Fade: A Temporal Market Manager for Competitive Visibility

outbid.lol introduced an unusually legible market primitive: participants pay to oc-cupy positions in a public ranking, and the next participant can outbid the position above.The mechanism makes the price of attention visible and turns rank into a competitiveobject. Its very success also reveals a structural problem. If purchased rank is cumula-tive and permanent, the threshold for visibility can ratchet upward, early winners canbecome durable incumbents, and ordinary entrants may inherit a market price created byexceptional bidders.This paper proposes FADE, a deterministic temporal market manager for competitivevisibility. Every paid purchase is represented as an independent tranche of depreciatingrankpoints. Its balance fades proportionally; a logarithmic spend term creates a stronger,short-lived carrying cost for unusually large purchases; and a campaign-age factor accel-erates the release of older positions. Fan-earned points occupy a separate pool, preservingearned participation without applying the high-spend surcharge. Top-ups add a freshtranche but cannot reset the age or history of an existing campaign.Within the stated v2 production domain—launch purchases and top-ups acceptedbefore campaign age reaches 21 days—the resulting market remains hospitable to highspend: more money always buys more immediate strength and some additional lifetime.It does not buy proportionate permanence. Under the launch calibration, a $100 purchaseopens with one hundred times the points of a $1 purchase, but its paid-point lifetime isapproximately 18.5 days rather than 13.1 days. Fade therefore converts accumulated rankfrom permanent property into perishable visibility capital. In a finite chart, that automaticdepreciation returns positions to circulation, limits inherited price floors, and creates acontinuous balance between incoming demand and expiring dominance.The proposal is a novel synthesis for the outbid.lol design space, not a claim thatlogarithms, exponential decay, auctions, or position markets are themselves new. Thepaper specifies the model, derives its main properties, describes its implementation andgovernance, and uses Tracklist.lol as the first concrete application.