Token economics

A scarce token that pays for security

MintID has its own native token with a fixed maximum supply of 108,000,000 tokens — like Bitcoin, the cap is absolute. It exists to make the network expensive to attack and cheap to trust: validators lock it to secure consensus, issuers lock it as collateral for good behaviour, and the businesses that profit from trust pay fees — part of which are destroyed. One thing it never does: buy access to anyone’s identity.

In one minute

How the money works

01

The supply is capped

A hard maximum supply is fixed — 108,000,000 tokens — written into the protocol. New tokens are created on a public, strictly declining schedule — the argued point: 3% of the cap in year one, declining by 5% each year — and the schedule is a completeness rule: the curve sums exactly to the validator reward pool, so every token the cap promises can actually exist.

02

Validators earn the new tokens

Each epoch’s new tokens go to the validators who actually did the work — weighted by how much they have at stake and how reliably they signed. Miss blocks and you earn less; cheat and you lose your stake. Nobody is paid for judging identities: validators never see one.

03

Businesses pay, and part is burned

The organisations that profit from the network — KYC issuers above all — pay admission fees, renewal fees and ongoing registry leases. A defined part of those fees, and of any penalties, is destroyed; the protocol’s cut follows an argued split of 30% burned, 45% directed to validators and 25% to the foundation — earmarked first for its validator operator floor program. Demand for trust removes tokens from circulation.

04

Supply can shrink — no promises

When burns exceed new issuance in a period, total supply falls. And burning is one-way: burned tokens never re-open room to mint, because the cap counts everything ever issued — not what circulates. The protocol makes that possible by design, but deliberately promises no perpetual deflation — sound security is never sacrificed to force a chart to go down.

Bands are ratified and frozen; the points shown are our argued working points inside those bands, and the independent economic simulation validates every one of them before genesis.

Genesis allocation

Three compartments, argued points in ratified bands

The genesis allocation is ratified as bands — a hard envelope committed in writing, in public — and inside those bands the working points are now published: development 15%, public tranche 25%, validator reward pool 60%. Argued points, not guesses: the independent economic simulation validates every one of them before genesis.

15%

Development & team

Natively vested on-chain over four years with a one-year cliff, plus a twelve-month lock-up on top — and a rule most projects avoid writing down: insider genesis accounts may not delegate, may not vote, and do not count toward the launch-security gate.

25%

Public tranche

The tranche that finances the launch — offered, if ever, only through the complete EU MiCA Title II process, with a published budget annex mapping the entire launch cost stack to it, through mainnet plus twelve months. Nothing is for sale today.

60%

Validator emission pool

Sixty percent of the hard cap — the argued point inside a ratified ≥60% band — is reserved for one thing only: paying the validators who secure the chain, on a strictly declining emission with no re-mint. And when emission eventually runs out, the written answer is a modelled post-emission fee market — none of its successor options is printing more tokens.

The vesting, the cliff, the lock-up and the no-delegation/no-vote rule are protocol policy, not promises. Bands are ratified and frozen; the points shown are our argued working points inside those bands, and the independent economic simulation validates every one of them before genesis. The cap needs no simulation: 108,000,000 is immutable.

These bands — and the mechanism behind every flow on this page — were examined by an economic-viability audit (July 2026), performed by Conectia PRO — a related-party service provider to the protocol, not an arm’s-length third party, disclosed on the report’s cover — with the verdict, stated whole, and the complete register of critical findings published on this site. Read the findings

Economics

Five flows, one structure

Everything the network earns fits in five flows. This is the canonical structure — the same one used with partners and reviewers. The mechanism of each flow is committed in the specifications; apart from the fixed maximum supply, the numbers are versioned parameters — band ranges committed before genesis, final points set by the independent economic simulation.

LEASE

Agent mint + lease

Each agent credential pays a mint fee when issued and a small recurring lease while it lives, with a normative, non-zero protocol cut, partially burned. Costs scale with the agent population — never with how often agents prove things, because presentations are free by construction.

ISSUER

Issuer economics

KYC organisations pay registry admission and renewal, and post a slashable bond without which they cannot operate — misbehaviour is expensive and undercollateralization is self-suspending. Issuers charge their own KYC and issuance fees to their clients — so recruiting one issuer brings its entire portfolio onto the rail.

BID

Disclosure brokerage

When a relying party pays to identify an agent, the disclosure bid is paid to the principal — the person whose privacy is at stake — while the issuer earns a brokerage fee for operating the consent machinery, and a normative, non-zero protocol cut is partially burned. Identification becomes a metered, priced event with the privacy-holder collecting.

ARBITER

Dispute & arbiter market

Disputes run on slashable bonds and a paid, registered arbiter market, with the accumulated cost borne by the eventual loser. These fees sustain the ecosystem roles as off-chain service revenue — never as consensus rewards, which stay reserved for validators.

SVC

Premium verification services

Verifying is free by construction: stateless, off-chain, no per-check fee. What is paid is the premium layer around it — mirrors, archives, SLAs and dashboards — as optional services on top of a free public rail.

Why it compounds

One KYC, every agent

One human verification amortises across every agent that human deploys. Machine identities already outnumber human ones roughly 50 to 1 (Omdia, Dec 2024). In a per-check world, every agent of every human re-pays verification at every counterparty. Here, one KYC backs N agent credentials at the marginal cost of a mint and a lease — orders of magnitude below a KYC — and every presentation is free for everyone. The marginal cost of accountability per agent tends toward the mint cost, not the KYC cost.

