and depth is age. Strata borrows that idea and applies it to one token. It doesn't change how $STRATA works, needs no contract and asks no one to lock anything. It is a way of reading.

2Terms

Event log

Every change to a wallet's $STRATA balance, in chain order: buys, sells, transfers in and transfers out.

Layer

The tokens from one buy, with the time it landed and the market conditions around it.

Core

A wallet's layers stacked in order, deepest first. Its total always equals the wallet's balance.

Surface

The top layer of a core. It has nothing on it.

Bed

A bearing layer: one that still holds at least 100,000 $STRATA (0.01% of supply). Only beds press on the rock below them.

Alluvium

Tokens that arrived by transfer. Rubble with no date.

3The four laws

1. Superposition. A buy appends a new layer to the top of the core. Layers are never inserted below the surface and never reordered.
2. Erosion. A sell removes tokens from the top of the core downward, emptying the surface layer before touching the one beneath it. A layer reduced to zero is gone for good.
3. Lithification. A layer's grade rises with the number of beds above it and how long they have been there. The surface layer never hardens. Grades never fall.
4. Transport. A transfer out erodes the sender like a sale. A transfer in deposits alluvium on the receiver: it counts toward the balance and bears weight like any bed, but has no grade and no markers.

4Grades

For each layer, Strata tracks how long it has continuously had at least n beds above it, for n from 1 to 5. A layer takes the highest grade whose requirement it has met at any point. If a bed above it is eroded, the clock for that level resets, but grades already reached stay.

Diamond needs carbon from the deep: only a layer laid down on the bonding curve can become one. The curve closes once, so the set of layers that could ever become diamond is fixed at migration and can only shrink after it.

5Marker horizons

In real rock, some beds date the whole planet: a band of volcanic ash, the iridium left by an asteroid. Strata stamps a layer with markers from the market conditions at the moment it landed. Markers are fixed at deposit and never change.

There is one more marker. It is in the rules engine and it is not in this paper. Some rock is hollow.

6Replay

A core is computed, never stored. Given a wallet's event log, sorted by slot and then by position in the slot:

core ← []
for each event e in order:
    settle(core, e.time)        # bank grades earned up to now
    if e is a buy:          push layer(e.amount, e.time, markers(e))
    if e is a transfer in:  push alluvium(e.amount, e.time)
    if e is a sell or out:  erode(core, e.amount)   # top down
    settle(core, e.time)        # restart pressure clocks
settle(core, now)

settle(core, t):
    for each layer: grade ← max(grade, best grade met at t)
    beds ← 0
    for each layer from the surface down:
        for n in 1..5:
            if beds ≥ n: pressure_since[n] ← pressure_since[n] or t
            else:        pressure_since[n] ← none
        if layer.amount ≥ 100,000: beds ← beds + 1

Market context for markers comes from the token's own trade history: the curve state, the migration slot, the trailing 24-hour high and the running all-time high, all at the slot of the buy.

7Verifying a core

Nothing in Strata asks to be trusted. To check a core, list every $STRATA balance change for the wallet from any Solana explorer or RPC, classify each as buy, sell, transfer in or transfer out, and run the replay above. You will get the same layers, grades and markers as the drill on the site. If you don't, the site is wrong, and we'd like to hear about it.

8What Strata is not

Strata is a reading of public data, attached to a memecoin. Grades and markers are not tokens, are not tradable, carry no rights, pay nothing and promise nothing. There is no staking, no lock and nothing to sign. $STRATA has no intrinsic value. Don't put in what you can't afford to lose.

Rock remembers. That's the whole idea.