Gonka charges for exactly one thing: tokens processed by an AI model. There is no gas market, no fee auction, no priority tipping — sending an ordinary transaction on the chain costs nothing. That is not an oversight; it is the entire economic thesis. The network's product is inference, so inference is the only thing priced, and everything else about GNK's design — escrow, minting, vesting, collateral — exists to make that one market work.

This guide follows a coin through the system: how a fee is calculated, where it sits while work happens, how new GNK enters circulation, and what can get a participant's stake burned.

Pricing: units of compute

An inference request's fee is the product of three factors:

Final fee = (prompt tokens + actual completion tokens) × units-of-compute-per-token × unit-of-compute price

Each factor has a distinct owner:

• Token counts come from the request itself — what the user sent plus what the model actually generated.
• Units-of-compute-per-token is a per-model constant, set when a model is registered on chain. A heavier model burns more units per token, so serving it earns proportionally more. You can see which models are registered on the models page.
• Unit-of-compute price is set collectively each epoch: participants submit price proposals, and the chain adopts the weighted median of valid proposals — weighted, like everything in Gonka, by proven compute.

The result is a price that tracks what the network's operators actually need to charge, without a per-transaction fee market. Users pay for model work, not for blockspace.

Escrow: guaranteed payment, automatic refunds

Inference has a timing problem that simple payment schemes handle badly: the cost is only known after the work is done, because nobody knows in advance how many tokens the completion will run. Gonka resolves it with escrow.

Before the request touches a GPU, the participant's API node verifies the user can cover the maximum possible cost — computed from the user's own max-completion-tokens setting — and that amount is locked in escrow on chain. After the response completes, the actual cost is settled from escrow to the provider and the difference is refunded to the user immediately.

Both sides get a guarantee. The provider knows the work is funded before spending compute on it; the user knows they only ever pay for tokens actually generated.

Zero gas, by design

Cosmos-based chains normally charge gas on every message. Gonka's client configuration sets transaction fees to zero across the board. Submitting a transfer, claiming rewards, sending a proof-of-compute batch — none of it costs GNK.

You can verify this yourself on any transaction detail page: messages carry gas accounting (used and wanted, visible on every block page) because the machinery still meters computation, but no fee is deducted. The economic model concentrates all value flow in the inference market rather than taxing chain activity.

Rewards: two streams, one settlement

At the end of every epoch, settlement pays participants from two sources:

1. Work coins — the escrowed fees from requests the participant actually served. Distribution is exact: you receive precisely the fees your work generated.
2. Reward coins — newly minted GNK from the subsidy mechanism. Distribution is proportional: the chain totals all work performed in the epoch and splits the minted amount by each participant's share of it.

The subsidy is not a fixed emission. Each epoch's minted amount is computed from the total work performed that epoch, and the schedule is designed to taper — generous while the network bootstraps, declining as fee revenue grows into the dominant income stream.

On top of both streams, a separate top-miner program pays additional rewards to the network's highest-performing, most reliable participants, with its own qualification criteria tracked on chain.

Settlement events are visible on GNKScan as reward-claim transactions in the feed, typically clustered near epoch boundaries — the same boundaries where proof-of-compute batches spike.

Vesting: rewards on a drip

To keep incentives long-term, newly distributed rewards do not have to unlock immediately. All three reward types — work coins, reward coins, and top-miner rewards — route through a vesting system with independently configurable periods, adjustable by governance.

The mechanics are simple and predictable: each participant has a personal vesting schedule, new rewards are spread evenly across the vesting window, and once per epoch the oldest tranche unlocks into the participant's spendable balance. The chain defaults ship at zero (immediate unlock), but production networks typically configure vesting on the order of 180 epochs — roughly 180 days — so a participant's income is a rolling average of their last six months of work rather than a spot payout.

Collateral: skin in the game

Proof of compute answers "how much capacity do you control?" — but Gonka's Tokenomics V2 adds a second question: "what do you stand to lose?" The collateral system splits a participant's potential weight into two tranches:

• A base tranche (default 20%) granted unconditionally from proven compute.
• A collateral-eligible tranche (the remaining 80%) that only activates if backed by GNK deposited as collateral.

A grace period — 180 epochs by default — waives the requirement entirely for the network's early life, granting full weight unconditionally while the participant set grows. After it ends, weight without collateral caps out at the base tranche.

Collateral is slashable. The defaults:

• 20% slash for malicious behavior — a participant flagged invalid for consistently incorrect work.
• 10% slash for downtime — failing an epoch's participation requirements.
• Consensus-level faults by the associated validator propagate into the collateral system through staking-module hooks.

Withdrawals pass through an unbonding queue (default: one epoch) before release, so collateral stays slashable even while leaving. Slashing hits active and unbonding collateral proportionally — there is no exit ahead of a pending penalty.

Supply

The initial GNK supply and its genesis allocation — originator allocation, top-reward pool, a pre-programmed sale amount, and the standard reward pool — are fixed in the chain's genesis parameters. From there, ongoing issuance is entirely the subsidy mechanism described above: minting is a function of work performed, on a declining schedule, rather than a calendar emission.

The design in one paragraph

Gonka's economics reduce to a tight loop. Users escrow fees for model work and pay only for tokens generated. Participants earn those fees plus a work-proportional share of a tapering mint, with rewards vesting over months to reward persistence. Their network weight comes from proven compute, but most of it must be backed by slashable collateral, so both capacity and capital stand behind every vote. And because ordinary transactions are free, none of this leaks into friction for users of the chain itself.

To see the loop running, check the network tiles and charts on the GNKScan home page and analytics — or start from the beginning with What Is Gonka?