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 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: roughly four-fifths of the earned tranche emits within the first ~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. 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. That frees stake to do what operators actually want, buy priority, instead of sitting idle as collateral.
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.