The long-term problem
A treasury seeded once and spent by grants is a countdown. Ecosystems that fund public goods — client development, documentation, audits, tooling — from a fixed pool eventually run out or dilute to refill. Sustainable funding needs an income tied to the thing being sustained.
The design
EmpoorioChain's treasury starts with 150 M DMS (15 %) and receives, forever:
- 20 % of every transaction fee (the other 80 % is burned).
- 70 % of every slashing penalty.
- Domain registration revenue from
.empnames (2,000 / 500 / 20 DMS per year by length).
Income scales with network use. The tokenomics document's phrasing: without the fee share, the 150 M would be a closed bag — when it runs out, it's over.
Spending is capped at 10 % of the balance per 365-day window, through on-chain proposals. No single vote, however large, can empty it; a hostile governance majority is bounded to a tenth per year.
The interaction with emission
Burning 80 % of fees widens the gap to the 3.5 B cap, and gap-decay emission mints a fraction of that gap per era. Fee burns therefore raise future emission to validators and the AI pool. Use funds security structurally; the treasury funds everything else by proposal. Two mechanisms, both fed by activity, neither needing a vote to keep running.
The bug
Until runtime 217 the cap's window was 12 hours, not a year — a constant in blocks copied from a timelock. Ten percent every twelve hours is not a cap. Found by walking every economic constant against TOKENOMICS.json; fixed; recorded in the document's history. A treasury protected by a rule is only as good as the rule's units.
What it funds today
Nothing. The testnet treasury holds test DMS; no proposal has spent. The grants programme pays testnet tokens. The public goods the ecosystem actually needs — external audits, weight benchmarking, a published SDK, a faucet, an explorer indexer, documentation — are being paid for by the operating company, not by the treasury, because there is no mainnet.
What it will fund
By design: the audits the mainnet gate demands (after mainnet, the ongoing ones); client and SDK maintenance; documentation; bug bounties (pallet-bug-bounty, index 42, and pallet-bounties); tooling grants. Each as a proposal, each visible, each within the cap.
The rule behind the design
A public good is funded for the long term when the funding does not depend on anyone remembering to fund it. Fees are paid whether or not governance meets. That is the whole idea, and the window bug is why the idea needs tests.
Based on TOKENOMICS_CANONICO.md §2 and §5, TOKENOMICS.json and the runtime 217 notes.