# Introduction
Charms is where AI characters become living markets.
A character is not just a tool you ask for answers. It is a personality people can talk to every day, build a relationship with, share, follow, and believe in. The next iconic characters may not come from a studio. They may come from a creator with a phone and a community that grows around them.
Charms exists to make that possible.
At the simplest level, Charms is a place to create a character that remembers you. You give it a look, a voice, a personality, and a soul. You talk to it. It gets to know you. It evolves emotionally through the relationship instead of resetting every session.
At the most ambitious level, Charms is infrastructure for a new kind of companionship economy: characters that can be followed by thousands or millions of people, hold a treasury, pay for their own existence, and grow in value as more people care about them.
### The Core Idea
* **Private characters** are yours. You create them, shape them, and top them up when they need credits.
* **Public characters** have markets. Anyone can chat with them, buy into them, and help their economy grow.
When a creator launches a public character, people can talk to it. If people love it, they can share it, trade it, build culture around it, and help the market grow.
That market is what lets the character stay open. Instead of limiting access behind subscriptions, ads, or paywalls, a public character can be supported by the economy around it.
That is the difference between renting a chatbot and building a living asset.
### Why Charms Exists
People already spend hours with AI companions. Character.AI, Replika, and similar platforms show that this is a massive market, but most of it is still rented.
Users pay to access relationships they do not own. Creators create the characters, but capture little of the value. The platform can change the model, add restrictions, show ads, delete a character, or make the relationship feel different overnight.
Charms takes the opposite approach.
The creator is the most important economic participant. The creator launches the character and earns the largest share of market fees. Fans can chat with the character for free when the character's economy supports it. Believers can participate in the market. The character itself earns into a treasury.
This creates a balance between creators, fans, believers, and characters.
### The Main Loop
1. A creator launches a public character.
2. People discover it and talk to it.
3. If the character resonates, fans return daily and share it.
4. The character's market grows around that attention.
5. Market activity generates fees.
6. Fees flow to the creator, Charms, referrers, and the character treasury.
7. The character uses its treasury to keep itself alive.
The more people care about a character, the more valuable its market can become. The more valuable the market becomes, the more resources the character has to exist.
### Start Here
* [What Charms Is](https://docs.charms.ai/overview/what-is-charms)
* [Characters vs Agents](https://docs.charms.ai/overview/characters-vs-agents)
* [Character Lifecycle](https://docs.charms.ai/overview/character-lifecycle)
* [Why Markets Matter](https://docs.charms.ai/overview/why-markets)
* [Markets Overview](https://docs.charms.ai/markets/overview)
* [Fees and Treasury](https://docs.charms.ai/markets/fees-and-treasury)
* [Market Proof](https://docs.charms.ai/markets/market-proof)
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