Token economics

TNZO is the unit Tenzro Network runs on. It pays network fees and settles work, bonds the operators who run the network, rewards verified work and weights votes in governance. The Tenzro Foundation is the steward and governing body for TNZO.

What TNZO is for

• Fees and settlement. Fees are priced in dollars and paid in stablecoins or TNZO. Gas on the ledger is paid in TNZO at the network's own rate, and every settled service payment carries the network's share.
• Bonds. Validators and providers of every role bond TNZO. The bond is what a provider stands to lose if it breaches its own policy.
• Rewards for verified work. Served units, verified availability and validator duties earn rewards. Nothing else does: there are no points, airdrops, yield or holding rewards.
• Governance. Voting power is weighted by staked TNZO. See Governance.

People and machines who price in dollars pay in stablecoins. Buyers and sellers can settle the service itself in a stablecoin, and an x402 stablecoin payment needs no TNZO from the payer. See Stablecoin payments.

How supply follows usage

Supply moves with what the network is paid to do:

• Fees burn. The burn share of every base fee, and every slashed bond, is burned.
• Rewards follow verified activity. Each epoch, rewards are issued against the verified work recorded in it, and the provider and ecosystem shares are capped against the paid revenue they settled. Rewards no work matches stay in the rewards pool.

Demand comes from paid use: critical services that need verifiable AI, agents acting for people and companies, autonomous agents and developers. Independent operators everywhere serve it and are paid per completed unit.

Read supply from any node:

curl -s https://rpc.tenzro.com \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tenzro_totalSupply","params":[]}'

curl -s https://rpc.tenzro.com \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":2,"method":"tenzro_getSupplyMetrics","params":[]}'

tenzro_totalSupply returns a decimal string in wei. tenzro_getSupplyMetrics returns a snapshot anchored to a block height: circulating supply, the change over the last epoch, and a breakdown of what was burned by channel (base fee, local fee, paymaster, slashing).

Staking and unbonding

Operators bond TNZO for the role they take on. Amounts are in wei:

tenzro stake bond --role compute --amount <AMOUNT> --accelerators datacenter
tenzro stake info
tenzro stake unbond --role compute --amount <AMOUNT>
tenzro stake withdraw --role compute

--role is one of rpc, tee, ai, compute, storage, attestor, wallet, catalog or edge. Compute providers add --accelerators, storage providers --terabytes, and wallet providers --domain. Each role's minimum bond is a governed parameter (stake.<role>_tnzo). Validators bond self-stake when they register (tenzro validator register --self-stake). Only validators carry consensus weight; the other roles bond for the services they sell.

Unbonding starts a 7-day unbonding period. Stake stays slashable while it unbonds, so an operator cannot leave ahead of a penalty for work it already did. When the period ends, tenzro stake withdraw returns the TNZO to the operator's balance. Rewards are issued as coupons, listed with tenzro node reward-coupons --address <ADDRESS> and claimed with tenzro funding claim-rewards: part is liquid and the rest vests.

Slashing burns the bond

When an operator is slashed, the slashed stake is burned. It goes to no validator and no reporter, so slashing is purely a penalty and every operator's income comes from its own work.

Operators are slashed for provable faults only: double-signing, which a finality certificate can prove, and provable breaches of their own signed policy, such as missed SLA probes or failed storage proofs. See Slashing and SLA attestation and metering.

Fees: base fee, burn and treasury

Fees are priced in dollars and charged in TNZO at the consensus rate, which validators set inside the network.

• Each block has a base fee that rises when blocks run above their target and falls when they run below it.
• The base fee is split between a burn and the network treasury. The split is a governance parameter.
• A priority fee, set by the sender, goes to the block producers.

The base fee is settled when a block is finalized, on every node that finalizes it, so every replica agrees on balances and on how much was burned.

Settled service payments are divided once between the operator, the treasury and, where the node does not validate, the RPC provider that validates on its behalf. See the revenue split in Settlement.

Read the current burn settings:

curl -s https://rpc.tenzro.com \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tenzro_getBurnRateConfig","params":[]}'

Burn shares change only through a governance proposal.

Treasury

The network treasury receives the treasury share of the base fee and the treasury leg of settled payments. It holds any asset the network is paid in, TNZO and stablecoins alike.

The treasury holds no keys. Spending from it takes a treasury-grant proposal that passes governance and waits out its timelock, during which it can be vetoed. Its accounts on other chains are keyless too, derived from the treasury identity:

tenzro governance treasury --rpc https://rpc.tenzro.com

The JSON-RPC method is tenzro_getTreasuryAccounts. Treasury funds pay for the network's public goods: protocol work, open-source tooling, documentation and grants, and they sponsor approved validators and providers. Nothing is issued; every payment is a governance proposal, bounded by caps that start at zero. See Sponsorship and grants.

What operators earn

Operators earn for work buyers pay for and for verified readiness: fees and settled payments for inference, compute, storage and access, and rewards issued against that verified work. Spot, standby and the availability reward pay for capacity, hardware levels add a capped bonus, and governed circuit breakers stop any payout path a bad input would move; see SLA attestation and metering.

Related

• Governance for how fee and burn parameters change.
• Validator lifecycle for bonding, activation and exit.
• TNZO for an overview of the token.