MintID has its own native token with a fixed maximum supply of 93,924,792 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 forever. One thing it never does: buy access to anyone’s identity.
A hard maximum supply is fixed — 93,924,792 tokens — and can never be exceeded; it is written into the protocol, not left to anyone’s discretion. New tokens are created on a public, declining schedule over a long horizon, so most of the supply is known in advance.
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.
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 forever. Demand for trust removes tokens from circulation.
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.
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, set only after independent economic simulation.
Each agent credential pays a mint fee when issued and a small recurring lease while it lives, with a protocol cut partially burned. Costs scale with the agent population — never with how often agents prove things, because presentations are free by construction.
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.
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 an optional protocol cut is partially burned. Identification becomes a metered, priced event with the privacy-holder collecting.
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.
Verifying is free by construction: stateless, off-chain, no per-check fee, ever. What is paid is the premium layer around it — mirrors, archives, SLAs and dashboards — as optional services on top of a free public rail.
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.
The native token is the economic security asset of the chain. Every use ties value to honest behaviour.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some of the strongest design decisions are refusals. These boundaries are written into the specifications.
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.
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. USDC and EURC are the launch collateral; the ratified target set also includes BTC as the first post-launch volatile rail and, subject to legal review, XMR — each added through the protocol’s collateral registry, with per-asset over-collateralization, never by weakening the escrow guarantees.
A small, separate BTC/XMR 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Earn the declining epoch emission, split by stake and signing performance, plus transaction fees. Validators charge a declared commission on delegated rewards.
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.
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 hard cap, the declining schedule and the burn mechanics are normative requirements of the protocol. The maximum supply is fixed at exactly 93,924,792 tokens — immutable, ratified in July 2026. The genesis allocation and the decay curve remain deliberately unfixed: the specification requires an independent token-economic simulation before genesis, so those numbers are set by analysis, not by marketing. The genesis allocation itself follows a published policy: percentages set by the independent simulation, on-chain vesting from block 1, labelled addresses anyone can watch, multisig custody with an independent co-signer, and coverage by the pre-launch economic audit. Until then, treat any allocation figure you see elsewhere as unofficial.
Structure now; bands later; point figures never prematurely. Fees are versioned parameters gated on the independent Phase-0 economic simulation and pilot calibration. Every market figure on this site carries a primary source — see where the numbers come from.