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, all of it. The whole 5B is emitted only for verified contribution (served inference plus passed liveness challenges) on an 8-year halving schedule, Bitcoin-style, open to anyone on the same permissionless terms. The period was stretched from four years to eight to keep early-year emission, and the inflation it implies, moderate. The curve is asymptotic: about four-fifths of the supply emits within the first ~20 years, approaching but never quite reaching the cap.
• No genesis allocation. There is no premine, no launch sale, no team tranche, and no foundation tranche. Supply at genesis is zero, and every unit that will ever exist is minted against an epoch’s verified work. The founding team earns, if at all, only as an operator on the same terms as anyone else.
• The schedule, in numbers. The per-epoch ceiling is derived from the cap rather than chosen (a halving series sums to twice its first period, so ceiling = cap / 2P), which works out to about 35,674 OGONG per hourly epoch. Like Bitcoin’s subsidy it is a step, constant across a period and halving at the boundary: at most 312.5M in year one (6.25% of the cap), exactly half the cap at the year-8 halving, and about 81% by year 20.
• No bond, on either lane. Nothing anyone posts is a slashable correctness deposit. Cheap verification, not capital at risk, is what keeps answers honest. On the OGONG L1 there is no stake at all: priority, seats, and emission share are all bought with verified work, and the penalty for cheating is ejection and forfeited future earnings, never a seized balance. On the deployed EVM lane, staked OGONG buys routing priority and availability weighting, which is pure upside and is still never slashed for a wrong answer. (See How verification works and The OGONG L1.)

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,

plus a liveness credit for answering a random availability challenge.

Routers are not on that list, though an earlier version of this page and the whitepaper both put them there. A router earns fees, not emission. Emission is paid against work a validator quorum has agreed on, and “routes served” is not a figure the chain can check: the router is off-chain, and a number it reported about itself is exactly what emission must never be paid against. Giving routers a share needs a verifiable measure first, which does not exist yet. That credit is a bootstrap floor: it guarantees a per-epoch payout to provably ready capacity before real demand exists, so miners earn from day one rather than waiting for inference volume, and it tapers linearly to zero across the first year (8,760 hourly epochs). It is drawn from the same finite tranche as everything else, so it front-loads emission rather than adding to it. Each epoch the validators first agree one canonical work tally — a leader proposes the distribution and the others ratify it only if it matches their own within tolerance — and then co-sign the mint against that agreed distribution. So nothing mints without consensus, and honest validators that saw the epoch boundary slightly differently still converge instead of stalling.

A hard per-epoch ceiling backs this on-chain: the total minted across all recipients in an epoch can never exceed that epoch’s scheduled reward, and the running total can never exceed the anti-front-load cumulative schedule or the 5B cap. So no amount of fan-out — splitting a mint across many recipient addresses — can inflate an epoch’s emission beyond the halving curve.

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.

A provider that is directly reachable (it serves the request over its own endpoint, not relayed through the router) pays no router cut — that share folds back into the provider’s residual. Only a NAT’d provider served through the router’s reverse-tunnel relay pays the router share, since the router did the work of carrying its traffic. The settle proves which case applies, so a provider cannot claim the direct rate while actually being relayed.

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. So no capital has to sit idle as collateral to make the network safe: on the L1 none is posted at all, and on the EVM lane what is staked buys priority rather than insuring correctness.

A floor price keeps that deterrent honest: a request is not routed below a governance-set minimum, so fee competition can never shrink the fee-at-risk — and with it the cost of getting caught — toward zero. And a consumer who wants certainty over speed can force verification of its own request (every time, or at a probability it chooses) rather than rely on the network’s baseline audit sampling.