Tokenomics

OGONG is the network’s unit of account: consumers pay it for inference, and providers and validators earn it for serving and securing the network. Model makers are attributed on-chain, with a royalty slot reserved for them (inactive at launch, deferred to governance).

The principles

• Fixed supply. A hard cap of 5,000,000,000 OGONG, enforced as an on-chain invariant.
• Earned by work. The dominant 80% (4B) is never pre-allocated. It is emitted only for verified contribution (served inference plus passed liveness challenges) on a 4-year halving schedule, Bitcoin-style, open to anyone on the same permissionless terms. The curve is asymptotic: roughly 97% is emitted within ~20 years, approaching but never quite reaching the cap.
• Initial supply. The remaining 1B (20%) is allocated at launch: 625M to core team & advisors, 250M to the Ogong foundation, and 125M to public liquidity.
• Stake is priority, not a bond. Staked OGONG buys routing priority and availability weighting. It is not a slashable correctness deposit. Cheap verification, not capital at risk, is what keeps answers honest. (See How verification works.)

How emission is earned

The earned tranche mints to the roles that produce and secure work, in proportion to what each verifiably contributes per epoch:

• providers for settled inference,
• validators and verifiers for audits performed,
• routers for routes served,

plus a liveness credit for answering a random availability challenge, which decays with the halving as a bootstrap. Emission amounts are agreed by a validator quorum from the same on-chain record that settlement runs on, so nothing mints without consensus.

Where the money goes per request

When a verified request settles, the escrowed fee is split on-chain across the parties that produced and secured the result: the provider that served it, the router, and the validator with a verification reserve. The model’s maker is attributed too, though the maker-royalty slot is reserved and currently inactive. A reply that fails its audit releases no fee at all.

Why a deposit isn’t needed

In most pay-for-work networks an operator posts a large refundable bond so they have something to lose if they cheat. OGONG drives that to zero: because verification covers nearly every request, simply forfeiting the cheated request’s fee is deterrent enough. That frees stake to do what operators actually want, buy priority, instead of sitting idle as collateral.