Every market figure on this site carries a primary source — see where the numbers come from.

What the token is for

The native token is the economic security asset of the chain. Every use ties value to honest behaviour.

STAKE

Staking & delegation

Validators bond tokens to run consensus, and anyone can delegate to them and share the rewards. The more value honestly staked, the more expensive an attack becomes.

BOND

Issuer bonds

Every KYC organisation allowed to issue credentials locks a token bond as collateral — and cannot be active without it: the requirement is enforced by consensus, not by policy. Proven fraud or negligence gets it slashed through a documented, evidence-committed process, and if the collateral falls below the protocol minimum the issuer is suspended automatically — vouching for people has skin in the game, verifiably. Slashed collateral has only two destinations: compensation for the parties an issuer harmed, or the burn address. It can never fund operations — the body that adjudicates sanctions cannot profit from them, and that rule is enforced by construction, not by promise.

BURN

Fees, leases & burns

Transaction fees, issuer registry leases and status-publication fees keep the network running — and defined portions are burned. The system does not depend on end users transacting constantly to sustain itself.

VOTE

Governance weight

Software governance runs through the token: protocol upgrades and versioned parameters are decided by token-weighted on-chain voting, alongside an operational compliance council whose reserve actions always require an independent custodian’s co-signature.

Deliberate boundaries

What the token is not

Some of the strongest design decisions are refusals. These boundaries are written into the specifications.

Not a key to identities

No payment — token, bid or bond — is ever the lawful basis for revealing who someone is. Commercial disclosure requires the person’s consent; dispute disclosure requires due process. Money alone never unlocks identity.

Not the dispute escrow

The recourse funds behind AI agents are held in USDC or EURC stablecoins, self-custodied in the owner’s wallet under a smart-contract lock — so compensation is stable and predictable, insulated from token volatility. The committed collateral set is USDC/EURC at launch, extending to BTC — each asset added through the protocol’s collateral registry, with per-asset over-collateralization, never by weakening the escrow guarantees.

Not backed by the reserve

A small, separate BTC treasury exists only for proven issuer-fraud remediation and critical security incidents. It is not token backing, not escrow collateral (the escrow collateral rails are a separate, registry-governed mechanism) and not a price-support fund — moving it requires the council plus an independent custodian, with a timelock and a public report.

Not a DeFi playground

No lending, no wrapped collateral, no stablecoin backing, no token-price support, no cross-chain bridges. The token does one job — economic security for an identity rail — and refuses the rest.

Not a privacy coin

The native token never supports shielded or anonymity-enhanced transfers — a protocol invariant of the same rank as the hard cap. MintID’s privacy protects identities, not payments: the token’s value flows stay transparent and auditable end to end.

Two payments, two rails

A bid is not a bond

BID

Disclosure bid

A payment for consent. It goes to the principal if they accept; nothing happens if they refuse; it is never slashed. On the commercial rail the basis for any disclosure is the principal’s consent.

BOND

Dispute bond

Slashable stake: it deters frivolous claims and is adjudicated. On the dispute rail the basis is due process, never money.

The two never mix — and no payment of either kind is ever a lawful basis for revealing someone’s identity.

Incentives

Who earns what

Consensus rewards and service revenue are firewalled from each other: securing blocks is paid in new tokens, while identity services are paid in ordinary fees that can never influence consensus.

Validators & delegators

Earn the declining epoch emission, split by stake and signing performance, plus transaction fees. Validators charge a declared commission on delegated rewards.

Issuers

Pay to play — admission, renewal and registry leases — and earn off-chain by charging for KYC and credential issuance. Their locked bond is what they stand to lose.

Verifiers & arbiters

Earn direct service fees off-chain — verification services, status mirrors, proof APIs, and arbitration fees paid by the losing side of a dispute. Never consensus rewards.

The mechanism is committed. The bands are frozen. The points are argued — and validated before genesis.

The hard cap, the declining schedule and the burn mechanics are normative requirements of the protocol; the maximum supply is fixed at exactly 108,000,000 tokens — immutable. The genesis allocation is no longer an open question: the bands are ratified and frozen, and the points on this page — 15% development, 25% public tranche, 60% validator reward pool — are our argued working points inside those bands, with the independent economic simulation validating every one of them before genesis. Most token models quote a max supply their own emission schedule can never reach; MintID closed that gap by rule — the emission curve must sum to the reward pool exactly, so the 108M cap is not a marketing number but the real denominator of every figure we publish. The allocation will be published address-by-address, natively vested on-chain, custodied under multisig with an independent co-signer — and the whole economic design was put through a published economic-viability audit before genesis.

One thing stays visible on this page on purpose: nothing is for sale. No token sale, no pre-sale, no whitelist, no price, no date. As a matter of ratified policy there is exactly one route by which an offer could ever exist — the complete EU MiCA Title II process: crypto-asset white paper, notification to the AFM — the Dutch regulator, fixed as the competent authority under MiCA by the foundation’s seat — public offer, and only then admission to trading. Until that day, anything that looks like a MintID sale is not us.

Structure committed; bands ratified and frozen; argued points validated by the independent simulation before genesis. Fees remain versioned parameters gated on that simulation and on pilot calibration. Every market figure on this site carries a primary source — see where the numbers come from.