The asset lock
No one extracts more than what they put in plus honest pay for honest work; the body cannot be bought, sold, or cashed out.
An asset lock is a single sentence in a body's constitution that removes the exit. Once it is in, the wealth a body builds is held in service of its purpose and can leave only as fair repayment or fair wages — never as a windfall, never as a sale, never as a distribution to whoever holds the most of something. It is one line, and it is the line that decides whether everything else survives its own success.
It works because it changes who shows up and what they want. Where a body can be cashed out, every decision acquires a shadow question: what does this do to the value of my claim? Growth becomes valuable for its own sake, purpose becomes a brand, and the people who would have bought it do not need to be villains — they only need to make a good offer at a bad moment. With the lock in place that offer cannot be accepted by anyone, including the founders, including a unanimous future membership. The temptation is not resisted; it is removed.
The lock is not a vow of poverty. People are paid, properly, for their work — The waterfall puts them ahead of any return to capital. Those who lent are repaid with a capped return. Founders are made whole for the unpaid hours and gifts they put in at the start, recorded honestly from day one rather than reconstructed from memory and resentment later. What is forbidden is the surplus above all that becoming any person's private claim on the body itself.
It is one of three locks that travel together: the asset lock on wealth, Constitutional Protection Of Purpose on the purpose, and anti-enclosure on the Commons. Each closes a different door out of the same room. Together they are most of what Structural Immunity means in the economic register, and they are the reason FSx exists as a legal shape rather than a good intention.
Also called: Asset Locks · anti-enclosure · the lock Stands on: Capital Subordinate To Purpose · Commons · Structural Immunity Opens onto: The waterfall · The Founder's Fund · Constitutional Protection Of Purpose · FSx · Usury · Extraction Of Wealth In play: Home · beyond Sources: Where Value Flows (Community Guidebook Toolkit; draft — "The Asset Lock holds", the Legacy Pool and Legacy Ledger) · The LIØNSBERG Pattern Language — Synthesized, Structural Immunity (canon-grade list; Asset Locks named) · The DNA of Heaven, Part IV (Fable synthesis — the seed's own statement of the lock) · lionsberg.wiki: Where Value Flows Open: There is no dedicated canon page for the asset lock; its articulation lives inside the Guidebook toolkit. The exact legal vehicle was still under counsel's review when the seed was written — the shape is treated as settled, the vehicle as open.