Modern weighting, governance, and consensus systems often exhibit a structural weakness: influence is weakly anchored to verifiable economic value creation, enabling power-for-sale, short-window capture, and non-auditable rule drift. This paper introduces Proof of Contribution (POC) as a parent-layer execution-weight framework that maps finalized, auditable, and recomputable contribution-generated claims into execution weights under a strictly enforceable audit loop. POC is governed by six non-negotiable invariants: Source0 (external purchases do not create eligibility), verifiable caps, decay, downward-only normalization, localized negatives, and delayed activation, together with an Only-Down monotonicity constraint that forbids influence expansion under violations. These invariants are implemented through timelocked versioned policy bundles, canonical commitment roots, deterministic recomputation, challenge windows, and automatic consequences. Within these constraints, we extend contribution to generalized contribution, while strictly restricting any non–cap-anchored components to eligibility gating, penalties, or risk parameters. We further introduce an auditable reference-price instantiation as a time yardstick to capture cross-time contribution capability without legitimizing speculation. Finally, a consensus-compatibility profile (POC-WC) and a minimal export object (PCEO) ensure large-scale composability with contribution-weighted consensus mechanisms.
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