PHI Tokenomics

How the fixed 100,000,000 PHI are allocated, sold, staked and paid out — Launch Sale, ICO, staking reserve, incentives, team and reserve — and how fee shares move.

Last updated 2026-09-08 · maintained in the Final Wiki

Figures marked indicative come from the tokenomics model and are pinned when Final Chain's parameters are published; everything else is the design of record. What PHI is and does: PHI; the fee schedule: Fees and PHI; the tiers: Particle Ladder.

#Fixed amount

100,000,000 PHI. Nothing is ever minted beyond it and nothing is ever burned. Value per token grows as chains join the network as modules and assets arrive as vAssets; the return on PHI is denominated in what it earns and backs, and grows with adoption — a self-sustaining, universal ecosystem rather than an inflation schedule.

#Allocation

Allocation	Share	PHI	Terms
Launch Sale	5 %	5,000,000	A fixed USD 1.00, one month, on five mainnets in any accepted asset; the first public tranche — and the PHI works the moment it is delivered. Unsold Launch Sale PHI rolls into the ICO.
Public ICO	50 %	50,000,000	A six-month ICO opening when the one-month Launch Sale ends, in month 5, at USD 2.00, with 50 chains by the ICO. The price is $2.00, rising to $6 (time floor) / $6 (demand curve, at sell-out), whichever is higher: a time floor that rises every hour, steepest at the start (2.00 → 6.00 over six months), and a demand curve that steps up $0.08 with every million PHI sold. Below.
Staking reserve	10 %	10,000,000	Base rewards for staking on Final Chain nodes, released against the remaining reserve (below).
Network bootstrap and planned incentives	5 %	5,000,000	Operator bootstrap for the first node network, the referral pool for the sales (1,500,000, below), and the upfront incentives governance votes for: developing, adapting, forking and hosting modules.
Team	15 %	15,000,000	Vests over four years with a one-year cliff (below), each member on a schedule from their own start. The pool never grows: unsold PHI goes to the reserve, never to the team. Individual grants are not published; the pool and its rule are.
Project reserve	at least 15 %	15,000,000 +	Not vested; funds partnerships, development, liquidity, a published founder salary and — capped at a tenth of the reserve — listings. Whatever the Launch Sale and the ICO leave unsold after about seven months joins it.

Plainly: half of the supply is sold in the public ICO and five per cent in the Launch Sale before it; ten per cent rewards staking, five per cent bootstraps the network and its incentives, fifteen per cent goes to the team over four years, and at least fifteen per cent stays in reserve, together with whatever the sales leave unsold.

Listings are deliberately small. One or two large listings at the start, with small amounts and pre-negotiated exits, never more than 10 % of the project reserve in total. Later, an exchange that wants PHI buys it. Morphing makes exchanges largely redundant for holders: price exposure to any asset, inside your wallet, with no sale.

Public early access is the Launch Sale. It opens in month 4, after the Malta license (around month 3), and runs for one month. The six-month ICO opens when that sale ends. Institutions reach us directly; private investors use the Launch Sale, then the ICO. PHI bought in either is usable from the day it is delivered — tiers, fees and morphing — not a claim on a token later.

#The ICO price

The ICO opens at USD 2.00 — twice the Launch Sale price, so everyone who bought at the launch sees it the day the ICO opens — with 50 chains by the ICO, and the price at any moment is the higher of two curves, both public, both shown on the sale page with their own countdown:

The time floor rises every hour, steepest at the start. It follows a square-root curve from 2.00 at opening to 6.00 at the end of the six months: about six cents an hour on the first day, under a cent an hour by the second month, a fraction of a cent at the end. The floor never falls.

| Day | 0 | 7 | 30 | 60 | 91 | 120 | 150 | 182 | |---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---| | Time floor (USD) | 2.00 | 2.78 | 3.62 | 4.30 | 4.83 | 5.25 | 5.63 | 6.00 |

The demand curve steps with every million PHI sold: $0.08 per million, from 2.00 to a cap of 6.00 at the full 50,000,000. A fast sale runs ahead of the clock; a slow one is carried by the floor.

| PHI sold | 0 | 10 M | 25 M | 40 M | 50 M | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | Demand price (USD) | 2.00 | 2.80 | 4.00 | 5.20 | 6.00 |

What you see. The price now; the next hourly tick with a countdown; the next demand step with the PHI remaining to it. Two counters, both honest — the price rises because time passes and because people buy, never because the page says so.

