1200-respect-onchain-facts-verified

1200 - ZAO Respect: verified on-chain holder facts (Optimism)

Tier: STANDARD Date: 2026-07-17 Status: Verified from chain state Owner: builder loop (facts), Zaal (whether to bump cited figures)

Why this doc exists

The ZAO's public materials (whitepaper 942, the ICM context boxes, member pages, GEO surfaces) cite Respect holder counts. Two numbers were circulating and looked like a contradiction:

• "122 holders" (facts note, board task, stale ~2026-07-10)
• "156 Respect holders" (ICM thezao.llm.txt + whitepaper 942, verified 2026-07-05)

A soulbound holder count can't drop from 156 to 122, so one of them had to mean something different. This doc reads the live chain and resolves it — because the North Star is ZAO as the documented, cited DAO case study, and a cited number that doesn't reconcile is worse than no number.

The resolution (both figures are correct, in different contexts)

Verified 2026-07-17 (block 154329202, 02:59 UTC) via the free Blockscout Optimism explorer, enumerating the full holder list of each token (so the enumerated count cross-checks the explorer's reported count — they matched exactly):

Metric	Value	What it is
OG holders	122	Holders of the OG ERC-20 (0x34cE…6957), the soulbound governance token, alone
ZOR holders	56	Holders of the ZOR ERC-1155 (0x9885…445c), "ZAO Fractal Respect"
Unique holders (OG ∪ ZOR)	157	Distinct addresses holding either token — de-duplicated
Hold both OG and ZOR	21	Intersection
Naïve sum (OG + ZOR)	178	NOT a real holder count — double-counts the 21
OG total Respect points	38,484	ERC-20 totalSupply (18 decimals)

So:

• "122" = OG holders alone. Still 122 today — accurate.
• "156" = unique holders across OG or ZOR (de-duplicated). Now 157 (as of 2026-07-17; it was ~156 on the 2026-07-05 snapshot — grew by one, did not shrink). This validates the 942 / ICM figure: it was never wrong, it's the union metric.
• The OG Gini ≈ 0.73 cited alongside "156" is an OG-ERC-20-specific distribution stat.

Cite discipline going forward: when a doc says "N Respect holders," say which N — "122 OG governance-token holders" vs "157 unique Respect holders (OG or ZOR)."

Canonical source (single source, drift-proof)

• respect-facts.json — the machine-readable facts, with verified_at_block + verified_at_timestamp provenance. Any doc/box/whitepaper quoting a Respect number should trace to this file, the same single-source discipline used for the GEO llms.txt generation (research/identity/icm-boxes/build-llms-txt.py).
• verify-respect.py — re-runnable verifier (free Blockscout API, no key, read-only). Run it before quoting a Respect number to refresh the facts and catch drift.

python3 verify-respect.py                    # print reconciled facts
python3 verify-respect.py > respect-facts.json   # refresh the canonical file

Reconciliation actions (for Zaal — cited numbers)

Non-gated (a loop may PR these once Zaal confirms the framing):

1. ICM thezao.llm.txt currently says "156 Respect holders." Options: (a) bump to "157 unique Respect holders (OG or ZOR)" for precision, or (b) leave as a rounded "~156" and add the OG-specific "122 governance-token holders." Recommend (a) + note the OG figure, since precision + reconciliation is the citability win.
2. Whitepaper 942 Ch on membership/Respect: same — state both numbers with their definitions so a reader (or an LLM) can't find a contradiction.
3. Keep this doc's respect-facts.json as the number every other surface points to.

Numbers move slowly (soulbound, weekly mints) — a monthly re-run of verify-respect.py keeps every citing surface fresh without re-deriving.

Sources

• OG ERC-20 0x34cE89baA7E4a4B00E17F7E4C0cb97105C216957 (Optimism) — explorer
• ZOR ERC-1155 0x9885CCeEf7E8371Bf8d6f2413723D25917E7445c (Optimism) — explorer
• Method: Blockscout /api/v2/tokens/{addr}/holders, full pagination, enumerated 2026-07-17
• Cross-refs: ICM boxes, whitepaper 942, doc 1107 GEO