🪙The Witnet Coin (Wit)
Utility of the Wit coins
The Wit coin is a utility token, native to the Witnet blockchain, encouraging fair and trustworthy behavior throughout the network. These coins perform a number of important functions within the ecosystem:
Gas / fees
Transactions on the Witnet blockchain require fees for occupying block space. Validator nodes are allowed Wit tokens for each block they get accepted by the network, as well as for including transactions into those blocks.
Payment for service
Queries to the Witnet oracle need to pay the nodes resolving the requests using Wit coins.
Securing the network (staking)
Node operators need to stake Wit coins in their nodes to increase their chance to mine blocks and to get data requests assigned for them to resolve and take fees from.
Tokenomics of the Wit coin
Maximum supply
The maximum supply of 2,500,000,000 Wits is reached after many decades of mining.
In practice, this maximum amount will never be reached because in the early days of the network, there was a high rate of epochs without blocks, leading to the implicit burning of 13,000,000 Wits.
Circulating supply
The circulating supply can be checked in real time on CoinMarketCap:
Issuance rate
70% of the total supply (1,750,000,000 Wits) will be mined by block validators (aka witnesses) through block minting rewards.
Witnet block time is 45 seconds. Initially, the block minting reward is set to 250 Wits per block, and is set to decrease geometrically, with a 50% reduction (halvening) every 3,500,000 blocks (around every 5 years).
Until a first halvening in 2025, there will be 1920 blocks mined every day, with a daily token issuance of 480,000 Wits, a monthly issuance of 14,600,000 Wits, and a yearly issuance of 175,000,000 Wits.
Genesis Block initial mine
The remaining 30% of the total Wit supply (750,000,000 Wits) were pre-mined in the mainnet genesis block (the first block in the blockchain).
250,000,000 Wits (10%) went to founders and early contributors. All these tokens were subject to a lockup period: 6 months cliff in April 2021, followed by 18 months of bi-weekly unlocks of 1/24th of each allocation.
250,000,000 (10%) was allocated with no lock-ups to the Witnet Foundation to support ongoing efforts.
250,000,000 (10%) were preassigned with no lock-ups to participants in the Republic.co token pre-sale and SAFT participants.
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