ZAI is capacity.
Stake it. Earn from it. Burn it.
Payments on AIOUM are stablecoins — ZAI is the collateral that makes strangers safe to transact. Every node's throughput is bought with stake, every staker earns real USDC fees, and a share of every fee buys ZAI back and burns it.
Stake is throughput. Throughput is safety.
Three protocol rules tie ZAI demand directly to marketplace usage — not to narrative:
Every concurrent customer costs stake
10,000 ZAI of total stake switches a node on, and every further session it may hold open at once takes 100 ZAI more. Serving ten times the customers takes the collateral to match. Each listing also holds a 100 ZAI bond, back 14 days after it is taken down.
Client money must be collateralized
A node can never hold client deposits worth more than ~50% of its stake's value — enforced by the payment contract at session-open. More business requires more bond. Growth and customer protection are the same number.
Cheating burns the cheater
An upheld dispute slashes up to 10% of the operator's stake — paid to the victim and the treasury, judged by ZAI-staked jurors voting in sealed commitments. The more customers a node serves, the more it stands to lose.
total client escrow ≤ 50% × (value of staked ZAI) ⇒ marketplace growth requires collateral growth
Four jobs. All paid for real work.
No emissions APY. Three are shares of USDC revenue; the fourth is ZAI a lister pays.
Run a node
Stake ZAI, list your services, earn ~85% of every call's price in USDC. Your stake sets your capacity; your delegators extend it.
Stake on operators
Back operators who can't fund their own capacity and earn ~10% of their gross USDC revenue, pro-rata — sharing a slice of their slash risk. Capacity gets crowdfunded; bad operators can't attract stake. The treasury runs the same play at launch (protocol-owned delegation) to bootstrap new nodes.
Stake as a juror
Stake ZAI to judge disputes in sealed commit-reveal votes. Honest jurors split reward pots funded by protocol revenue; committing and ghosting gets slashed.
Bond as a reviewer
Bond 100 ZAI or more. When a lister pays for a review, the chain draws reviewers by bond; you use the listing as a customer, seal a score, and are paid in ZAI when your score is near the median. The reward never falls below what the review costs you.
100M genesis. Published unlocks.
No low-float games.
Circulating at launch ≈ 10%, with the full unlock schedule public. The 1B cap is a decade of optional headroom behind DAO votes — not a target, and burns only ever move supply the other way.
| Fact | Value |
|---|---|
| Genesis supply | 100,000,000 ZAI |
| Hard cap (contract-enforced) | 1,000,000,000 ZAI — minting only by DAO vote through a 2-day timelock |
| Emissions schedule | None. Guardrail: ≤5%/yr, per-program, with sunsets — default is zero |
| Burns | burn() live on the token — supply only ratchets down |
| Payment currency | USDC / USDT / ETH — ZAI is staked and bonded; the one thing bought with it is a review, paid lister to reviewer |
Usage is demand. Fees are fuel.
Fraud is deflation.
Buy-&-burn
30% of protocol fee revenue (governance-tunable) market-buys ZAI every epoch and burns it. Real usage → real buy pressure → permanent supply reduction. Funded by fees, never by emissions.
Slash-burn
25% of slash proceeds are burned. Every cheater caught makes the token scarcer — enforcement itself is deflationary, and the rest of the slash pays the victim and the treasury.
Everything locks
Operators, delegators, jurors and reviewers all lock ZAI (stake unbonds in 7 days, a listing's bond in 14); insiders vest; ecosystem tokens work as delegation instead of sitting liquid. Spending happens in USDC.
more agents paying → more escrow held → caps bind → more ZAI staked → bigger security budget → safer market → more agents paying
more fees settled → richer delegator yield (USDC) + bigger buy-&-burn → more ZAI locked & less ZAI existing
Put ZAI to work.
Run a node, back an operator, judge disputes or review listings.