Network economics

This is the unit of account on the Citrate Network and the rules that move it. SALT settles the work the network performs, fees, block rewards, and staking; it is not a product to hold, and this page does not treat it as one. It is for builders and operators who need to reason about what the network charges, what it pays, and how supply behaves over the long view.

What it is

SALT is the credit the network counts in. When a transaction pays a fee, when a node earns a reward for sealing a block, or when stake is placed and returned, the amount is denominated in SALT. The supply is fixed at genesis: one billion SALT, never more. The smallest unit is wei-style, so one SALT divides into 10^18 base units, the same granularity a developer already expects from an account balance.

The economics live in one crate, core/economics/. It holds the token itself (token.rs), the per-block reward schedule (enhanced_rewards.rs), and the constants that bound the whole system (lib.rs). The reward schedule is the part worth understanding early, because it is what gives a node a reason to keep the network running, and it shrinks on a fixed cadence so that early seasons are more generous than late ones.

A block reward is built from a base reward plus four bonus pools, each expressed as a percentage of that base reward. The four pools recognise four kinds of contribution: validator performance, AI contribution, network health, and long-term staking. A node that does more of the work the network values earns a larger share of the pools. The base reward halves every 2,100,000 blocks, roughly four years at the testnet cadence, so issuance tapers toward zero over the network's life rather than running flat forever.

How to use it

You rarely set these values yourself; you read them, so you can price work and project earnings.

1. Price a transaction. Estimate the fee the way you would on any account-based ledger: gas used times the prevailing price. SALT carries 18 decimals, so amounts and balances behave like the smallest units you are used to.
2. Read the live economic state. Call citrate_getEconomicState for current network metrics and citrate_getToken for token fundamentals over JSON-RPC. Both are documented in the chain RPC reference.
3. Reason about rewards. If you operate a node, the reward you can expect for a sealed block is the base reward plus your earned share of the four bonus pools, adjusted for where the chain sits in its halving schedule. See run a node for the operator path.

Reference

Token constants, verified in core/economics/src/lib.rs and core/economics/src/token.rs:

Total supply in base units is 1_000_000_000 × 10^18. The token tracks balances, total minted, and total burned; circulating supply is minted minus burned, and minting is capped at the one billion ceiling.

Block reward schedule, verified in core/economics/src/enhanced_rewards.rs:

The base reward and the four pool percentages are defaults in the source; we describe the base as a configurable base reward rather than asserting a fixed number, since governance can move it. What does not move is the halving cadence and the fixed supply.

use citrate_economics::*;

// Token fundamentals are constants:
assert_eq!(TOKEN_SYMBOL, "SALT");
assert_eq!(TOTAL_SUPPLY, 1_000_000_000); // 18 decimals; base units = value × 10^18

Design rationale

A fixed supply with a halving base reward keeps the accounting honest: the network can settle the work it performs without an open-ended issuance that quietly dilutes everyone who came before. Splitting the reward into four pools, rather than paying a flat amount per block, lets the network pay for the behaviours it actually depends on, uptime, useful compute, a healthy peer set, and committed stake, instead of paying the same for a block whether or not the node contributed anything beyond sealing it. The trade is more moving parts to reason about; the benefit is that incentives point at the work rather than at the clock.

Failure modes

The supply cap is enforced at mint: an attempt to mint past one billion SALT is rejected, so no path through the reward schedule can inflate beyond the ceiling. Burned credits are tracked separately, so circulating supply stays an honest minted-minus-burned figure rather than drifting. Because the base reward and pool percentages are governance-configurable, the load-bearing invariant is the supply cap and the halving cadence, not any single reward number; treat a published base-reward figure as a default, not a guarantee.

Access and canon

Public. SALT settles the work the network performs; it is not an investment instrument, and Atlas does not describe it as one. The token fundamentals, the reward structure, and the halving cadence are exactly what a builder or operator needs to reason about the economy. No keys, balances, or private allocations appear here.

Source and verification

• Source: citrate-chain/core/economics/, constants in src/lib.rs and src/token.rs, reward schedule in src/enhanced_rewards.rs.
• Live state over JSON-RPC: citrate_getEconomicState and citrate_getToken (core/api/src/economics_rpc.rs); see chain RPC.
• Audited against SHA: 03d7851.
• Status: Implemented (testnet), internally tested, pre external audit. The base reward and pool percentages are configurable defaults in source, not certified values.