Every market borrows its discipline from an external anchor that eventually, forcibly arrives — a coming exchange listing, a Monday reopen, a settlement print. A prediction market has none: its catalyst resolves to a fact that snaps the probability to 0 or 1, not a price it converges to. So VSA must MANUFACTURE the anchor it lacks — a disciplined, subsidized, independently-verified spot price (Layer 1). Everything here reframes around that spine. Repricing a sponsor's milestone note, once the headline, is shown later as one downstream application of the manufactured price — not the point of the demo.