The price is $2.00, rising to $6 (time floor) / $6 (demand curve, at sell-out), whichever is higher. At full sell-out in the base case the ICO raises about $233.3M ($238.3M including the $5M Launch Sale). The minimum is $198.0M from the ICO ($203.0M including the Launch Sale). The range, including the Launch Sale, is $205.0–265.0M. Launch Sale: $5M (5,000,000 PHI at $1.00, 5%). Main ICO: ~$233.3M (50,000,000 PHI, 50%). Together 55% of supply. Total base ~$238.3M including the Launch Sale, range $205.0–265.0M including the Launch Sale, ICO minimum $198.0M ($203.0M including the Launch Sale). Unsold PHI after about seven months joins the project reserve — never the team pool. The curve lives in the sale contract, as the Launch Sale's fixed price does today; the parameters above are the design of record and are pinned at opening.

#Vesting

Vesting exists so that nobody sells ahead of the buyers. It is shaped to that purpose and no further:

Allocation	Schedule
Launch Sale	Unlocked at delivery. The PHI is usable the moment it arrives — tiers, fees, morphing — and it must be, or the launch means nothing. Five per cent of the amount at USD 1.00; the float is small and it belongs to the people who use the network first.
Public ICO	40 % at delivery; 20 % at twelve, twenty-four and thirty-six months.
Team	Four years, one-year cliff: nothing for twelve months — counted from the release or from a member's own start, whichever is later — then one thirty-sixth of the remainder each month. The last team unlock lands about a year after the last ICO unlock, so the team is never ahead of buyers.
Project reserve	Not vested. Instead, a published rule: any spend above a threshold is announced before it happens, and a modest founder salary is drawn from it, published, from the release. Working capital that can be seen is better than a lock that has to be amended.
Staking reserve, bootstrap and incentives	Released by their own rules — 12 % of the remainder a year, the bootstrap over two years, incentives by vote — never in a lump.

Plainly: Launch Sale PHI is yours at once; ICO PHI unlocks in four steps over three years; the team waits a year and then unlocks monthly over three more; the reserve is not vested but is spent under a published rule; the staking, bootstrap and incentive pools follow their own schedules.

#Referral bonus, paid on your next buy

Both sales carry a referral scheme, funded from the bootstrap and incentives allocation — never from the sale allocations, so the caps and the ICO's demand curve (a function of PHI sold) are untouched. Bonus PHI is not "sold".

Accrual. 5 % of what each buyer you referred purchases is credited to you, in PHI at that purchase's price. Referred buys under USD 50 credit nothing.
Release. The credit is paid out with your own next purchase, up to 20 % of that purchase; whatever is not released carries forward to the one after. Nobody receives PHI without buying, so the sale stays terminal and a self-referral is only ever a small discount on one's own purchase.
Bounds. At most USD 500 in PHI per referral; a lifetime cap per identity; a hard pool of 1,500,000 PHI (30 % of the bootstrap and incentives allocation), shown live on the sale page, first come first served. Credit left when the ICO closes lapses.
The buyer you referred receives 2 % extra on their first purchase.
Vesting. Bonus PHI vests as the buy it rides on: Launch Sale bonuses are unlocked at delivery; ICO bonuses follow 40/20/20/20.

Design of record. The referral is recorded on the state plane with the purchase; it goes live with the sale's referral record.

#Where the fees go, and how the shares move

PHI is Final Chain's execution asset; every transaction there is paid in PHI. The fees are split three ways — to holders, to node operators, and to the treasury that funds the incentives governance votes for — and the split shifts gradually and automatically, with no phases and no votes: with every block the protocol reads how much of the incentive pools has been spent and sets the split from it.

Holders: 30 %, always. Proportional to PHI held, weighted by lock multipliers (1.0× unlocked · 1.2× at six months · 1.5× at twelve · 2.0× at twenty-four), paid as blocks finalize, nothing to claim.
Node operators: from 10 % to 30 %, rising in proportion to the pools' depletion — so what an operator earns moves smoothly from incentives to traffic.
Treasury: the remainder, from 60 % down to 40 %. The PHI set aside for module work decreases over time — in PHI, not in value.

Incentive pools spent	Holders	Node operators	Treasury
0 %	30 %	10 %	60 %
25 %	30 %	15 %	55 %
50 %	30 %	20 %	50 %
75 %	30 %	25 %	45 %
100 %	30 %	30 %	40 %

Plainly: holders always receive 30 % of the fees; node operators start at 10 % and rise to 30 % as governance spends the incentive pools; the treasury's share shrinks from 60 % to 40 % to make room.

Indicative: the endpoints and the curve are the model's; the final parameters are published with Final Chain.

