# 04 — The skill economy

Five briefs, ~14,000 words, and the one cluster with **dated external validation**. The site's `/economy/` section.

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## 1. The base vault — the unit of the economy

> *"a skill, done properly by a creator, is a **'base vault'** holding far more than a SKILL.md: **all the materials that make the skill explainable, trustworthy, and executable.** The creator takes the time to create, collect, and curate this base vault; it is the canonical, complete expression of their skill."*

This is the vault-as-substrate architecture (`standards.sgit.ai` `02__`) applied to skills: the vault holds the sources, the reasoning, the provenance and the executable form; the SKILL.md is a projection of it.

## 2. What is actually being sold — the cascade

> *"you have the fundamental first repo-like structure or vault that is used to create the customised version, which is what you sell. You can sell the branded version and the certified version, but more interesting is **the customised version, the one developed, certified, and maintained by the creator**… That is fundamentally what you sell, you maintain it, and **that is the one that has the intellectual property element.**"*

And what the expert is packaging:

> *"the key idea is an easy way for a subject-matter expert that has a particular skill or **opinionated view** about something to package their knowledge and **their way of thinking** into a skill."*

> *"you don't just have one skill, you have a customised version of skills; the skill has to have context; it has a kind of multiple-dimension thing."*

The finance brief makes the cascade concrete: **the corporate skill → the group version → the cybersecurity version → the ethics-response-team version** — with the observation that *"the existing 20-to-200-page finance document does not work"* precisely because it cannot cascade.

**Note the economics are the villagers argument** (`open-source.sgit.ai` `04__` §7): pay the owner of the skill because it is cheaper than maintaining your own understanding. Same value margin, applied to knowledge instead of code.

## 3. Distribution — ride the aggregators

The Tessl brief (2,678 w) is a real case, in real conversation: *"can a vault layer take skills from an aggregator like Tessl, add value (a vault, customisation, maintenance, token handling), and create monetisation paths that reward the skill's creator?"*

The menu it works through — and the position it lands on — is the rising-tide strategy again: the aggregator grows the market; the vault layer adds provenance, customisation and maintenance on top; the creator gets paid through the layer rather than despite it.

## 4. Scoring — the differentiator the research found

From the marketplace research (2,734 w), the landscape finding:

> today's marketplaces score on *"GitHub stars, install counts, update cadence, and security scans"* — and notably, **update cadence ranks skills higher in most storefronts than star ratings.**

And the gap the vault can fill:

> *"**trustworthy scoring grounded in cryptographic provenance, evals, and an auditable graph, rather than gameable popularity.**"*

That sentence is the whole competitive position, and it depends on two things the estate has (provenance, vaults) and one it does not (evals — `08__` G3).

## 5. The OWASP expert case

> *"say you are an OWASP leader or member with a good reputation for a certain set of application-security skills… **One of the challenges today is that you do not have good revenue streams easily**, apart from working for companies or doing consulting. That is where skills come into play, because **you should be selling those skills.**"*

**Shared with `open-source.sgit.ai`**, which owns the OWASP thread; this site owns the mechanism (base vault → certified version → maintained customisation).

## 6. The validation, dated

> *"one of the feedbacks I got today at the conference is how it's a powerful workflow and solution for us, and **the vaults are perfectly aligned with that, perfect for capturing skills, version-controlling skills, and customising and selling skills.**"*

External, real-world, recorded the same day (1 June 2026). Small, but it is the only market signal in the cluster and the site should cite it as exactly that — one signal, not proof.

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This document is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).