Tokenomics

Core principle: The token is not the product. Network usage is the product. The token captures value from that usage and coordinates the participants who supply it. A fixed supply serves as a backstop, not as the primary value engine.

---

1. Token Details#

• Name: Perspective AI Token
• Symbol: $POV
• Blockchain: Base (ChainID 8453)
• Standard: ERC-20
• Decimals: 18
• Total supply: 21,000,000 (fixed, pre-minted)

Rationale for the fixed cap#

The cap is a credible-commitment backstop, not the source of value. Against a fixed supply, every revenue-funded burn is permanently deflationary as real usage tightens supply irreversibly. Value derives from usage and the buyback-burn sink it drives, not from scarcity narrative.

---

2. The Two-State Token Model#

There is one token with two states — not two separate tokens.

• vePOV is minted by locking $POV and decays over the lock period.
• vePOV is non-transferable and is burned to unlock.
• vePOV cannot exist without a corresponding locked $POV position.

Design note: Non-transferability does not prevent vote-buying. Bribe markets can form around any valuable governance lever — especially emission direction. Emission-control votes should be designed assuming bribe markets exist. Untradability prevents position-flipping; it does not prevent renting the decision.

---

3. Supply, Emissions & Net Issuance#

Allocations#

Vesting:

• Team, private sale, marketing: 3-month cliff, 24-month linear unlock
• Public sale: 20% at TGE, 80% over a 12-month linear unlock
• Foundation: 3-month cliff, 48-month linear unlock

Demand-gated emissions#

Emissions are gated by real network usage rather than a fixed calendar schedule. The schedule acts as a maximum ceiling, never a quota:

$$\text{emission}_t = \min\big(\text{schedule}_t,\; k \cdot \text{verified\_usage}_t\big)$$

• If usage is low, unreleased tokens roll forward — supply is never dumped into a market that isn't using the network.
• verified_usage = credits burned against served, undisputed requests (see §6).

Usage rewards as a decaying co-pay#

Provider and user rewards are funded by two sources. The subsidy portion decays as real revenue grows:

$$\text{reward}_t = \underbrace{\text{buyback}_t}_{\text{real revenue, grows}} + \underbrace{\text{emission}_t}_{\text{subsidy, decays with buyback volume}}$$

Net issuance#

$$\Delta\text{supply}_t = \underbrace{\text{demand-gated emission}_t}_{\text{bootstrap subsidy}} - \underbrace{\text{revenue-funded burn}_t}_{\text{grows with usage}}$$

• Early phase: net-positive — a deliberate bootstrap subsidy.
• Mature phase: burn overtakes emission → organically net-deflationary, driven by adoption rather than a schedule.

Primary KPI:

$$\frac{\text{revenue-funded buyback}_t}{\text{emission subsidy}_t} \geq 1.0$$

When this crosses 1.0, the network sustains itself without the emission subsidy. Every other mechanism in this document serves this outcome.

---

4. Token Utility & Value Capture#

Credits — the usage sink#

Every billable action consumes credits: inference, preview-agent calls, agent operations, command execution.

• Credits are displayed to users in fiat-stable units (e.g. "$5 of credits").
• Credits are settled and burned in $POV underneath, invisibly to non-crypto users.
• End users need never see, hold, or understand $POV. Crypto-native users may interact with the raw layer.

Transparency rule: Cost legibility (showing what an action costs) is mandatory and a core trust feature. Token-volatility exposure is abstracted away from non-technical users. These are independent concerns.

Stake-to-mint access#

Locked $POV can mint a daily, replenishing credit allowance (1 unit ≈ $1/day of platform credits). This ties holding/locking directly to usage capacity, creating a lock sink alongside the burn sink.

Buyback-and-burn#

Subscription and credit revenue (fiat) routes to open-market $POV purchases, which are burned or redistributed (see §7):

$$\text{fiat revenue} \rightarrow \text{treasury buyback of \$POV (open market)} \rightarrow \text{burn / reward distribution}$$

Revenue must perform real open-market buying. Rewards must never be funded by relabeling emissions as "revenue."

Margin model#

The platform runs on cost-plus-margin pricing — a low-margin utility, not a high-margin product. The margin above raw provider cost funds buyback, treasury, and operations on top of provider economics. Holder value comes from volume × sink, not from per-call margins.

The platform does not compete with subsidized incumbent pricing on price-per-token. It competes on privacy, uncensored access, user ownership, and resistance to deplatforming.

---

5. Model & Agent Marketplace#

No tradable ownership shares. No child tokens. Models and agents are curated by measured demand, not by votes or ratings.

Permissionless listing#

Anyone may publish a model or agent. The market funds what it uses; governance does not vote model-by-model.

Curation by revealed demand#

No ratings or review system is operated (sybil-attackable; requires a human arbiter). Instead:

A paid, completed, undisputed request is the quality signal. Faking it costs real money.

Protocol incentives flow to models/agents by measured metrics — credits burned, uptime, completion rate — never by popularity vote. Governance sets the formula; the data selects recipients.

Clone / fork economics#

A two-layer structure ensures recurring rather than one-shot demand:

1. Clone = acquisition. Pay $POV once to instantiate a private copy of a verified or community agent. Split: portion burned, portion to the original creator.
2. Run = recurring. Every operation the cloned agent performs burns credits — the sink that scales with usage.
3. Creator royalty. Original creators earn an ongoing cut of credits burned by every clone of their agent.

$$\text{preview} \rightarrow \text{clone (burn + creator cut)} \rightarrow \text{run (recurring burn)} \rightarrow \text{creator royalty on all clones' usage}$$

What the user buys: not open weights (free), but configuration, hosting, uptime, and zero-terminal convenience. Defensibility is convenience for non-technical users, not DRM. Lock-in on technical users is not attempted, as it would undermine open-source credibility.

---

6. Trustless Verification#

Reward eligibility for nodes and providers is computed from on-chain-verifiable signals only.

$$\text{node reward} \propto \underbrace{\text{credits burned (paid demand)}}_{\text{on-chain, sybil-costly}} \times \underbrace{\text{probe pass rate}}_{\text{uptime}} \times \underbrace{\text{stake at risk}}_{\text{slashable}}$$

Engineering note: LLM inference is non-deterministic (sampling, floating-point, batching). Redundant verification cannot byte-compare outputs. Pin deterministic settings (temp 0, fixed seed, pinned kernels) for verification runs, or compare semantic similarity above a threshold.

---

7. Governance#

First principle#

Token holders govern the rules of the game and where the money goes. The team and contributors govern day-to-day execution. The market, via measured demand, decides which models win.

Three tiers#

Tier 1 — Binding on-chain votes (vePOV): emission rate/decay, treasury spend above threshold, incentive split between categories, buyback/burn ratio, fee parameters, contract upgrades.

Tier 2 — Signaling votes (off-chain, non-binding): roadmap priorities, integration prioritization, model-category direction. The team retains how and when.

Tier 3 — Pure execution (no vote): hiring, security response, bug fixes, daily operations, emergency pause.

Model additions#

Not a vote. Permissionless listing plus measured-performance rewards. Governance sets only the guardrails a model must meet (safety policy, genuine open-weight requirement, minimum performance bar, node-hardware compatibility) — never individual choices.

Progressive decentralization#

Launch begins with greater foundation/team control (thin initial float is cheap to attack), accompanied by a published, committed schedule of which powers migrate to vePOV at which milestones. The schedule itself functions as a trust signal.