Beside the fees, two further streams flow the same way: what platforms save on identity verification when they accept Final Identities (part to the person verified, part to the protocol, part to holders and operators — dynamic per group), and the RPC and oracle API plans. See Final Identity and Fees and PHI.

#Staking on Final Chain nodes

Final Chain runs delegated proof of stake (dPoS): node operators stake on the nodes they run, and every other PHI holder stakes by delegating to a node — staking is open to every holder, not only to operators, once Final Chain is released. Stake backs a node and earns from two sources: the staking reserve and the operators' share of fees. Delegation to an operator's node never moves PHI out of your wallet.

Reserve release, keyed to what remains. Each year the reserve pays out 12 % of what is left in it, split across the staked PHI. That keeps the horizon honest — no cliff, no fixed calendar — and lets the yield from the reserve fall as staking grows while the yield from fees grows with adoption:

Year	Released that year	Cumulative	Reserve spent
1	1.20 M	1.20 M	12 %
3	0.93 M	3.19 M	32 %
5	0.72 M	4.72 M	47 %
10	0.38 M	7.21 M	72 %
18	0.14 M	9.00 M	90 %
25	0.06 M	9.59 M	96 %

Plainly: the staking reserve pays out 12 % of what is left each year, so the release is largest at the start — 1.2 million PHI in the first year — and tapers without ever reaching zero.

The reserve yield in a given year is the release divided by the PHI staked: with 10 M staked in year one it is 12 %; with 30 M staked, 4 % — before the fee share, which is added on top and rises with traffic. Indicative.

Node types (indicative, from the model): each carries a minimum own stake, a ceiling on total stake including delegation, and a lock:

Node type	Minimum own stake	Maximum total stake	Lock
Light / Access	500 PHI	50,000 PHI	30 days
Standard	500 PHI	125,000 PHI	60 days
Core	3,000 PHI	250,000 PHI	90 days
Elite	10,000 PHI	500,000 PHI	180 days
Final	20,000 PHI	1,000,000 PHI	365 days

Plainly: running a node takes from 500 PHI of your own for a light or standard node to 20,000 for a Final node, with a ceiling on what others may delegate to you and a lock that grows with the node's role.

Delegation: from 100 PHI, for 30, 90, 180 or 365 days; a flat 2 % operator commission on delegation rewards; the operator's own stake is slashed first. Any holder can delegate — running a node is the operators' side of dPoS. The holders' fee share needs no delegation at all — it follows the PHI you hold.

Validation is one module among many. A node's earnings are the sum of the modules it runs and the traffic they carry: indexing, co-signing and slot keys, the shard log, the fee ledger, settlement, the encrypted node tunnel, routing and protection, the interface, platform connectors, oracles, zone hosting, identity attestation — and every module holders vote into existence. More modules, more traffic, more pay; operators who adapt faster earn more. See governance.

#Development incentives

Operator bootstrap. Part of the 5 % pool starts the first node network: a quarter available at launch, the rest released monthly over two years (indicative).
Module incentives by vote. The rest of the pool, and the treasury's fee share, pay the upfront incentives holders vote for — develop, adapt, fork, host — followed by traffic-based payments for as long as a module is used. Hosting follows demand under the protocol's ground rules for a valid module.
Zones. Institutions hosting their own zones pay the network for what they use and earn on what they host, like any operator.
Identity savings. Platforms that accept Final Identities share what they save on verification with the person, the protocol, and all holders and operators.

#Tiers

Holding PHI locked raises your tier on the Particle Ladder and discounts your service fees — Neutrino, Positron, Muon, Z Boson, Top Quark, from 0 % to 60 % off the percentage fees and from a 10 % to a 0 % ledger surcharge, not gas. The ladder is the one tier system; earlier drafts' marine-themed tiers are retired.

#What changed from the earlier drafts

The 2025 drafts had a separate 20 % early-investor allocation, an ICO from USD 1 to 6, marine-themed tiers with referral commissions, fee shares that moved on a 25-year calendar, and a possible burn of unsold PHI. The design of record: early access is the 5 % Launch Sale at USD 1.00; the ICO opens at $2.00, rising to $6 (time floor) / $6 (demand curve, at sell-out) ($0.08 per 1M tokens sold); the team holds 15 % and the reserve at least 15 %, unsold PHI flowing to the reserve alone; referrals are a bonus released on the referrer's next buy, from the incentives allocation; tiers are the Particle Ladder; shares shift continuously with the depletion of the incentive pools, automatically; nothing is ever burned.