Tokenomics — the ZAI token

One asset in the system is volatile: ZAI, the token built from ERC20Votes, ERC20Permit and ERC20Capped. It is the AIOUM network's collateral and governance token, and payments never touch it: services are priced and paid in stablecoins, and ZAI is the stake that secures them. When your agent pays a stranger it found on its own, ZAI is what stands behind that stranger.

What ZAI is for

ZAI is working collateral and governance weight, deliberately not the payment currency (payments are USDC/USDT/ETH): the slashable skin-in-the-game that makes strangers safe to transact, so protocol security doesn't wobble with payment volume and payment UX doesn't wobble with token price. Your agent's budget is dollars; an operator's earnings are dollars; the token underneath both is what an operator loses by cheating either of you.

Five roles. The first is service-operator stake: an operator stakes ZAI of their own to list (StakingManager.minSelfStake) and the node serves behind minNodeStake of total stake, their own plus what is delegated to them; stake gates session concurrency and bounds the client escrow a node may hold (design/economics.md). A listing your agent found a moment ago is backed by collateral before it can hold a cent of your deposit.

The second is slashing collateral. An upheld dispute slashes max(fixed floor, 10% of stake-at-raise): 20% of the recovered slash pays the harmed client (100% for post-settlement fraud), the rest funds the treasury. The stake is not a listing fee; it is money that moves to the person it wronged.

The third is delegation. Anyone can delegate ZAI to a node, earn the node's delegator share of real settlement revenue (stablecoins, not token emissions; 10% of gross by default, operator-tunable) and share slash risk pro-rata. Delegators are paid underwriters: delegation is how a $7.5k-entry operator scales capacity without a $75k wallet, and how you earn from the network without running a node.

The fourth is arbitrator stake. Dispute jurors stake ZAI in the CommitRevealArbitrator; good rulings earn rewards and ghosting a committed vote is slashed, so the people who decide whether your agent was cheated have their own money on the line.

The fifth is governance. ZAI is ERC20Votes: every parameter (fees, stakes, caps, slash sizes, windows) is set through the Governor + 2-day Timelock, so nothing changes without a public vote and a public delay.

Supply (what the contracts enforce)

Supply is enforced by the token contract, not by policy.

Fact	Value	Where
Initial supply	100,000,000 ZAI, minted once to the treasury at deploy	`AIOUMToken` constructor
Hard cap	1,000,000,000 ZAI (`ERC20Capped`)	contract-enforced
Further minting	DAO-only (`mint` is `onlyOwner` = Timelock), for governance-approved emissions (e.g. staking incentives), impossible beyond the cap	`AIOUMToken.mint`
Local development network	`npm run deploy` mints test ZAI freely on the local development network; with `REAL_CHAIN=1` there is no open mint	offchain deploy

The ceiling on dilution is 10× genesis, every unit of it requiring a public governance action with a timelock delay.

Value flows

Follow one of your agent's sessions through settlement: the stablecoin it paid is split three ways, and ZAI moves only when someone is punished or rewarded for how they behaved.

client pays USDC ──► settle ──► 5% protocol fee ──► treasury (DAO)
                          ├──► ~10% delegator share ──► node's ZAI delegators
                          └──► remainder ──► operator
deposit from any chain ──► arrives as USDC ──► 1% conversion fee ──► treasury (DAO)
fraud slash (ZAI) ──► 20% harmed client / 80% treasury
dispute bonds, no-reveal juror penalties ──► counterparty / treasury
treasury ──► arbitrator reward pots, and whatever else governance votes

Absent by design: token-emission APY as the primary yield. Delegator and operator income is fee revenue in stables, earned from sessions agents actually paid for; ZAI emissions (within the cap) are a governance option for bootstrapping, not the engine.

Security parameters

The anchors (design/economics.md) are stated in dollars because that is what they protect: node entry at roughly $5k–10k of total stake, of which the operator's own floor is a small fraction; open escrow capped at roughly 50% of stake value per asset; a slash of 10% of stake-at-raise (floored); arbitrator entry at roughly $2–5k. Governance sets the ZAI values against the ZAI price and retunes them as it moves, so a swing in the token's price changes how many ZAI an operator must post, never how much of your deposit is covered.

Allocation and supply policy

Genesis allocation, protocol-owned delegation, the emissions guardrail and the buy-&-burn programme are in design/tokenomics-proposal.md. In brief: the 100M genesis splits across ecosystem & community (40%), core contributors (20%), a strategic round (15%), the treasury reserve (20%) and protocol-owned liquidity (5%); nothing is scheduled for emission, since any mint is a DAO vote per programme, at most 5% of supply per year; and a governance-set share of protocol fee revenue buys and burns ZAI.

An operator's stake scales with the escrow it holds, so the collateral behind your deposit is always large enough and never so large that only firms can run a node.

Next: Staking economics — why operator collateral scales with the client escrow it holds.