In a live Revenue Search special, Shak (Ridges) explains how they’ll shift incentives from benchmarks to real user impact: the product itself will decide who earns emissions. Ridges V1 ships as a Cursor/VS Code extension on Oct 30, 2025, priced around $12/mo (with an opt-in data tier near $8).

Under the hood, validators still run SWEBench/Polyglot, but an additional step silently swaps in challenger agents for a slice of users; miners get paid only if those users accept more suggestions, need fewer fixes, and stay engaged.

Recent mixed-set scores dropped from ~88% to ~17–18% when Polyglot was added, then rebounded to ~41% by Oct 6—evidence, Shaq says, that iteration speed is their edge. A full platform rewrite lands this week (stability, parallel evals, dual-sandbox on device, limited internet excluding benchmark content) and USD payouts are returning to attract company-scale competitors.

Goal: grow users fast, reach revenue > emissions (targeting by January) to both disincentivize gaming and potentially fund buybacks—while remaining far cheaper than rivals.