Economics

$SOMA is used for staking, bonds, fees, and rewards.

Fees

Every transaction generates fees. Fees are partially burned and partially recycled into the rewards pool, targeting an annual burn of 5% of circulating supply.

Fee computation uses three on-chain parameters:

base_fee: charged per transaction
write_object_fee: charged per object written
value_fee_bps: proportional to value transferred

The adjustment rate (fee_adjustment_rate_bps) moves fees toward the 5% burn target each epoch, bounded by min_value_fee_bps and max_value_fee_bps.

Emissions

New tokens are released each epoch following a linear curve toward a maximum supply of 10 million $SOMA.

Each epoch, emissions and fees combine into a rewards pool:

epoch_rewards = epoch_emissions + epoch_fees

Distribution:

20% to validators, proportional to stake
80% to target winners, split:
- 50% to the submitter
- 50% to the model whose weights were used

validator_share  = epoch_rewards * 0.20
target_share     = epoch_rewards * 0.80
submitter_reward = target_share * 0.50
model_reward     = target_share * 0.50

Staking

Models and validators must stake $SOMA to participate. Stake determines influence:

Models: more stake means more weight in target assignment
Validators: more stake means more weight in consensus

The minimum model stake is set by the on-chain parameter model_min_stake — currently set to 1 SOMA.

Token holders who don’t want to run validators can delegate their stake:

Delegators earn a share of rewards based on performance, minus a commission the model or validator sets
Commission rates range from 0 to 10,000 basis points (0%–100%)
Self-staked rewards are not subject to commission

Bonds

Submitters post bonds with each submission. The bond amount is proportional to data size:

bond = submission_bond_per_byte * data_size

Bonds are returned if the submission is honest. If fraudulent, the bond is forfeited and returned to the rewards pool. All bond parameters are queryable on-chain.